THE night of 21 November proved a nightmare for the Musahar Dalits of Vasudeva village in Singhiya police station area of Samastipur in Bihar. After 10 in night the Rajput landlord community organized a brutal attack on inhabitants resulting in killing of Hira Lal Sada while dozens were seriously injured. This is not the first time under the current BJP-JDU dispensation in Bihar that Dalits had to face an organized attack by upper caste feudals.
CPI(ML) Bihar state secretary Kunal and AIARLA General Secretary have condemned this brutality and demanded effective action and arrests of the killers who were more than three dozen in number and well-armed. They told that this incident is an outcome of continued attempts by upper caste community in the village of capturing lands belonging to Dalit families. If state government had taken concrete measures in time such a heinous crime would have been prevented. Comrade Kunal said that apparently a campaign to capture lands of poor and Dalits is relentlessly going on under the surface in Bihar and such incidents are deliberately been ignored by the administration in order to appease the feudal communal upper caste support base of BJP-JDU combine.
An AIARLA team led by Lal Bahadur Sada and Lalan Ram visited the village after the incident. They informed that in the center of this attack lies a twenty bigha plot of land where about fifty Musahar families reside for long. The upper castes have tried to displace them earlier too, but failed in face of resistance by dalits. This time they came more organized, led by Manoranjan Singh, Bakhel Singh, Lapetan Singh, Rajanish, Awadhesh Singh, and Pankaj Singh. The police reached late, though a FIR has been lodged on the statement of Ramia Devi, wife of the deceased Hira Lal Sada, no arrests have been made yet in spite of the fact that names of attackers are known and incidents of intimidation and attacks were reported earlier too.
