Death of a Martyr Shakes the Land of Untouchables

If it had happened in another time, or perhaps another place, few in India would have taken notice of the day they burned Dhanraj to death in the tiny village of Sato Dharmapur.

Except for the national political implications, few would have known that Dhanraj, a 26-year-old Hindu untouchable, preferred to die rather than give up his bride to a feudal lord who had built a sort of modern-day harem while ruling over the likes of Dhanraj and his family.

Dhanraj loved Kuchchi Devi that much. Still, it’s not the kind of story to captivate a nation that finds the private lives of its rajahs and rulers far more meaningful.

After all, Dhanraj and the 22-year-old woman he took as his wife in January are harijans , Hindu outcasts who, despite laws that forbid discrimination, continue to be the most downtrodden and repressed of India’s 850 million people. They are so low on the social scale that, as the word “untouchable” suggests, high-caste Hindus will not come within an arm’s length of them.

Besides, in modern India, the raping and killing of harijans is a daily event.

Kanchi Ram, a social activist who heads a new political party fighting for the untouchables, said recently: “There are two identical countries in the world where a minority rules over the majority. One is South Africa, and the other is India. The difference is that in India it is not color. It is caste. This case of Dhanraj and the poor widow is a usual thing here, a routine case involving only one death.”

But this time there was a difference. There was a political element, and last week the Dhanraj incident exploded into a scandal that has rocked the fragile government of Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh.

For one thing, Dhanraj was burned to death in the heart of Singh’s home district, allegedly at the instigation of a feudal lord named Arjun Singh who, like the prime minister, is of the Thakur caste. He was Singh’s local agent in the 1989 election.

Even so, the incident would have gone generally unreported had it not been for Krishna Rawit, a firebrand harijan woman in the Congress-I party of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the party that forms Singh’s principal opposition. At her insistence, the Congress-I has made a cause celebre of the Dhanraj incident.

Also, the tragedy took place against the backdrop of Ram’s campaign on behalf of the harijan s, without which it probably would not have come to Rawit’s attention.

Ram’s Indian Majority Party, which maintains that lower-caste Hindus make up 75% of India’s population, has in recent weeks been intensifying its campaign to do something about the 10,000 atrocities that are recorded every year against untouchables.

Ram says the Dhanraj incident is an apt metaphor for untouchability in India today, and an acid test for Prime Minister Singh’s professed liberal social policies.

“V. P. Singh is a most dangerous person for us because of his own compulsions,” Ram told an interviewer last week. “He was brought up in a feudal family. He is a small rajah. He belongs to a feudal caste, the Thakurs, and if he does not support feudal interests, then he will be disowned by his caste.”

Singh is clearly on the defensive. After Dhanraj’s death, he hastily organized a visit to his constituency in Uttar Pradesh state, where the incident took place. He did not stop in Kuchchi’s village; there was no point. Congress-I people had already brought the widow to Delhi and sequestered her at party headquarters. But Singh did visit the villages nearby, and at each stop he spoke out on the issue.

“These atrocities will not be tolerated,” he declared at one point. “I dare anyone to make any atrocities against harijans .”

A Western journalist accompanying the prime minister asked how such a thing could happen in his own district, within his own caste, and he replied:

“It’s all over the country. Upper castes have a hand over the lower castes. But our policy is clear. We stand behind the (untouchable) castes.”

But no one stood behind Dhanraj and his bride until his death became a national issue--not the police, not Singh’s civil administration, not even the courts.

“When Dhanraj was screaming in pain, shouting, ‘Save me, save me, save me,’ no one helped us at all,” Kuchchi told a reporter, weeping throughout a three-hour interview. “Everyone just let him die.”

For Kuchchi, the incident that led to her husband’s death is hardly a political affair. Even now, she is not sure who the prime minister is. And Rajiv Gandhi is just a face on tattered campaign posters. She has no formal education. Her hands are like tree bark as the result of a life of planting and weeding and harvesting wheat.

Both she and her husband were Chamaras, members of a shoemaker caste, and in India anything to do with the feet is considered so vile it is left to the untouchables. Over the years, as machines took over the task of making shoes, the Chamaras were brought to the fields by landed upper-caste Hindus and became little more than slaves, who work for a few rupees a day, or a fist-sized ball of wheat.

“They are forced to live at the animal level, subhuman,” Ram said. “The Thakurs are too afraid to make them human. They say, ‘Who then will till our fields?’ So they keep them like animals.”

But even among the Chamaras, there are ancient human customs--marriage, for example. When the time came for Kuchchi to wed, at the age of 20 in late 1988, everything had been arranged, as is the case with most marriages in rural India. A middleman who knew both fathers brokered their marriage.

Kuchchi’s father paid a dowry of rice, wheat and dal, or pigeon peas--10 pounds of each, which is no small matter among the Chamaras--and the couple was wed a year and a half ago.

Then came the gauna , or reunion. As is customary, the couple were kept separate after the wedding until an auspicious date selected by the astrologers. For Kuchchi and Dhanraj, the gauna came in January, after a 14-month wait. And a few months later their nightmare began.

They were living in a tiny mud hut with seven of Dhanraj’s relatives, and they worked the fields of the powerful local Thakur, Arjun Singh. They were content. But one day Arjun Singh came up to them in the field and, as Kuchchi recalled, “demanded my womanhood.”

“When Dhanraj protested,” she said, “Arjun Singh laughed and said: ‘Don’t you worry. I am a rich man. I will purchase two bullocks, and they will do your work in the field. You give me your wife, and I will keep her like a rani (princess). Now do as I say.’

“Dhanraj shouted back: ‘She is my wife. Not yours. I will not stay here any longer. I will never work for you again.’

“As we ran back to the hut, Arjun Singh shouted after us: ‘I will get what I want. I will take you by force, and after that nobody will help you.’

“We hid. I was afraid. I had heard so many stories from the others about Arjun Singh’s ‘keeps,’ the harijan women he has brought into his house. In our community, such a thing is unholy. We are ostracized and forced to pay a heavy penalty of food and money to the others. Dhanraj would not let this happen to me.”

Late that afternoon, Dhanraj paid for his defiance with his life. According to his widow, Arjun Singh sent two of his nephews, one of them free on bail after being sentenced to life in prison for murder. They forced Dhanraj out of the hut, slapped him several times and dragged him off to a remote compound, where they drenched him with kerosene.

She said that one of the pair shouted, “You stay back or we’ll kill you all.”

“Arjun Singh,” she went on, “came with a matchbox. He handed it to his nephew Raju and, as nephew Gulab held Dhanraj’s arms, Raju set him on fire. Dhanraj ran screaming to a nearby well and jumped in to save himself. We ran after him, pulled him out and brought him back home. He was still screaming. His clothes were gone. His skin was black and peeling off, all except his face and feet. He just kept screaming, ‘Save me, somehow. Save me. I’m dying.’ ”

Within minutes, hundreds of angry harijans gathered around. They carried him to the local police station, an hour away, where an officer refused to take down his “dying declaration.”

So they brought Dhanraj back to the hut and, several hours later, a state police jeep arrived to take him to the nearest government hospital in Fatehpur, 25 miles away. There the doctors were on strike, the result of a salary dispute. Finally, Dhanraj was taken to a private nursing home nearby.

It was in the nursing home, at 8 o’clock the following morning, after a night of intense pain, that Dhanraj died in Kuchchi’s arms. He had not been allowed to make a formal statement, even though he had been conscious for a day and a half and in the presence of scores of police officers.

The local police accepted Arjun Singh’s story that Dhanraj had stolen 50 rupees ($2.75), got drunk and burned himself to death.

That was on April 6, more than a month ago. In the days that followed, Dhanraj’s family grew increasingly militant. They carried his body 50 miles to where an autopsy could be performed. It showed that there was no alcohol in his blood. They carried out a sit-in, together with 100 other harijans, at the office of the district collector, who in late April finally got Arjun Singh to pay them 10,000 rupees in compensation ($550).

A one-paragraph item on the settlement appeared in a local newspaper, and it caught the eye of Krishna Rawit. A former state legislator, she too is a harijan , and a fierce campaigner for the rights of untouchables and women. She immediately saw the political dimension of the incident.

Rawit found Kuchchi in her family village, Bela, to which she had fled after the district collector sternly told her: “Go back to Bela and remarry. If you go to Sato Dharmapur, you’ll be killed.”

Rawit told a reporter: “At first, Kuchchi refused to tell me anything. But I convinced her that if we can get justice for her, others like her will not have to suffer.”

Whether this is so was still not clear last week. Arjun Singh’s two nephews have been forced to turn themselves in, and they are being held. But Arjun Singh remains a free man, and the Chamaras who work for him say they live in terror.

The incident was debated in Parliament last week, with Congress-I stalwarts speaking out firmly. One, S.S. Ahluwalia, declared: “We have been shouting ourselves hoarse to bring this issue of atrocities on harijans , but this government is a deaf government. It has been promising so much but done nothing.”

The prime minister’s supporters retaliated by reminding their opponents that during the five years under Rajiv Gandhi there were tens of thousands of such atrocities.

Rawit said she tried three times and waited for several hours to meet with Gandhi, but without success.

Kuchchi says that, despite everything, her mind is on one thing only: the baby she carries, Dhanraj’s baby.

“No matter what is being done after Dhanraj’s death,” she said, “no one is feeling the pain I am feeling inside of me.”

She paused and dried her tears, and added: “But I am also very happy, because I am carrying Dhanraj inside of me. I don’t care whether it is a boy or a girl. I will give it what I would have given in a lifetime to Dhanraj.”