"... Not only many of the Dalits boys and girls had benefitted from the
affirmative action programmes in education, a few among them had even
surpassed the Reddys in many respects. Many of the Dalits from the village
were working with Indian Railways. Overall the situation was such that the
Dalits had refused to follow the medieval dictats reserved for them under
the Varna system. ..."
Tsundur : A New Milestone In The Movement For Dalit Emancipation
By Subhash Gatade
13 August, 2007 Countercurrents.org
If we do not struggle
If we do not persist in our struggle
The enemy would finish us with his bayonets
And pointing to our bones he would tell the rest of the world
Look, these are bones of slaves !
Look, these are bones of slaves !!
( A Hindi couplet)
D Dhanraj from Tsundur ( Guntur, A.P.) possibly does not know how the rest
of the world remembers 6 th of August. Neither possibly he knows that
there is a city called Hiroshima in far away Japan which was nearly
obliterated that day. But for him also the very day symbolises deaths and
destruction and an endless wait for justice.
He can still recollect each and every incident on that fateful day way
back in 1991 when five people from his own community were lynched before
his eyes by a mob of marauders belonging to his village itself.
In fact, the blood thirsty mob had nearly lynched him also but somehow he
was saved. Streets of Tsundur that day witnessed deaths of total eight
people all of them dalits when a 400 strong armed mob of Reddys - a
landlord caste which has dominated the politics of A.P since independence
- attacked the dalits to teach them a lesson. The perpetrators of the
massacre were so brutal that they cut the dead bodies into pieces, put
them in gunny bags and threw them in the nearby Tungabhadra canal.
But as of now the wait for justice seems to be finally over. The recent
judgement of the Special Court - which was the first of its kind formed
under the provisions of the SC and ST Act (1989) at the scene of offence-
has rather vindicated their sixteen year old struggle. Twenty one of the
accused have been given life imprisonment which 35 of the accused have
been asked to serve one year rigorous imprisonment. The court have
acquitted the rest of the accused showing lack of evidence, but a
coalition of dalit organisations have been pressing upon the government to
file a petition in the upper court to challenge the acquttal.
A brief recap of the events in this 'historic case' tells us that the
upper caste (read Reddys') used the pretext of of alleged harassment of a
Reddy girl by a dalit youth in a cinema hall to attack the dalits. The
planned nature of the attack was evident also from the fact that within no
time a few hundred strong mob of Reddys wielding traditional weapons (and
few of them carrying modern firearms) descended on the dalit hamlett and
unleashed their fury against the innocents. In fact, sensing an imminent
attack, most of the menfolk had alread left the village. Once the
marauders came to know of this they literally chased the dalits on the
road adjoining the Tungabhadra canal and lynched them one by one.
Looking back it is clear that the preplanned attack against the dalits was
another futile attempt by the Reddys to reassert their age-old authority
which had seen fissures with the growing assertion of dalits. The changed
atmosphere in the village was for everyone to see. Not only many of the
dalits boys and girls had benefitted from the affirmative action
programmes in education, a few among them had even surpassed the Reddys in
many respects. Many of the dalits from the village were working with
Indian Railways. Overall the situation was such that the Dalits had
refused to follow the medieval dictats reserved for them under the Varna
system.
D Dhanraj was a crucial witness to the whole case. He did not falter for a
moment despite tremendous pressure brought upon him by the powerful
Reddys. One can see that Tsundur, the small village in Guntur, has created
many such 'unsung heroes' - ordinary looking people who faced heavy odds
so that they get justice. Merukonda Subbarao, a fifty six year old daily
wage-worker, who had served as the first president of the Tsunduru Victims
Association was another such 'hero' who identified and named forty of the
accused standing in the court room, from among the one hundred and eighty
three accused. It was clear that the whole incident was etched in his
memory so strongly that he did not falter despite the judges requests to
repeat the identification. And who can forget Martyr Anil Kumar, a young
man in his twenties who was in the forefront of the struggle so that the
perpetrators of the massacre are punished without delay. Anil was killed
in a police firing during one of those struggles.
http://www.countercurrents.org/gatade130807.htm
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