In a gory display of primitive justice, dozens of people in a Bihar village on Friday beat a dalit teenager to death in presence of policemen. But the police, instead of initiating any action against the attackers who included men from the upper castes, arrested the dead youth’s father.
Dinesh Manjhi, alias Viru, 18, a resident of Chhotki Kalpa village under Kalpa police station in Jehanabad district, was repeatedly attacked with sticks and stones in the forenoon by some 30 men from the village who accused him of murdering 50-year-old villager Upendra Manjhi the previous night.
There was little intelligible evidence to link the teenager, who used to work in Mumbai and had returned a fortnight ago, with the previous murder except, as some villagers claimed, he was “found hiding” in a field near the village in the morning. In the village inhabited by a few upper-caste Rajput families and about 150 mahadalit families of the Manjhis, who are the poorest community in Bihar, most of the Manjhis earn their livelihood doing domestic and agricultural work in the Rajput families, said sources. The entire attack was caught on local TV news channel cameras.