On Friday, an old man with a high forehead and a long flowing beard, whose hands are allegedly soiled with the blood of more than 250 Dalit men, women, and children, walked free from the Ara jail in central Bihar.
Brahmeshwar Singh, the mukhiya who masterminded the rise of the Ranveer Sena in the mid 1990s, was wanted in 22 cases and 277 murders of Dalits, who included Musahars and Dalit Muslims among other victims.
His Sena proved the most brutally effective of private upper caste armies which plummeted Bihar to untold barbaric depths in the 1990s.
However, the unprecedented mandate accorded to the Nitish Kumar-led NDA government in the 2010 Assembly elections has often been perceived to mark attenuation in the violent caste-based strife which had earlier plagued the State.
Despite much heralded moves like the formation of a Maha Dalit commission in 2007 and a slew of benefits for the State's most backward Dalit communities, discomfiting ground realities prove otherwise.
Since 1997, more than a 100 Musahar families in and around the Paliganj and Masaurhi subdivisions have been uprooted following the bloody and lethal armed conflict between the Sena and the Naxals.
No political empowerment
Mouri, a Bhumihar-dominated village 22 km north of Paliganj, is a grim prototype of the pervasive dominance of feudal mentality which proves that no serious political empowerment has been accorded to the Musahars till this day.
A deserted, weedy colony of ghost brick-houses which once housed Musahar families in this village under a central flagship scheme, now bear testimony to an ominous displacement effected by caste conflagration.
Forty-odd Musahar families, who fled the village in 2004, today live on the edges of Barah Mile, a muddy settlement three km away from Mouri.
Cut off from life's essentials, a couple of brick houses in this cluster are the only evidence of anything solid here.
Social stigma
Supplanted from their lands and economically encumbered, the families are further subjected to crude variants of social stigmatisation by the upper castes.
“I cannot even drink water from the school hand pump,” says Babloo Manjhi, 10, with a vacant gaze.
Pintoo, his thirteen year is more forthcoming, as he reveals how the twenty-odd Musahar children who attend the local school can eat “only after their Bhumihar colleagues have eaten.”
A Musahar teacher is not permitted to reprimand a Bhumihar student. If he does so, he faces continual harassment, even threats to his life as in the case of Shambhu Manjhi — a young Musahar teacher at the local school.
The families had fled when turbulence struck Mouri one raw winter evening after Siya Ram Manjhi, a young servant in the household of Kameshwar Sharma — a prominent Bhumihar landlord of the village — had been murdered by two Ranveer Sena men in October that year.
In retaliation, a massive troop of rebels belonging to the Sangram Samiti (an earlier incarnation of Bihar's Naxals) and the People's War Group (PWG) swooped into the village, held a kangaroo court and exacted revenge by gunning down four upper caste men.
Despite emotions now having been reduced to history, there is an unnerving moment in Mr. Sharma's narrative as he recalls the chilling aftermath of his servant's murder.
“A Sena man barged into my house with a semi-automatic gun in his hand, quivering with cold, fear and revenge ... he simply wanted to kill any Musahar labourer he thought was hiding in my house.”
When the Musahars attempted to return to Mouri in 2008, they were greeted with abuses, threats and a group of rifle-toting Bhumihar men who fired shots in the air.
“We want to return to our homes. But we dread the consequences even today,” says Mukesh Manjhi, a primary school teacher at a neighbouring block.
Caste tensions
Resettlement has remained a thorny issue with suspicion raging between the two parties. Despite the Musahars' fears over resettlement, Mr. Sharma feels caste tensions aren't what they used to be five years ago.
A similar script repeats itself at Jalpura, a village not far from Arwal district, where only the dominant Bhumihar castes now remain.
Here, tensions erupted in 1997 when four upper caste members of the Bhumihar community were killed by Sangram Samiti members, which led to the exodus of Dalit Muslims, Kahars, Musahars and other backward communities of the village.
“One talks about a rich landowner and the feudal mentality? But who fits this definition in present day Bihar where the average land holding is barely 4-5 bighas,” says Ramprasidh Singh, a landlord who survived the turmoil.
“Things were peaceful and all castes lived in perfect harmony until the advent of the Naxals, who barred us from farming by planting red flags on our fields,” he says.
Mr. Singh recalls the tough times faced by them when it was impossible to generate any agricultural produce between 1996 and 2001.
What old Ramprasidh does not mention however is that a large number of Musahars in Jalpura were displaced as early as 1975 when they staked their claim to the 1400 acres of diara land situated by the Sone river.
When one seeks out the Musahars living on parallel sides of the road, they bluntly state that the disputed area has always been under Bhumihar or Yadav control, by force of the gun or the ‘lathi' (heavy stick).
Bhushan Paswan, a wage labourer, produces a 1976 land parcha in which his father had been apportioned a part of the Sone diara land.
Police help sought
In Mouri, protest expressed itself in the form of a week-long sit-in in front of the sub-divisional officer's office in December last year. No results or investigations have since taken place despite the Musahars repeatedly demanding police intervention.
As a Bhumihar from Mouri suavely put the 2004 displacement in cricketing jargon before a polling official during the panchayat election: “Their scalp [the Naxals] was a mere four wickets, but we [the Ranveer Sena] wiped out their [the Musahars] entire team.”
