The Private Caste Army

In one line

Private violence with a public purpose: an armed body raised by a landholding caste to enforce an agrarian order the law would not enforce, and the legal problem of what to do about it.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: a private caste army is an armed body raised, financed and directed by a landholding caste or a group of them, operating in a defined area, for the purpose of suppressing the wage, land and social demands of agricultural labourers; the best documented in India are those of central Bihar, of which the earlier Kuer Sena and Bhoomi Sena and the later Ranvir Sena are the best known; and the legal problem they present is that Indian law has instruments against an unlawful association, against an organised crime syndicate and against an unlawful assembly, and that proscribing an organisation which does not admit its own existence, whose members are the landholders of a district and whose object is the enforcement of an existing distribution, is a different problem from proscribing a political or a criminal one.

Why they exist

A private army is a substitute for something. The question is what.

It is a substitute for the law that would have enforced the demand. If the notified minimum wage were enforced, there would be no wage dispute to suppress. If the ceiling law had been implemented, there would be no surplus land to defend. The private army exists in the space left by unenforced legislation, and the chapters on land reform explain how that space was made.

It is also a substitute for the police, and this is the more uncomfortable half. Where the local force will not act against the labourers' demand, because the demand is lawful, a private body will. The findings of more than one inquiry into agrarian violence in Bihar record an understanding between the two, and an answer should say that such findings exist without overstating them.

And it is a substitute for the caste panchayat, whose sanctions, boycott and exclusion, had ceased to be sufficient once the labourers had an alternative source of organisation.

What distinguishes them from a gang

Four features, and they matter because they decide which law applies.

Membership is by caste, not by recruitment. A person belongs because of who he is, which makes the organisation coextensive with a community and makes proscription of the organisation look like proscription of the community.

The object is defensive in its own account. It presents itself as protecting landholders against the labourers' organisations, which lets it claim the language of self-defence.

It has no property and no accounts. A criminal syndicate has proceeds; this does not. So the financial provisions of the security statutes, which are designed to reach proceeds, have little to bite on.