M A I N   N E W S

‘Send us anywhere, but we won’t go back to Mirchpur’
SC-appointed team meets displaced families, to submit report
Deepender Deswal/TNS

Hisar, August 5
The Dalit families that fled Hisar’s Mirchpur village after caste violence in 2010 today told a Supreme Court-appointed team they would not return as they feared for their safety.

Narrating their tales to the team of legal experts and social scientists — including Sessions Judge Ajay Jain and Shamim Modi of Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences — the victims said they wanted to resettle elsewhere as returning to the native village was fraught with danger.

“How can anybody live under constant threat? The situation has not changed much in our village. The Jats are still as inimical to us as they were before. Move out the CRPF deployed in the village and you will see the consequences in two days,” Ramesh Kumar, a middle-age Dalit man, told the team. About 135 families have been living at a farmhouse on the outskirts of Hisar since January 2011.

Dalit settlements were targeted and torched in Mirchpur village by members of the dominant caste on April 21, 2010, resulting in the death of Tara Chand, 70, and his physically-challenged daughter. The court had convicted 15 persons and acquitted 82 in the case.

Mincing no words, Gulab Singh, an elderly man, said: Send us to other states or even Pakistan, but we will not go back to Mirchpur. “There is no work for us in 20 adjoining villages. Nobody offers us even a glass of ‘seet’ (left over after extracting butter from yogurt, ‘seet’ is usually distributed by cattle rearing farmers free of cost to lower caste).

What will we do there?” he said. When the team members asked the families what they wanted, they stated in unison: “Give us homes anywhere near the town so we can work and feed their children. We have suffered enough and we don’t want to endanger our lives by going back to our village.”

Living in poor conditions at the farmhouse, the displaced villagers blamed the state government. We have been denied basic amenities such as water, electricity and toilets despite the Supreme Court’s directions, they said. Our children are being denied admission in nearby government schools at the behest of the upper caste people, they said.

“We are grateful to Ved Pal Tanwar, the owner of the farmhouse, who has given us shelter. The government wants to evict us and has framed Tanwar in criminal cases. The apex court directed the government to provide two quintal grain per family in two months, but we have not got the quota,” said a villager.

Bhoop Singh, an octogenarian who fractured his hand during the attack by Jats, said his son Vicky, who with other witnesses testified against the accused leading to the conviction of 15 persons, had died under mysterious circumstances. “I suspect he was murdered. I wrote to the police for a probe, but they did not register a case and called my son’s case an accidental death,” he said.

Earlier, the team visited the 50-odd families living in Mirchpur village where CRPF men provide them security.

The team would submit its report to the Supreme Court.