In Hathras village, Dalit families say they live alone, eat alone

HATHRAS: The 19-year-old girl, who was allegedly gang raped and then brutally tortured before being killed by four upper caste men, had always kept to herself. The village she grew up in had contained within it two disparate worlds — one which she lived in, another in which upper caste communities did. “Breaching the barrier would never occur to us,” said a Dalit man.

In the Hathras village where the girl lived and died,

Dalit families

are painfully aware of the lines they must not cross. “We eat by ourselves, talk among ourselves, live by ourselves. Unse koi lena-dena nahin hain (they have nothing to do with us),” a Dalit youth told TOI. The small village is home to 64 families. Only four are Valmikis, living in a tight cluster within a half-km radius of one another. They have marginal landholdings, own cattle and fall back on MGNREGA when money runs out. “We had to sell a buffalo when corona came,” a woman from one of the families said.



On Wednesday, when TOI visited the village, the turmoil over the cremation of the gang-rape victim had given way to an uneasy silence. “We don’t have anything to say about the upper caste families. We don’t know anything,” said 50-year-old Kiran Devi. “They don’t acknowledge us. It’s as if we don’t exist,” the victim’s brother said. An eight-year-old ambled by. Does he go to school? The boy said he does but keeps away from the “other side” of the village. “Their children don’t play with us.”

For years, Dalit children in the village were not sent to school. “We were afraid,” the brother said. “We are socially disconnected even though we live in the same village,” said Shilpa, a 14-year-old, who studies in Class VIII.



“It is a fact that we don’t invite them into our houses," the village priest said. ''But we live with them in the village. Isn’t that enough?” The pradhan’s son,

Ramkumar Singh

, was dismissive: “Khaana-paani toh nahin karenge na unke saath (It’s not like we can eat or drink with them).”




The last engagement with upper castes that the Dalit families remember is one 20 years ago, when the gang-rape victim’s grandfather had lodged a complaint against the family of two of the four men accused of raping her. One of them, Sandeep, lives right across the victim’s family. When asked about them by this correspondent, all the Dalitmen and women TOI was talking to walked away, silently. No one turned back.