“I know we live in an unequal society. But I was not prepared for such a close encounter with caste prejudice which hit me like a ton of bricks,” Kandru Shyam Kumar says, running his fingers gently over his bandaged chin, his eyes staring into the distance.
The 21-year-old Dalit youth, who holds a B.Sc degree in computer science, is nursing a fractured jaw after he was allegedly kidnapped on November 1, in retaliation to a two-year-old fight involving a woman, on his college campus in Nandigama constituency of Andhra Pradesh’s NTR district. He was allegedly abused in the name of caste, thrashed, and urinated on by a college-mate, S. Harish Reddy, and five others from upper castes in a moving car.
Shyam Kumar spends the better part of his day lying on a mattress spread on the ground of his single-room house with an attached kitchen in Sanjivanagar Colony of Kanchikacherla village in NTR district.
Recalling the college incident, Shyam Kumar says he was witness to a dispute between his brother’s friend, Avinash, and his classmate Harish Reddy. The disagreement, sparked by alleged misbehaviour towards Avinash’s female friend, escalated into a physical altercation. Shyam Kumar had jumped in to support Avinash. The police intervened, resolving the matter through counselling. “We agreed to bury the hatchet, or so I thought,” he says wryly, trying to overcome the pain in his jaw.
“But Harish Reddy refused to let go of the grudge and decided to settle scores,” chips in Shyam Kumar’s mother Seshamma as she slouches and gently strokes his hair. “Post surgery, he is unable to have solid food. He has been living only on juices for the past 10 days and has lost almost 2 kg,” she adds.
On that fateful night, Shyam Kumar and his family — elder brother Sriram, mother Seshamma, and grandmother Mariamma — were having dinner around 8.30 p.m. when he received a call from Reddy, who requested to meet up. Reddy said he was about to leave town to pursue higher studies abroad and asked Shyam Kumar to reach Shiva Sai Kshetram.
“I went in good faith, but when I reached the place, I saw Harish and five of his friends waiting for me in a car. They assaulted me and pushed me inside the car. I was held captive and beaten with sticks for more than four hours in the moving vehicle,” he alleges. “At one point, I thought I would die. I was bleeding profusely. I was thirsty and when I asked them for water, they urinated on me,” he says, his eyes welling up.
Reddy and the five others, he says, drove down to a deserted place near Guntur bus station. They then handed over the car keys to him and fled the scene. Shyam Kumar managed to reach Vijayawada main bus station and called up his brother, asking to be picked up from there.
Three days later, all six accused — four of them engineering graduates and one an MBA student — were arrested. Reddy and his five friends G. Anil Kumar, B. Srikanth Reddy, S. Vishnuvardhan Reddy, M. Nagarjuna Reddy, from Ganapavaram village in Tripuranthakam mandal of Prakasam district; and D. Venkatalakshmi Narayana from Guntur district, were arrested under the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, and remanded to the Jaggayyapet sub-jail.
The police have been supportive, says Sriram but the four are still worried about their safety. “Life has already been unfair to us. We don’t want more trouble,” says Mariamma, the family matriarch who, along with her daughter Seshamma, works as a daily wage coolie to earn their daily bread. Seshamma’s husband died when the children were very young after which she moved in with Mariamma.
Atrocities abound
Discrimination and violence against Dalits are common with the caste hierarchy condemning them to the bottom of the social ladder. Despite laws to protect the Scheduled Castes (SC), abuse is frequently reported from across the country. In Andhra Pradesh alone, 2,014 crimes against SCs were recorded in 2021, of which 33 were murders and 49 were cases of rape of minor girls. The State recorded a conviction rate of 5.3% and 13.8% in terms of disbursal of relief within seven days, says Chennai-based Citizens Vigilance and Monitoring Committee, a civil society mechanism set up to monitor the implementation of the law that has collected State-wise data for 2021 from the National Crime Records Bureau and through the Right to Information Act, 2005.
“It is an encouraging sign that the police acted against the perpetrators in Kanchikacherla. But victims are often left helpless when police protect the wrong-doers,” says Andra Malyadri, Andhra Pradesh State general secretary of Kula Vivaksha Vyatireka Porata Samithi (the committee against caste discrimination, affiliated to Communist Party of India-Marxist). He cites a recent incident from Kalluru village in Garladinne mandal of Anantapur district where the local police used casteist slurs against 150 SC and ST families and pulled down their thatched houses despite a High Court stay against their removal.
On November 12, Manda Vijay Kumar, a lawyer from the SC community at Kolimigundla in Nandyal district, was paraded down a street while being hit with footwear. “They were upset as I had filed a case of land encroachment and illegal building construction against them. The perpetrators thrashed me with slippers on the main road in full public view, but the police did not come to my rescue. They merely said that the case is being investigated,” Vijay Kumar rues.
Shunned by many in society who call them ‘untouchable’, Dalits, particularly in villages, are discriminated against, denied access to land, forced to work in degrading conditions like in scavenging, and routinely abused, even killed, sometimes at the hands of the police and at times by people of upper castes. This entrenched form of societal segregation, often described as hidden apartheid, has led to the complete isolation of many villages along caste lines.
What happened in Tsunduru on August 6 in 1991 was perhaps the most gruesome and premeditated attack on Dalits. Eight SC men were hacked to death and many others injured in an attack by the Reddys and Telagas from Tsunduru and neighbouring Modukuru, Munnangivaripalem and Valiveru villages in Guntur district. “After 32 years of the brutal killings, we are still waiting for justice,” says Jaladi Moses, who has lost three members of his family to the caste violence – his father Jaladi Mathaiah, 40; uncle Jaladi Immanuel, 38; and uncle’s son Jaladi Isaac, 25. Caste in India transcends religion, with those who have converted out of Hinduism migrating the social structure.
“I was an Intermediate student then,” reminisces Moses, now 49. “My father and uncle were naïve and could not sense the danger of sitting in their fields at a time when tension had gripped the village due to caste clashes,” he says. Others killed in the violence unleashed by the upper castes were Mallela Subba Rao, 35; Angalakudur Rajamohan, 25; Sunkuru Samson, 28; Devarapalli Jayraj, 30; and Mandru Ramesh, 21.
Ramesh’s older brother Mandru Parisudha Rao, 35, died of a heart attack when he saw him being lynched by a mob. Another youth, Kommerla Anil Kumar, was later shot dead by a constable. Moses says the police made no attempt to stop the killing spree which continued for more than three hours. The police did not search for the bodies, he says. “We ourselves traced the bodies and handed them over to the police for conducting the inquest,” he adds.
Justice delayed and denied
“Failure to prosecute perpetrators of horrific caste atrocities like those at Tsunduru, Venkatayapalem, and Laximpeta has emboldened the perpetrators. Low conviction rates are a reflection of how cases under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act are registered and pursued,” says V.S. Krishna, member of the Human Rights Forum’s Andhra Pradesh and Telangana coordination committee. He says that prosecutors and judges fail to faithfully pursue complaints brought forth by Dalits, which is evidenced by the high rate of acquittals in such cases.
The Tsunduru carnage is a case in point. The Special Court, on July 31 in 2007, sentenced 21 people to life imprisonment and 35 people to one year imprisonment. The remaining were acquitted for want of evidence. But in 2014, all the accused were acquitted by a Division Bench of the AP High Court. The case is now in the Supreme Court and the families of the alleged victims are still awaiting closure to this tormenting chapter of their lives.
Another extremely grave instance was witnessed in Karamchedu village of Prakasam district on July 22, 1985, resulting in the death of six Dalits and injuries to many others by the upper (Kamma) caste men. Three women from the SC community were raped.
“The Karamchedu massacre was the trigger point for a revolution. It all started when a Dalit woman of the village held her ground and stood up boldly for her community and its dignity,” says Dalit poet-scholar-activist Katti Padma Rao, who also spearheaded an independent Dalit movement and established the Andhra Pradesh Dalit Mahasabha in 1985.
Padma Rao feels that rising aspirations and an unwillingness to be put down anymore among young Dalits have fuelled violence against them by the upper castes who are unable to accept this changeover. Establishment of special courts under the SC-ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, distribution of two acres of land to Dalit women, the grant of incentives (financial assistance on the lines of Kerala model) to couples opting for inter-caste marriage, and exemption from entrance test and direct recruitment of SC, ST, and BC women into jobs based on their academic qualifications are some of the steps that can help bring down atrocities against Dalits, he says.
Lack of accountability
Effective monitoring of the implementation of SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act is critical. Under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Rule 16 (2), the State-level vigilance and monitoring committee meeting (SVMC) is mandatory in January and July every year to ensure that officers perform their duties responsibly and are held accountable.
If followed in letter and spirit, 53 SVMC meetings would have been conducted in Andhra Pradesh by July 31, 2021, or at the very least by the end of 2021. However, only three of the mandatory 53 SVMC meetings were conducted from March 31, 1995 until 2021-end — on November 21 in 2006, August 12 in 2008, and on February 11 in 2013. In the previous five years (2017-2021), not even one of the 10 mandatory meetings was conducted. No meeting was conducted in the calendar year 2022, nor in 25 of the 28 years since the rule came into force in 1995.
“In fulfilling its constitutional mandate, Andhra Pradesh has scored 4 on 53 — a mere 7.55%, earning a dismal ‘F’ grade,” says Alladi Deva Kumar, executive secretary of Dalit Bahujan Resource Centre (DBRC), which is also the Andhra Pradesh partner of the CVMC.
He says the party-wise record in the State is no better. If the Congress conducted three meetings, two during the chief ministership of the late Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy and one by Kiran Kumar Reddy, the TDP has not conducted any meetings and the incumbent YSR Congress Party has a compliance rate of 20%, having conducted only of the five mandatory meetings.
“It is time we started looking beyond numbers, at the human side of the crime. Monetary relief alone cannot be seen as rehabilitation; one should also look at the emotional and psychological impact of these crimes,” Deva Kumar emphasises.
