Porbandar: A Dalit man was lynched in Gujarat’s Sodhana village on Friday, leading to tension in the area and police deployment.
According to a report in The Indian Express, the man was allegedly beaten to death by 46 members of the upper caste Mer community.
Rama Singrahiya, 42, was allegedly beaten to death using clubs and axes when he was sowing castor seeds on a plot in the village. He died in PDU General Hospital in Rajkot a day later.
Three people — Parbat Karavadra, Lakhu Mer and Nilesh Babar — were Friday arrested in connection with the case. The mob was allegedly led by village sarpanch Harbham Karavadra, who is on the run.
The incident led to a tense situation which saw Mer community members sit along the Porbandar-Jamnagar road, which runs through the village, as a group of Dalit men congregated around a paan shop.
Mer community members claimed the plot where Rama was farming is gauchar (pastoral) land, meant for cattle grazing. Two men hired by Rama for sowing seeds were also beaten up.
Rama’s family sat on a dharna near the office of the SP in Porbandar, demanding that he be buried on the land he was cultivating for the last 15 years.
”They cut him into pieces, nobody came to his rescue because they fear the sarpanch. We want him to be buried there,” Rama’s elder sister Veji Pandavadra said.
But a farmer from the Mer community said that Rama should be buried in the place reserved for Dalits. He claimed that the family would want to build the temple and ‘encroach’ upon the land soon.
The village has a population of 8,000. This includes 300 Dalit families. Porbandar district collector Dinesh Patel said Rama had submitted an application to regularise the 19 bigha of land he had been cultivating. He claimed that the village panchayat could remove ‘encroachment’ on the gauhar land by law.
However, Rama’s friend Suman Chavda claimed 96 people from the upper caste have also encroached gauchar land.
