Questioning the pattern of acquittals in cases of caste massacres and atrocities on Dalits, Meena Kandasamy, writer and activist, drive home the “compromised nature” of the justice-delivery mechanism in our country.
The author of The Gypsy Goddess , a book based on a massacre at Kilvenmani in Tamil Nadu in 1968, was speaking at the seventh Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Lecture, “No one killed the Dalits”, here on Friday evening.
Citing the incidents of caste violence in Kilvenmani, Villupuram, Tsundur, Dharmapuri, Bathani Tola and Laxmanpur Bathe, Ms. Kandasamy said, “The judgments were as merciless as the massacres themselves. There is a large element of victim blaming, dismissing the evidence of witnesses and denial of the caste element, denial of the case element and reducing the entire case into compensation as if Dalit lives can be purchased. Systematic denial of justice to Dalits is genocidal hate.”
She said the idea of “unreliable witness” was a steady feature of the judgments, which systematically acquitted the accused. “Testimonies of Dalits are found to be faulty and unreliable.” In the case of Bathani, prosecution witnesses were dismissed and in the case of Bathe, the accused were given the benefit of doubt.
There was also a lack of judicial intervention when witnesses turned hostile. Furthermore, courts viewed technical aspects such as delay in filing the complaint as “lack of merit” in cases. This weighed heavily against the Dalit victims, who in the Tsundur incident, for instance, had to go into hiding as they were chased by the attackers, she pointed out.
‘Paper tigers’The “caste-Hindu and feudal” nature of the judiciary made it an “important aspect of the bourgeois democratic State”, which functioned only to protect the interests of the ruling dominant castes. “Though the judiciary expressed the occasional anger, one has to look closer to understand its true face,” Ms. Kandasamy said.
With reference to the recent burning of two Dalit children in Faridabad and the 2002 carnage in Gujarat, she said, “The killing of children is a caste-Hindu specialty.”
Ms. Kandasamy termed judicial commissions “paper tigers”, and said that if the civil society had raised the voice against the acquittals in the Kilvenmani case, in which 44 Dalits were killed, the fate of other massacres would have been different.
