The Shankarbigha massacre

Shankarbigha was a hamlet of about 60 mud huts in Jehanabad district, in central Bihar, under the Mehandia police station.³ IANS, reporting in 2015, placed it in Arwal district.⁷ Its families were landless farm labourers of the Paswan, Chamar, Dusadh and Rajwar communities, PUDR reported.⁵ It lay about ten kilometres from Laxmanpur Bathe, where 58 to 61 Dalits had been killed in December 1997.^1,3,5

They had won better wages than their neighbours. In 1999 a PUDR fact-finding team found that a day's labour in Shankarbigha paid 3 kg of rice and a snack, against 1.5 kg of rice in Dhobibigha, the next village. Wages, it wrote, depended on whether the Marxist-Leninist labour organisations were strong in a village.⁶

The Ranvir Sena was a private army founded by Bhumihars, a landowning upper caste, in 1994.¹ In central Bihar it was fighting the parties of the Marxist-Leninist left, the CPI(ML) and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), which organised labourers for land and wages; the press and the state called their fighters Naxalites.^1,5 Human Rights Watch wrote that its victims were killed for their suspected loyalty to those parties.² The people of Shankarbigha were not known to be activists of any of them, PTI reported, though the CPI(ML) was strong in the area.³

Warned in advance

On 8 January 1999 the Sena's leader, Bharmeshwar Singh, told a local daily that the Sena was planning an attack in Jehanabad district, "with renewed vigour [and] in a very calculat[ed] manner," Human Rights Watch reported. He said a target had already been chosen.¹

The CPI(ML) said it gave the district administration a list of villages at risk of attack, and a list of Sena members already accused.¹ "The state did nothing to stop them," Human Rights Watch wrote.¹

The night of 25 January

This section describes the shooting of families in their homes, children among them.

At about 11 pm on 25 January 1999, the eve of Republic Day, the national holiday of 26 January, armed men came to the hamlet, the press reported.^3,4 Deonandan Paswan, a survivor, told reporters he saw nearly a hundred of them coming from the next village, Dhobibigha, firing and shouting slogans for the Sena. He ran to the fields.³

They went into the thatched huts, eight of them by Human Rights Watch's account and five by the press's, and fired on the people inside. Some were killed in their sleep; others were dragged out and shot.^1,3 Many, children among them, were shot in the head and stomach at point-blank range, Human Rights Watch reported, citing the press.¹ Gulf News reported that they set houses on fire as they left.⁴ The district magistrate said the attackers shouted the Sena's slogans throughout.¹

Human Rights Watch gave at least 21 dead on 26 January. By PTI's report of 27 January the toll had risen to 22, when one more of the injured died in hospital in Patna, and eleven others were still fighting for their lives there; it counted six children and five women among the dead.^2,3 In January 2015 PUDR and Gulf News gave 23, with five women and seven children, the youngest a baby; PUDR counted eleven men.^4,5

Police said the attack was revenge for the killing of two men, Sena activists by Human Rights Watch's account, by the MCC in a nearby village the week before.^1,3 Supporters of the Sena told the Times of India that it had planned to kill almost all the Dalits in the hamlet, close to 70 people, Human Rights Watch reported.¹

Among the dead, PTI named Jagmohan Sah in January 1999, and IANS named Ganga Paswan in January 2015.^3,7 Among the children killed, PTI reported, were a girl of two and a baby of six months.³ We have found no full list of the dead.

After the killings

The next day the families would not let officials take the bodies for cremation until the chief minister, Rabri Devi, came to the hamlet.³ She came, with her husband, Laloo Prasad Yadav, promised a thorough inquiry, and announced Rs 1 lakh (about US$2,300 at 1999 rates) for each bereaved family and houses under a government scheme.³ Human Rights Watch reported promises of compensation, a government job and solid houses for the families of the dead.¹

On 27 January the police officer in charge of the range, S.K. Bharadwaj, told PTI that 24 people had been named as accused, 23 of them from Dhobibigha and one from Obra, and that a case had been registered against 44 others not identified. He said a collective fine would be imposed on Dhobibigha.³ Twenty-four men, all Bhumihars, were arrested by the end of January, Human Rights Watch reported.¹

On the night of 10 February the Sena attacked the nearby village of Narayanpur and killed twelve more. It then claimed both attacks in a press release, Human Rights Watch reported.¹ On 12 February the central government dismissed Bihar's government and imposed President's rule, direct rule from Delhi, citing a breakdown of law and order; it reversed the decision in March.¹

Sixteen years in court

The trial ran for sixteen years in Jehanabad.⁴ On 13 January 2015 the Additional District and Sessions Judge, Raghvendra Kumar Singh, acquitted all 24 accused. Gulf News and IANS reported that the judge cited "lack of evidence"; we have not read the judgment itself.^4,7 Every witness had turned hostile: 49, by Gulf News's and PUDR's reports of January 2015, and 50 by PUDR's report of 2016. Gulf News reported that they said they could not identify the accused because of dense fog and because the attackers' faces were covered.^4,5,6

PUDR, a Delhi civil-liberties group, said the police had not applied the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act to the case, though the Sena had publicly claimed the killings. It called the verdict the fifth in a row of acquittals in the Bihar massacres.⁵ In its 2016 report PUDR wrote that the witnesses turned hostile because the accused, out on bail, had threatened and pressured them, and that their repeated requests to the police and the court for protection came to nothing.⁶

In their words

What people of Shankarbigha told reporters, in 1999 and in 2015. It is their testimony, as the press recorded it.

"We don't have anything to do with the Naxalites ... our people were killed only because we are poor," Parvati Devi, a survivor, told PTI in January 1999.³

"There is no one to do justice to the poor like us. We have only pain and misery in our life," Etwaria Devi told IANS after the verdict in January 2015.⁷

Lakshman Ram, an elder of the hamlet, told IANS that the villagers were not ready to accept the acquittals, and blamed the police: "The police did not file a strong chargesheet with solid evidence against them," he said, meaning the formal charges the police put to the court.⁷

Who remembers, and how

The CPI(ML) called a shutdown in protest on 16 January 2015.⁴ Later that year the news site Cobrapost broadcast hidden-camera interviews in which men of the Sena spoke of the massacres of the 1990s, Shankarbigha among them, The Quint reported. What they said is not a court finding.⁸

PUDR asked the Supreme Court to take up the Shankarbigha acquittals and the others on its own motion.⁵

What is still unknown

The count of the dead rose from at least 21 on 26 January 1999 to 22 a day later, as the injured died; by 2015, PUDR and Gulf News gave 23, and we have not found what the later count rests on. The sources differ, too, on the number of children among the dead, six or seven, on the age of the youngest, and on whether the attackers entered five huts or eight. Gulf News's headline gives 23 accused where its report gives 24.^2,3,4,5 We have found the names of only a few of the dead, and no full list.

We have not read the trial court's judgment, and so we name none of the accused. We have not found whether the acquittal was appealed, or what became of any appeal. The Quint reported in 2015 that the Bihar acquittals had been challenged in the Supreme Court, without naming each case.⁸