The blue lights beckoned Somesh Kumar, 17, on his way back home after his Class 10 Mathematics paper. He followed the unmetalled road into Silai Baragaon village in Uttar Pradesh’s Rampur district. It was dusk and the sky in parts matched the deep blue of the poster erected at the centre of the park he and his community had collectively cleaned and christened Ambedkar Park, after Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the head of the drafting committee of India’s Constitution, who was a Dalit, and seen by the community as an emancipator. It had been inaugurated just a few weeks ago in the presence of village elders and the gram pradhan, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Ranjeet Kaur. Somesh’s house was just behind the safe space created by the village’s Jatav neighbourhood, where children played and women gathered.
But something was different. In addition to the blue and red of Ambedkar’s suit on the park’s board, there were blue and red lights bouncing off the walls around the park. Then, the yellow of a bulldozer. Soon, police uniforms. By the end of the evening, Somesh was dead, with a bullet through his head; two other boys had bullet injuries in their legs, and yellow police tape had cut the park off from the community that used it.
