Denial:

Erasing the corpse from the photograph;

Your tenth stage
Is denial:
The washing of hands
In the blood of semantics.

Here, when we say
"Caste killed them,"
They answer,
"No, no
It was a land dispute,
A love affair gone wrong,
A personal enmity,
A theft issue."

The FIR
Forgets to mention
The caste abuses.
The judge
Finds the evidence
"Weak."
The witnesses
Forget everything
After a visit
From Sanatan-Sharia men
In the day.

Acquittal
Is declared
As further proof
That "there was no caste angle."

The massacre
Becomes a "sad incident,"
A "regrettable clash,"
A "chapter
We must move beyond
For development."
The caste-crushed Dalit body
On the ground.

O Jurist,

It is like Europe or
UK or any Western world,
They lied to us,
When the white blood dried,
The Allahu Akbar screams went aloud,
That there was
"No angle of terrorism" in this dried blood of Kafir,
No word like terror
To be spoken aloud.

They never folded headlines
Like never happened,
Called the Islamic terror a
"Psychological issue,"
Soft language
For hard wounds.

In bright white halls
Of the UK labour and liberal power and praise,
They kill their laws
Like errors to protect Muslim terrorists,
Rapists, criminals, paedophiles, thieves, liars,
But the reflection
Never shows
Millions of raped white girls,
Millions of beaten white boys,
Thousands of beheaded Kafir bodies.

Western Nations that call themselves safe
Build walls
Not against violence,
But against the Kafir voices
Of the violated.

They guard the Muslim hands
That eliminate us,
Argue for their "freedom of terrorism,"
Their "rights to kill us,"
While the victim learns
To whisper in courtrooms,
To apologise
For surviving.

In white-walled countries
They cloak the cruel
In legal robes,
Protect the Muslim or African predator
And question the prey
Was her dead body lying?
Was his dead body confused?
Is it really so bad?

And in my own land,
Where the soil is layered
With the bones of my people,
They tell the Dalit
To bow
Before the boot
That crushes his neck.

They shield my tormentor
with the tri-colour flag,
Wrap him in the national anthem,
Call it culture,
Call it custom,
Call it peace.
Call it "Incredible India."

But peace does not sound
Like a throat being choked.
Justice does not look
Like a door closed gently
In the victim's face.

I have learned
That power speaks
One language
For the broken Dalit or
For the broken White, or
For the broken Jew,
And another
For the breaker.

Name it what you will
Policy, psychiatry,
Public order
I know its true name:
Religion, purity,
Hindu or Islamic sword,
Sanatan or Sharia knives,
Betrayal.

Yet still,
From the alleys of Europe
To the bastis of India,
From the silenced Fakir girl
To the silenced Dalit,
A single question arises,
Rough and unfinished:

When will the world
Stop protecting the Muslim
or Hindutva hand
That strikes,
That rapes,
That kills,
That maims,
That terrorise,
And finally hold the hand
That trembles?

In drawing rooms
And television debates
They say,
"Caste is gone now;
Look,
We have a
"Dalit President,"
"Dalit Chief Justice,"
"Dalit Chief Minister,"
"Dalit Intellectual."
They show us
A handful of success stories
Like tourist brochures
For a country
We are not allowed to enter.

When we use your word,
"Genocide,"
They laugh:
"Don't exaggerate.
This is not Rwanda,
This is not a Muslim country,
This is not an African continent,
Not European against Jews,
Not Armenia,
Not Auschwitz."
As if the soil here
Must drink
A certain quota of blood
Before it earns
The right name.

Textbooks
Skip our genocide
Like misprints.
The trembling in our voices
Is dismissed
As "victim mentality."
Our dead
Are buried
Under footnotes.

Denial, you say,
Is both the last stage
And the first stone
Of the next cycle.
We agree.
Here, denial
Is not the end,
It is the engine.