The Bathani Tola massacre

Bathani Tola was a hamlet of Dalit and Muslim farm labourers in Bhojpur district, in central Bihar.^1,4 On the afternoon of 11 July 1996, in daylight, armed men came through an orchard from the main village, firing as they came.²

When they left, the dead lay across the hamlet. The Patna High Court counted 18 killed on the spot, all of them women and children, and two more who died later in hospital, for 20.² Human Rights Watch gave 19 in 1999; IANS and Gulf News later gave 21.^1,3,4 It was the attack that first put the Ranvir Sena in international headlines.¹

Thirty rupees a day

In Bhojpur the CPI(ML), a party of the Marxist-Leninist left, had organised farm labourers to demand the legal daily minimum wage of Rs 30.75 (US$0.77, Human Rights Watch reckoned). Landowners would pay Rs 20 (US$0.50). The labourers refused to work for less, and called a boycott of the landowners' fields, Human Rights Watch reported.¹

The Ranvir Sena had been founded two years earlier, in 1994, by Bhumihars, a landowning upper caste.¹ Human Rights Watch, citing press reports, wrote that the attack on Bathani Tola was meant to break the labourers' organising and the boycott on hundreds of acres. It was reported, too, as revenge for the killing of nine Bhumihars in another Bhojpur village by the CPI(ML).¹ Kavita Krishnan, a CPI(ML) leader, wrote in 2012 that it was punishment for the labourers asserting themselves, and for their votes, which had helped her party win two Assembly seats.⁷

The afternoon of 11 July

This section describes the killing of women and children.

The attack began at about 2 pm, the High Court records.² Some 50 to 60 men went into the houses, by the first statement to the police, and shot or cut down the women and children they found, then set the houses on fire.² Human Rights Watch reported about 60 men and twelve houses burnt, with lathis, the long bamboo staves of Indian village life, swords and guns, over two and a half hours.¹ Kavita Krishnan put it at three hours.⁷

The men of the hamlet hid nearby, the High Court records, and five or six of the injured, women and children, were carried to hospital. One man was among the dead.²

There was a police camp in the main village. Its officer in charge told the trial court that he saw an exchange of fire between the Sena and the CPI(ML)'s men, that his force was outnumbered, and that he sent a written report to the police station by the village watchman. A wireless message went out across the district at about 4.30 pm.² Kavita Krishnan wrote that people had asked the police and the district's officials for protection before the attack, and were refused.⁷

The High Court's judgment names Balchand Choudhary, Ram Ratia Devi and Sanjharia Devi among the dead, and records that a young man of 25 and a child of six died later in treatment.² We do not name the children.

Sixteen years in court

The police took the first statement for the case at 4.30 the next morning, twelve hours after the attack, though officers had reached the hamlet that evening.² Charges were framed in January 1998 against 62 people, PUDR reported, and the trial began in November 2000.⁶ Over the years the prosecution examined 13 witnesses.²

On 5 May 2010 the Additional Sessions Judge at Ara convicted 23 of the 53 men tried and acquitted 30. Three were sentenced to death and the rest to life imprisonment.²

On 16 April 2012 the Patna High Court allowed every appeal and set aside every conviction.² It found the eyewitnesses unreliable. It found, too, that three of those convicted had been children at the time, and apologised for the time they had spent in prison.² The judges laid the failure at the door of the investigation: no cartridge was seized, and the guns taken from the accused were never tested.² "All we can say is thanks to the investigating agency and the administration the true culprits have escaped gauntlet," they wrote. "People suffered, their families obliterated with no solace as to the punishment to the perpetuators."²

Kavita Krishnan answered that the ruling treated survivors as liars for having lived: if they were close enough to see, the court asked, why were they not killed? "Only if they were killed," she wrote, "could they have been credible and trustworthy."⁷ The High Court ordered no new investigation or retrial, PUDR reported.⁶

The State's appeal was admitted by the Supreme Court in July 2012, PUDR reported.⁶ In 2020 Kavita Krishnan told Forward Press that a hearing had taken place, "but nothing came out of it."⁸ In 2015 the news site Cobrapost broadcast hidden-camera interviews in which a man of the Sena spoke of taking part at Bathani Tola, The Quint reported. What he said is not a court finding.⁹

Who remembers, and how

Bathani Tola was the first of a run of acquittals. The Patna High Court went on to acquit the accused in the Nagari Bazaar, Miyanpur and Laxmanpur Bathe massacres, and in 2015 a trial court acquitted all those tried for Shankarbigha.^3,4

The CPI(ML) has kept up the campaign: Kavita Krishnan's answer to the verdict is part of it.⁷ After the Laxmanpur Bathe acquittals in 2013, the party's general secretary asked the Supreme Court for an investigation under its own supervision into the Bihar massacres.⁴

What is still unknown

An advocacy sheet published in 2013 by IMADR, an international anti-discrimination group, says a girl was raped in the attack. The High Court judgment and Human Rights Watch do not record it, and we could not read the sheet again for this draft.⁵

We have not named any of the accused; the judgment does, and the account will, with each one's exact status, once that is checked.² The sources disagree on the count of the dead, from 19 to 21, and on how long the attack lasted.^1,2,3,4,7 We have not found what became of the Supreme Court appeal after 2020.⁸ We have found no published testimony from the survivors beyond what the court records.