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Verdict today in Khairlanji case

KHAIRLANJI (Bhandara district): Nearly two years after the Khairlanji massacre which shook the country, an ad hoc sessions court in Bhandara will decide on Monday if the 11 men charged with the crime of brutally murdering four members of a Dalit family are guilty or not.

The lone surviving member and head of the Bhotmange family, Bhaiyyalal, is expecting the men to be sentenced to death.

It was business as usual in Khairlanji village in Maharashtra on Sunday morning. If the residents were worried about the verdict, they did not show it.

For two years, people have got used to a stage meant for cultural programmes in the village square, being converted into a police outpost. The police guard Bhaiyyalal’s house even though it has been reduced to a pile of bricks this monsoon.

Life has changed a lot for Bhaiyyalal who accepted a government job and a house last year. He works as a peon in the Babasaheb Ambedkar boys’ hostel in Bhandara and continues to live in the house of local Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Dilip Uke at Warthi for over a year.

He has disowned his relatives after a squabble over money.

The only regret Bhaiyyalal has is that the government did not pay enough attention to the case. “They should have tried the case on a day-to-day basis in a fast track court,” he told The Hindu.

He also feels that some of the accused were discharged. “At least five more people were involved in the crime and the government should arrest them and find proof to prosecute them,” he said.

After the killings on September 29, 2006, a devastated Bhaiyyalal had demanded death sentence for the perpetrators of the incident.

He lost his wife Surekha, teenaged daughter Priyanka and two sons, one of whom was partially blind. “Compensation is okay, but it won’t bring back my family,” he said. Bhaiyyalal was a key prosecution eyewitness in the trial.

He has vowed never to live in the village, though he still owns five acres there which he has leased to some sharecroppers.

He had gone once to see his house, after the police informed him that it had collapsed. He has not decided whether to live in the government flat at Bhandara.

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