admin SAVARI
A caste society is a society that sanctions violence at all levels, in a top-down fashion. This sanctioned societal violence heavily impacts Adivasi, Bahujan and Dalit women, every minute and day, lasting throughout our lives and across generations…
Of these communities, the Dalit and the Adivasi women to an extent are the prime targets of organized and open violence.
On June 30th 2010, Karnataka woke up to hear the horrific news that Honnamma, a Dalit woman politician had been attacked with stone slabs and brutally murdered by a violent mob of dominant caste men. Since then several new reports of assaults on Dalit women political leaders have appeared in the regional media from different parts of the country. SAVARI wants to map these murderous patterns into a connective narrative by remembering the lives and struggles of these women and discussing the ways in which they were exterminated for posing a challenge to the caste system. We hope this will spread awareness about the violence that is an everyday reality of most Dalit women’s lives. We also hope to understand why and how assertive Dalit women continue to be brutally attacked and murdered in modern India.
Honnamma’s Story
The study of Dalit women in Karnataka is very difficult. First of all, there are very few success stories. Secondly, even where there are such stories, it’s hard to meet and talk to such women, as they are very busy with their day-to-day life and work. But throughout history there have been many Dalit women who were brave, assertive, and fearless in the public sphere. Honnamma was one such woman, who continues to trouble, sadden and inspire us to this day.
Honnamma, 40, was a Madiga woman who had stood up to the caste patriarchs of her village, Gopalpura, in Tumkur district of Karnataka. This was in spite of the fact that the village had just 4 Madiga households and was fully dominated by OBC communities (1).
Honnamma was living and working with her partner, Dhabha Nagaraj, who was from a higher caste (Eediga) and whom she helped in running a Dhabha in the village. She had separated from her first husband at an early age and had brought up her son Manjunath (24) on her own. As the findings of the fact finding committee constituted by various Dalit organizations in Karnataka, after her death tells us, Honnamma, although illiterate, was a strong, Dalit, political woman leader who had come up in life with her own hard work and without any support or backing.
However, the dominant castes of her village resented her as she was a Madiga woman and they could not take it that she was able to rise up to a position of political power and prominence. The Eedigas were especially angry with her as her partner, Dhaba Nagaraj, was from their community.
Honnamma was also a woman who never accepted her caste situation tamely. Instead she courageously questioned the dominant castes and also questioned the irregularities in the functioning of the gram panchayat. In a way, as the fact finding committee could perceive, she had become a kind of irritant to many in the village. Moreover, as Dalit women are often violently and sexually exploited by higher caste men, the men of the village thought her to be sexually available. However, Honnamma resisted any such sexual exploitation or violation of her body.
Given all this there were many attacks on her even before she was killed. In fact, the same group that killed her had made a murderous attack on her earlier too. Ten years ago, her hut had been burnt down by some Eediga men of the village who had tried to intimidate her. She was subjected to violent quarrels/disagreements for almost 15 years before her murder.
Eventually Honnamma joined the BJP as a local worker and quickly became more active and visible. Soon she was made the Vice President of the Taluk level BJP unit. She began to interact with the officials of the local Panchayat, the local politicians and even State-level political leaders. She gained a name for herself as a strong and resourceful Dalit woman leader. Some casteist, anti-Dalit men in the village could not accept this. Men from Eediga, Kuruba, Uppara and Madivala castes especially resented her progress. Others from the Eediga community began to spread stories alleging that she was of loose morals and alleged that she spent time in Hotels (lodges) with political leaders in Tumkur and Bangalore. These people could not accept how an illiterate Dalit – that too a Madiga – and a mere woman, could rise in stature and move as an equal among political leaders.
Later in 2009, floods and rain heavily damaged her village. At this time, she protested the inaction of the authorities and forced the local MLA to come down and discuss the matter. She led a dharna protesting against the local JD(S) legislator, Mr. Suresh Babu, to force him to work for the release of compensation to the farmers for crop loss. There followed an altercation between them, both about politics and caste. No one could bear the fact that a Dalit woman was standing up to an upper caste local legislator.
As it often happens, her upper caste partner also troubled her to no end. Dhaba Nagaraj used her caste identity as a screen under which he carried out his business and illegal activities. As investigations by the fact finding team has revealed, whenever he faced any problem he would send her to the police station to complain that the village people were harassing her as she was a Dalit woman.
In such a situation, in May-June 2010, she had an altercation about payments with the contractors (Vadda community men from another town, Channarayapatna) who were carrying out the work of laying roads and drains in the area. To avenge this, some miscreants carried some cement and steel and left it in her house stealthily during the night. In the morning, they complained against her in the Handikeri police station. She was arrested and released on bail later. She had to face constant harassment like this, all directed against her strength, conviction and courage.
In fact, the local police and the DYSP were also equally responsible for her murder. She had complained many times to them about the threats to her life and about the sexual harassment she faced. So the police was fully aware of her situation. But they took no step to protect her. More shockingly, just a few hours before her murder, her killers were found sharing coffee and cigarettes with the police officials of the village. This points a finger to a more direct role for the police in planning her murder.
To go on with the story, after getting bail in the concocted case mentioned above, she returned to the village on 30th June, and went straight to the house of her friend Meenakshamma and sat on a bench at the entrance. All at once a mob of some 20-30 men attacked her, in public, just near the bus stop, beating her up ruthlessly. They tore off her clothes and abused her in filthy language, pushed and kicked her into the drain next to the road. Honnamma fell unconscious and after a while she regained consciousness and moved her hand signaling for water to drink. At this, the mob, finding her alive, pulled her out of the drain on to the footpath, and crushed her to death using the huge stones from a nearby construction site. The attack lasted for half an hour. Honnamma’s friend who tried to come to her rescue was fended off with threats to her life. The gang that committed this gruesome murder included Rangaswamy, Gram Panchayat President Raja, Appanna, Venkatesh, Muthyalappa, Umesh, Meese Venkataswamy, Eedigara Nanjunda, Satya . etc. Including Honnamma’s relative Ranga-Subba and some Kurubas, there were a total of about 30 people.
The fact finding committee which looked into the murder demanded that the case be tried in a fast track court and that the killers of Honnamma be booked under the various sections of the PoA Act 1989 including the charges of murder, outraging the modesty, sexual assault, humiliation and physical assault in a public place, damage to her house and personal goods, and all other applicable punishments. They also called for the DySP and the local police officials to be suspended. Similarly there was also a demand that Honnamma’s son Manjunath (who is studying BBM) be given a compensation of 10 lakhs and a government job. The fact finding committee also has suggested that the Madiga families of Gopalpura be given 5 acres of land, subsidy for agriculture and related assistance.
However, none of these measures can restore Honnamma back to life and give her back the dignity and respect that she deserved. And this is not her fate alone. All over India, many such assertive Dalit women go through similar situations. Among these, the most powerful, gifted, resourceful, active and committed women are the most gruesomely targeted, abused, hurt and often killed. This is a systematic and well established way of handling resistance to and deviance from caste and gender roles. However, the dominant discourse about women in India, neither accepts nor protests against this. In a way this discourse is complicit in the murder, maiming and torture of Dalit women throughout the length and breadth of this country.
Given this, SAVARI wants to record the memory of this terrible story. With this we want to remember and honor Honnamma and her courage. We also want to raise our voices in angry protest against the cruelty that was done to her and that is being done to many powerful Dalit women like her. We want Dalit women, along with Adivasi and Bahujan women, to move out of this vortex of daily humiliation, harassment and violence.
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1) OBC communities of Gopalpura: Madivalas – 20, Eediga – 40 (local dominant caste), Kuruba -10, Koracha – 10, Gangamathasthas – 10, Rayaru – 10, Upparas – 10 and Vaddas – 10. Other than the Madigas, most other households were of OBC.
Note based on Cynthia Stephen’s translation of the fact-finding report, originally written in Kannada. Please find the translation along with the list of news reports that covered Honamma’s murder at Roundtable India.
We look forward to inputs from readers and activists to help us collate such reports from different parts of the country. Caste violence against dalitbahujan and adivasi women is widespread, but only a tiny fraction of these brutalities reach the media. The methodical fragmentation of such news works to make them appear as random events and thus they get conveniently excluded from any discourse on caste based gendered violence on marginalized women. SAVARI members pledge to dedicate efforts to document, edit and make available the stories of violence and resistance from (often) unwieldy fact-finding statements. SAVARI recognizes that these valuable documents are written by activists at the grass roots with bare minimum resources and they remain the tenuous textual threads connecting caste violence occurring throughout our society. Our attempt to work these documents into a readable narrative at all times ensures that there is no dilution of the despair, desolation and towering resistance that went into creating the original fact-finding mission statements.
Edited by Jenny Rowena.