The Bihar Massacres

In one line

Between the late 1970s and the late 1990s a series of massacres in central Bihar killed agricultural labourers in groups of a dozen to sixty at a time, and almost every conviction was set aside on appeal.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the Bihar massacres were killings of groups of agricultural labourers, overwhelmingly of Scheduled Castes, in the districts of central Bihar, arising out of disputes over wages, land and social assertion, carried out largely by private caste armies raised by landholding castes; the best known are Belchi in 1977, Arwal in 1986, Bathani Tola in 1996, Laxmanpur Bathe in 1997 and Bara in 1992, the last of which was carried out on the other side of the conflict; and their significance for this paper is that they are the clearest available demonstration of what the criminal justice system does with collective violence, since the trials that were held ended in convictions that appellate courts set aside for want of reliable identification.

Why they are the module's central case study

Every proposition this book has advanced can be tested against them.

Collective violence destroys identification, and this is where that is demonstrated at its starkest: killings at night, by large armed groups, of people who had no relation with the killers other than the dispute, in villages where the surviving witnesses had to go on living.

Group liability is the only route to conviction, and section 190's difficulty is here in its acute form.

And the appellate stage is where the cases were decided. Trial courts convicted. High Courts, applying the ordinary rule that identification at night by witnesses who named accused for the first time long afterwards is unsafe, acquitted. Neither court did anything unorthodox.

A student must be able to state that last point without either excusing the outcome or attacking the courts, because it is the honest description and it is where the marks are.

The pattern

The dispute. Almost always a combination of three: a demand for the notified minimum wage, a claim to land held above the ceiling or to common land, and an assertion of social equality, over seating, over addressing, over a marriage, over a procession.

The organisation. Private caste armies, raised and financed by landholding castes, of which the best known are the earlier Kuer Sena and Bhoomi Sena and, from the mid-1990s, the Ranvir Sena. They are taken in the next chapter.

The method. A night attack on a hamlet, by a large armed group, killing indiscriminately within the target community, including women and children. The indiscriminacy is not incidental: the object is the community, which is what makes it collective violence in the second sense Module I gave.