Bangalore: The acquittal of all the 46 accused in the carnage in Kambalapalli village of Kolar district, in which seven Dalits were burnt alive on March 11, 2000, has come as a huge setback to Dalits and progressive segments of the political spectrum fighting caste hegemony.

When Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy arrives at the Vidhana Soudha on December 6 to garland B.R. Ambedkar's statue to mark the 50th anniversary of the great Dalit leader's conversion to Buddhism, Dalit Sangharsha Samiti and other organisations will hand over a memorandum to him demanding that the Government go on an appeal in the High Court over the verdict.

The organisations are also planning to stage a series of protests.

Faith in judiciary

"Judgments such as this would make Dalits lose faith in the judiciary," Dalit Sangharsha Samiti (Ambedkarvaada) State convenor Mavalli Shankar told The Hindu.

He recalled a series of incidents in Karnataka and other States, including the Kadakol incident in Bijapur district where Dalits faced social boycott and the Kherlanji incident in Maharashtra of rape and murder of Dalits.

Mr. Shankar said that laws to protect Dalits had remained only on paper.

Seven Dalits were burnt alive in their house in Kambalpalli village near Chintamani in Kolar district by an "upper caste" mob on the evening of March 11, 2000.

The incident evoked national outrage in the following months and the issue was raised in Parliament.

Intolerance

Reports in the media and those by fact-finding teams concluded that the incident had its roots in a complex web of socio-political factors including entrenched feelings of upper caste intolerance towards lower castes in the backdrop of the growing Dalit mobilisation.

The murder of an upper caste waterman, responsible for pumping water to drums and buckets, by a Dalit group was the immediate provocation for the massacre in Kambalapalli.

Mr. Shankar alleged that the investigation of the incident was flawed. There was a "sudden" transfer of a fast track court judge "under pressure from upper castes".

The Special Public Prosecutor appointed to handle the case had been withdrawn, he added.

Although the Government kept its promise on building houses for the Dalits of the village, not all have got the promised agricultural land.

SC/ST population

Significantly, of the 27 districts of Karnataka, Kolar has the highest population of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes bordering about 30 per cent of the district's population. They are mostly agricultural labourers working under upper caste landlords.

A report on the atrocity by the Babasaheb Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Adhyayana Kendra, Bangalore, recalls the first recorded incident of caste atrocity in Kolar in 1975 . A Dalit boy was killed because he had passed the PUC with distinction, while an upper caste boy from the same village had failed. The accused in this case were acquitted for lack of evidence. There have been a series of clashes following this in Kolar.

Fact-finding report

A 30-page fact-finding report by People's Democratic Forum, a human rights group based in Bangalore, titled "Burnt lives, burning issues," says: "The spurt of attention that the Dalit carnage has received from the media and political leaders seems to focus exclusively on the immediate convulsions that caused the deaths without any serious attempt to locate them in a broad socio-political context."

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