Around 7.30pm on September 29, 2006, the lone telephone at Andhalgaon police station rang. Constable Rajkumar Dongare picked up. Across the crackling line came the panicked voice of Sidharth Gajbhiye, a resident of Dhusala village 3.5km away.
His cousin Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange, Gajbhiye said, had just burst in, having fled through the rice fields from a mob of 60-70 villagers – on tractors, armed with rods, stones and bicycle chains – bearing down on his mud-and-brick home. “Maaro Saalon Ko (kill the b*****),” rose the cry that sent Bhaiyyalal scampering out of Khairlanji, and which Gajbhiye repeated over the phone. Dongare listened, set the receiver down and, according to two former officials, did nothing.
Tensions had been building up for weeks in Khairlanji, a village of 800 in Maharashtra’s Bhandara district – 750 of them OBCs and just 20 Dalits in three households. Matriarch Surekha Bhotmange’s acumen had made her family relatively prosperous despite irritants such as being stopped from building a pucca house or getting an electricity connection. Keen on education, Surekha bought her daughter Priyanka a bicycle to commute to college, inadvertently stoking caste resentment. “There was a feeling in the village that the Mahar family needed to be straightened out,” said one of the two officials cited above. A dispute over Bhaiyyalal’s land soured ties further.
On September 3, 2006, it erupted. Gajbhiye – who helped the Bhotmanges win their land dispute in court – was thrashed in front of Surekha and Priyanka, who later testified. Andhalgaon police station took 13 days to register an FIR and refused to invoke the SC/ST Act. Then station in-charge, Someshwar Bharane, arrested no one quickly. “The police were hand in glove with the accused in weakening the case,” said advocate Sashibhushan Wahane, later a government-appointed prosecutor.
On September 29, the police finally charged 12 people under IPC sections 324 (voluntarily causing hurt), 147 (rioting), 148 (rioting with deadly weapons) and 149 (unlawful assembly) – but not the SC/ST Act. Within three hours, the accused secured bail. Trundling through the fields on tractors, about 70 people stopped at the panchayat office where, according to the first official, the plot to attack the Bhotmanges was hatched.
Dark clouds were hovering over the Dalit family. Priyanka was drawing water from the well when she overheard village women say Dheds – a slur for Dalits – needed to be shown their place. At 5pm, Surekha called her nephew Rashtrapal Narnaware. “Something bad is happening,” she said. Narnaware urged her to leave. Surekha demurred, unsure what was coming.
Around 6pm, the villagers returned drunk and triumphant, and broke into the Bhotmange house. “You Mahars, Dheds, you think too much of yourselves,” they shouted as they thrashed Surekha, 44, her two sons Roshan, 23, and Sudhir, 21, and daughter Priyanka, 17, before dragging their limp bodies to the village square.
The Khairlanji massacre, considered among India’s most macabre episodes, exposed the grisly realities of caste. Yet police inaction, procedural violations and social hostility marked every step of the investigation, warped the trial, and left one of India’s worst caste atrocities unrecognised as such by the judiciary. Drawing on court transcripts, government records, fact-finding reports, field visits and interviews with 20-odd villagers, witnesses, officers, lawyers and police officers, HT reinvestigates the case.
Women gangraped, men’s genitals mutilated
Between 6pm and 8pm, carnage raged at the Bhotmange house. Surekha and Priyanka were thrashed, gangraped and dragged out. Sudhir and Roshan were beaten, their genitals mutilated. The villagers loaded the bodies onto a bullock cart and dumped them in a canal four kilometres away. Beside it, they met to seal their silence forever, according to a former investigator in the case.
At 8.30pm – roughly an hour after Gajbhiye’s call – beat constable Baban Meshram visited the village, reported everything “normal”, and left. “The deputy superintendent of police at Andhalgaon did not take any further action on the matter,” found a report by the Yashwant Chavan Academy of Development Administration (Yashada).
At 5am the next morning, Bhaiyyalal returned to Khairlanji. His home lay wrecked, their meagre possessions smashed. Shaking with fear, he walked to the police station at 7am. For about three hours, according to the former investigator cited above, the police kept him waiting, until a call from Bharane confirmed Surekha’s naked body had been found. At 10am, the First Information Report (FIR) was finally lodged – under the mildest clause of the SC/ST Act (insult or intimidation in public), with no mention of rape, criminal assault or outraging the modesty of a woman. “When CBI took over the case, it had to conduct a fresh probe,” said Ejaz Khan, the federal agency’s prosecutor in the case.
At 12pm, Surekha’s body – not yet identified in writing – was sent to Mohadi Rural Hospital, where Manisha Banthe was the officiating medical superintendent. Yet Banthe took a call and left before the post-mortem, which fell to Avinash Shende, a junior doctor on a one-year contract.
Chaos ensued. The hospital had no latex gloves, delaying the procedure. The doctor took no blood samples and no vaginal, rectal or pubic swabs, ignored conspicuous swellings and took no photographs. Shende later told a panel he didn’t check for sexual assault because the FIR didn’t mention it, according to Anand Teltumbde’s book The Persistence of Caste. Priyanka’s post-mortem showed similar lapses, the government probe later found. A former official quoted above said Tumsar lawmaker Madhukar Kukde was present during the first post-mortem. “When asked about the purpose of the call, the civil surgeon gave evasive replies… this points to a strong possibility that under political pressure the civil surgeon instructed Dr Shende to fabricate the post-mortem in a way that the crucial evidence, especially on the possibility of rape on victims, is lost,” the Yashada report said.
The post-mortem was over by 3.30pm. Though Banthe was at the hospital the next day, only Shende examined the other bodies. By midnight, police had pushed Bhaiyyalal to bury his kin.
Gaffes and slips galore in police investigation
On October 1, superintendent of police Suresh Sagar visited the village for the first time. The same day, police arrested 28 people. Pressure mounted on local authorities as news spread. On October 5, the women’s bodies were exhumed for a second autopsy. “It remains unclear just who ordered this because the family didn’t ask for it,” said the former investigator cited above. The second examination proved inconclusive.
Two weeks after the massacre, Nagpur special inspector general of police Pankaj Gupta visited Khairlanji. His statement that rape was not involved sparked an outcry, eventually forcing the government to hand the case to CBI.
“An FIR was never registered under IPC 302 and 376. It was hidden for days by local and state police. Only after the agitation was it handed to CBI,” said Wahane.
“The state police didn’t even have an eyewitness. CBI found a prime eyewitness,” said Khan.
There was another hitch. The police had rounded up 46 people, but 35 were discharged when CBI filed its charge sheet in December, setting off protests.
“The police strategy was simple. Take everybody inside, make them accused, nothing will be proven and everyone will be out. CBI found it very difficult to find evidence nearly two months after the crime. Police had kept all the accused in a single cell. Their cohesion was remarkable,” said Milind Pakhale of the Khairlanji Action Committee.
The trial began in Nagpur in May 2007.
Dominant-caste landholders had imposed a code of silence. Farm labourers and cattle grazers were warned that testifying would bring economic boycott and eviction. Many told investigators they were inside their homes, doors bolted, and saw nothing. At least two witnesses wrote to the collector, alleging death threats and social ostracisation, and asking to be moved.
“After the incident, my family and I had to run from the village; it was too dangerous for us to stay,” said Rajan Gajbhiye, eyewitness and younger brother of Gajbhiye. “A CBI officer warned me that if I did not leave, I would be the next to be murdered.”
Another witness turned hostile halfway through the trial. “It was physically dangerous to even attend the hearings at the time. The accused would bring their relatives to pack the benches,” said Pakhale.
Differences within the prosecution
The early slips repeatedly came back to haunt the prosecution, said two lawyers associated with the case. Without medical evidence, the defence gutted the sexual assault charge, pointed out that weapons described by Bhaiyyalal were missing from the post-mortem report, and underlined repeated police delays. The prosecution’s tactical choice not to add rape charges appeared to dilute the crime’s gravity. Most importantly, the defence severed the link between the killings and the SC/ST Act, blaming village enmity and even using investigating officer Vinayak Susatkar’s testimony to discredit an eyewitness.
In 2008, the trial court convicted eight people, acquitted three and discharged everyone under the SC/ST Act. On this last point, activists alleged the prosecution failed to establish a history of caste animus.
“There was no caste hatred for these killings,” the judge held.
“The court held that the fight had taken place due to the Sidharth Gajbhiye case. There was no evidence of casteist remarks. The court didn’t agree to our contention that caste was the trigger for the killings,” said Khan.
Wahane went further, admitting there were differences within the prosecution on the SC/ST Act and blaming special public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam – an allegation echoed by Pakhale. “I had asked for the death penalty, and for the SC/ST Act to apply, the prima facie evidence for it should have been present. But the agency probing this could not establish that, and the court rejected the claims,” Nikam said.
The high court in 2010 confirmed the trial court’s order but commuted the death sentences to life imprisonment. “The incident had not occurred on account of caste hatred,” the high court said.
In 2019, the Supreme Court upheld the high court verdict. By then, Bhaiyyalal had been dead for two years.
A village divided by hard caste lines
Khairlanji presents a difficult paradox. The first major atrocity since the turn of the millennium, it jolted a generation to the realities of caste. One of the few such cases to end in conviction, it underlined the power of dogged advocacy. “The credit goes to activists like us who pursued the case every day, at great personal risk. It ensured Khairlanji didn’t end up like other cases,” said Pakhale.
Yet the courts’ failure to recognise caste animus exposed gaps. “Although offences under the SC/ST Act were initially filed and included in the investigation and chargesheet, the charges were not sustained by the courts,” said former Maharashtra chief secretary Ratnakar Gaikwad, who commissioned the Yashada report.
But as Teltumbde noted, many of the errant characters – police officers Meshram, Sagar, Susatkar, Bharane and doctor Shende – were Dalits themselves. “Insofar as the system is considered naturally inimical to Dalit interests, it follows that Dalit individuals who rise within it tend to act against Dalit interests as well. The system thus transforms the individual into its faithful prop,” he wrote.
Only two Dalit households remain in Khairlanji today — that of Yograj Khobragade and Vinod Meshram. The Bhotmange hut has crumbled and the land sold. Shamkala Meshram, Vinod’s wife, said the massacre cast a long shadow. “We don’t celebrate Dr BR Ambedkar’s birthday or other anniversaries. I have sent both my children outside. We only live here because we have land,” she said.
Till police were posted in the village, an uneasy calm held. “After they left, caste tensions returned. They didn’t even listen to our request to install a statue of Dr Ambedkar. There is a silent fear,” she said.
An iron curtain has descended over the village.
On one side are the accused’s families, hopeful of release when their 25-year imprisonment ends in 2031. Many feel short-changed, believe the sentencing disproportionate for a crime “committed by outsiders”, and harbour deep resentment towards Dalits they see as having brought infamy on the village.
“The incident was done by others, but we were financially weak, we did not have the power to pursue it legally…The people who actually did it got away, and we got trapped in it,” said Nepal Binjewar, younger brother of prime convict Gopal Binjewar.
Then village chief Upasrao Urkunde blames the case for hurting development. “People became afraid to cross the village after nightfall,” he said.
He didn’t mention allegations that he threatened to eliminate the Bhotmange family, once in front of the police, or that Bhaiyyalal blamed him for shielding the culprits. Madhukar Kukde, another man named by Bhaiyyalal, later switched from the BJP to the NCP and became an MP.
On the other side are the Dalits, swallowing everyday indignities – dung smeared on their posters, wedding matches refused when the village name is mentioned, no response to their requests.
Rajan Gajbhiye runs a bar near Khairlanji but never steps into the village, preferring a two-hour daily commute. He said old fears surface whenever the convicted men are released on parole.
“I live in fear that someone will harm us. Sometimes they come to my bar. If I see them, to avoid any confrontation, I have my workers get me out of there,” he said. He has applied for a personal firearm licence.
Key eyewitness Mukesh Pusam did not leave Khairlanji, living instead with armed security for four years. For him and the Gajbhiye family, years blur their memory of the Bhotmanges – the parents toiling in the field, the boys running, the girl on her bicycle, her dupatta in the wind. “We do not take part in their festivals. They do not take part in ours,” said Pusam. “There is a wall in the village now.”
