"If an untouchable caste intentionally touches a high-caste person, then he or she is to be put to death" (Vishnu Smriti 5.104 and Angiras Samhita 1.39)

O Hindu,

They did not fall like accidents.
They were arranged:
Dalit bodies laid out
In the neat geometry of hate.

Keezhvenmani, Karamchedu,
Tsundur, Bathani Tola,
Laxmanpur Bathe, Khairlanji:
Names that are not taught
As "history,"
Only whispered as warnings,
In our Dalit ghettos.

We grew up
On these maps of massacres,
Of carnages,
Worse than the holocaust,
And worse than the October 7,
Worse than Jewish life.
Villages in our textbooks,
Marked not by rivers or crops,
But by the places
Where our people
Were lined up
And cut down
Like weeds.

They came in broad daylight,
Sometimes at midnight,
Not as strangers
But as neighbours,
As peasants, farmers, landlords,
As public and private servants,
As a police officer, as a doctor, as an engineer,
As a software engineer, as a PhD holder,
As lawmakers, as lawyers,
As judges, as teachers,
As professors, as artists,
As party leaders, as firebrands,
As human rights icons,
As lefties, as liberals,
As democrats, as feminists,
As a non-Brahmin,
As Brahmin,
As a Hindu,
As a Muslim,
With new faces:
Saffron and green headbands
No cloth wrapped over their noses,
Carrying country-made long knives and swords
That gleamed
With inherited rights.

The reason was always
Small enough to fit in a headline:
A girl,
A well,
A path,
A piece of land,
A vote cast freely,
A Dalit boy who refused to bow low.
A Dalit woman
Who said "no" to non-Dalit hands.

The punishment was always enormous:
Entire Dalit hamlets
Set on fire,
Granaries emptied and burned,
Cattle killed,
Children's skulls crushed,
Old men hacked to death
On their own doorsteps,
Pregnant women split open
As if their wombs
Could give birth to resistance.
In the midnight news
This is called:
"Teaching a lesson."
In the morning news:
This is called:
"An inter-caste issue."
In the police report
This is called:
"Long-standing Dalit issue."
In parliament debates:
It is called a "caste problem."

Never "Pogrom,"
Never "Dalit Genocide,"
Never
"Caste war declared
On unarmed Dalits
For daring to be
Less afraid."

Total Dehumanisation,
Is when the killers
Are still called
"Respectable men and women"
By the country.

When the blood-soaked
Chief justice asks,
"What proof
That this was caste?"
As if the choice weapons,
The targets,
And the slogans
Did not spell it out
In fire.

When the state arrives
With relief
In plastic bags
Instead of a justice
With a spine.

In Laxmanpur Bathe,
They crossed the river
Like an Indian army,
Muzzle flashes
Reflecting in the black water.
Fifty-eight Dalits
In one winter night,
Children's bodies
Piled like discarded logs.
The survivors' eyes
Still carry that river
How it did not rise,
Did not wash away
The footprints
Of those who walked home
After the massacre was done.

In Bathani Tola,
They came at noon,
Screaming "Jai Sri Ram"
Killing toddlers,
Beheading women,
Shooting a baby
In his mother's lap.
The court would later say:
"Evidence insufficient."
As if the charred houses,
The bullet-holed walls,
The mass graves,
Were all hallucinations
Shared by an entire caste.

Khairlanji:
Not called a massacre.
At first,
Just "family dispute."
A mother and her daughter,
Paraded naked,
Gang-raped,
Mutilated,
Dumped in a canal
Along with her two sons.
The Hindu village swore
It was about land,
About dispute,
About anything
But their Mahar blood,
Their Dalit tongues
That had learned
To say "this is mine"
Without trembling.

This is how Total
Dehumanisation looks:
When a Dalit body
Is not simply killed,
It is punished,
Tortured,
Dismembered,
Gang-raped,
Burnt alive,
Arranged into a message
For the rest of us.

Hands chopped
To warn against reading an Ambedkar book,
Faces slashed
To warn against sitting in front of them,
Genitals mutilated
To warn against loving their daughter,
Houses burned
To warn against writing a Dalit book,
Gang-raped
To warn against attending a school,
Beheaded
To warn against "Educate, Organise, Agitate,"
Maimed
To warn against "Knolwedge Production."

The Dalit massacre
Does not end
With the last Dalit life.

It continues
In compensating forms
Where a Dalit life,
Is priced like cattle.
In the relief camps
Where we stand in line
For the rice given
By the same state
That let them come for us.
In the school registers
Where children
Of survivors
Carry new addresses
Ambedkar Colony, Ramabai Colony
While the fields
Of their old villages,
Still grow crops,
Still feed the families
Who walked over their dead.

Total Dehumanisation
Is when an entire community
Can be wiped out,
And yet the nation
Does not lower its flag.

No three days' mourning,
No candlelit silence
On Television,
No monuments
In capital cities.

Our massacres
Are made local,
Regional,
Small.
Our dead
Are fenced in
By state boundaries,
By language,
By the expertise
Of forgetting.