Memorial | 29 Sep 2006
The Khairlanji massacre
This account tells of a mother and her children beaten to death, and records that women were stripped and paraded, and that the press reported rape. The section on the evening itself describes it; you can skip it and read on from what came after.
On the evening of 29 September 2006, a mob of about 40 people from the village of Khairlanji, in Maharashtra's Bhandara district, killed a Dalit mother and her three children, by the Supreme Court's account. Eight men were convicted of murder; the High Court held that the killings were not about caste, and in 2019 the Supreme Court dismissed the appeals against its ruling.
Key takeaways
- Four people, a Dalit mother and her three children, were killed at Khairlanji on 29 September 2006, every source we read agrees.1,2,5
- The family had refused to give up its land or its rights, the press and Human Rights Watch reported. The mother had identified the men who beat a Dalit friend of the family, and the killings came on the day those men were let out on bail.1,3,5
- A special court convicted eight men of murder in 2008, the Supreme Court records, and sentenced six to death; the High Court commuted the sentences in 2010, finding that the root cause was not caste but the accused's belief that they had been falsely implicated; in 2019 the Supreme Court dismissed the appeals against that ruling. No one was convicted under the law against atrocities on Dalits.1,2,7
Khairlanji was a village of about 780 people in Mohadi tehsil, a sub-district of Bhandara district in eastern Maharashtra, some 120 kilometres from Nagpur, Communalism Combat reported in 2006.3 The family were Mahars, a Dalit community, Maktoob reported. Kunbi Marathas, "categorized as 'OBC' (Other Backward Classes)", The Mooknayak wrote, also lived there.8
The family farmed there. The mother worked the land, fought to win back part of it from the landlords who had taken it, and sent her children to school and college, Communalism Combat reported.3,7 The family was denied electricity and kept from the village well, Maktoob and The Mooknayak reported, and in 2004 an official ordered a road cut through their field for their neighbours' use; a court later overturned the order.7,8 Human Rights Watch reported that farmers drove their tractors across the family's land, and that the family resisted.5
For more than a decade, Communalism Combat reported, the family's complaints to the police met with little response, and in the months before the killings it faced open threats.3
A witness
In September 2006 a Dalit friend of the family from a nearby village, the police patil there, the villager who serves as the link to the police, quarrelled with a man of Khairlanji over unpaid wages, and was later beaten by villagers, the Supreme Court records.1 The mother and daughter brought him to their house. His attackers were named in a statement to the police, and they were arrested, the court records.1,3
On 29 September 2006 they were released on bail, the court records.1,3
The evening of 29 September
This section describes the killing of a mother and her children, and records that the women were stripped and paraded and that the press reported rape.
Between six and half past six that evening, about 40 people surrounded the family's house, some of them shouting that the mother had falsely implicated them, the Supreme Court records.1 The mother tried to escape, the court records.1
The attackers chased and caught her, and beat her with sticks, bicycle chains, kicks and fists until she died. They caught her sons and her daughter one by one and killed them in the same way, the court records.1 They then loaded the four bodies onto a bullock cart and threw them into a canal.1
The attackers were Kunbis, a caste listed among the Other Backward Classes, The Mooknayak reported.8 Human Rights Watch reported that the attackers stripped, beat and paraded women through the village, and that "almost all of Khairlanji village witnessed this spectacle of caste vengeance. No one did much to stop it."5 Communalism Combat and Scroll reported rape.2,3 The Supreme Court's order does not mention it.1 The CBI, the federal investigating agency, concluded that there was no rape, The Mooknayak reported.8 The same report noted claims that the doctors who did the post-mortems were bribed.8
After the killings
The bodies were found in the canal over the next two days, the Supreme Court records.1
The police were slow to act, every source agrees. The district superintendent of police told Communalism Combat that the local police station had not answered the family's calls, nor investigated at once.3 The case passed to the state's CID and then, in November 2006, to the CBI, because, the Supreme Court records, the investigation "was not carried out properly by the local police".1 Several policemen were suspended, as were the doctors who failed to file proper post-mortem reports, Human Rights Watch reported.5 In December 2006 the CBI charged eleven men, the Supreme Court records.1,5
Many early reports called it a crime of "adultery", repeating a rumour about the mother that Communalism Combat said village heads had spread.3,6,8 Dalit protests spread across Maharashtra in October and November 2006, with a shutdown in Nagpur on 10 November and more than 4,000 people at Azad Maidan in Mumbai on 19 November.3,7,8 The police broke up protests with lathis, tear gas and gunfire, and the state's home minister blamed Naxalites, Maoist insurgents, for the unrest, a joint civil-liberties fact-finding reported.3,4
The chief minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, promised a thorough investigation, Maktoob reported.7
Three courts
On 15 September 2008 the Special Court at Bhandara convicted eight of the eleven accused of murder and acquitted three, the Supreme Court and Maktoob record. It sentenced six to death and two to life imprisonment, and found none of them guilty under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.1,7
On 14 July 2010 the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court upheld all eight convictions but commuted the death sentences to life, with no release before 25 years in prison. It gave two reasons, the Supreme Court records: "the incident did not take place on account of caste stature but the root cause was that the accused felt that they were falsely implicated", and none of the accused had a criminal record.1
On 24 May 2019 the Supreme Court dismissed every appeal: the CBI's, for the death sentences, and the convicts', against their convictions.1
In their words
What Dalit writers and advocates have said of Khairlanji, as the press recorded it.
"Violence is another name of caste; people who raise their voice against this injustice are suddenly termed Maoist insurgents," the writer Urmila Pawar told a meeting at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 2014, Round Table India reported.6
"The Khairlanji case exemplifies the failure of every institutional mechanism designed to prevent and punish atrocities against Dalits," the lawyer Priyadarshi Telang told Maktoob in 2025.7
Who remembers, and how
Khairlanji is marked each year on 29 September by Dalit groups and the Ambedkarite press.6,7,8 In 2010 the scholar Anand Teltumbde wrote a book on it, The Persistence of Caste.7 A Marathi film based on it, Khairlanjichya Mathyawar, was released in 2014 and then stopped by the courts after objections to how it showed the family.8
What is still unknown
Whether the women were raped is disputed: the press reported it, and the CBI concluded they were not.2,3,8 We do not name the family, because the record holds reports of sexual violence, and naming any of them could identify a survivor of it.
The sources differ on why the family was attacked: a wage quarrel and the accused's belief that they had been falsely implicated, by the courts' account; land the family had won back, a road, or tractors crossing their field, by the press's and Human Rights Watch's.1,3,5,7 They differ, too, on the size of the mob, from about 40 to about 70, and on the sons' ages.1,5,7,8
Our sources
The main source is the Supreme Court's order of May 2019 (1), which sets out the facts as the courts found them and each court's verdict; we quote it directly and name none of the accused. Communalism Combat's cover story of November 2006 (3) rests on its own visit to the village and on the first fact-finding. Human Rights Watch (5) is an advocacy group writing from its own research. PUDR's page (4) summarises a joint fact-finding on the protests; we have read only the summary. Scroll (2), Round Table India (6), Maktoob (7) and The Mooknayak (8) are press, written later and drawing on earlier reports. No source here is linked, because the record protects people it does not name.
On the map at the centre of Bhandara district. See it on the map.
The sources
- Primary. Supreme Court of India, via Indian Kanoon. Case record, Criminal Appeal Nos. 1791-1795 of 2014 (party names not shown). 24 May 2019.
- Press. Scroll.in. Lone survivor of 2006 Khairlanji Dalit family massacre dies of heart attack. 21 Jan 2017.
- Press. SabrangIndia / Communalism Combat. Massacre in Maharashtra (Communalism Combat, Nov 2006, cover story, archived). 31 Oct 2006.
- Shadow. People's Union for Democratic Rights (with PUCL Chhattisgarh, PUCL Nagpur and others). Suppressing the Voice of the Oppressed: State Terror on Protests Against Khairlanji Massacre (joint fact-finding). 11 Jan 2007.
- Shadow. Human Rights Watch. India's Dalits: Between Atrocity and Protest. 12 Jan 2007.
- Press. Round Table India. Remembering Khairlanji: Trail of Dalit atrocities in Maharashtra. 2 Oct 2014.
- Press. Maktoob Media. Nineteen years of Khairlanji: the massacre that shattered the myth that caste no longer exists. 29 Sep 2025.
- Press. The Mooknayak (English). 17 Years After Khairlanji Massacre: Reflecting on a Dark Chapter in Dalit History. 29 Sep 2023.
The sources are not linked, to protect people this account does not name.
Updates and corrections
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