The blood has dried on the steps of Ambikapathi’s single-room house in Nanguneri, a drought-ridden and crime-prone town in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu. This is the spot where, on August 9, her children were brutally attacked by her son’s classmates. The asbestos roof and small porch are clean, but the reddish-brown streaks serve as a reminder of the caste violence that erupt periodically in southern Tamil Nadu.
Ambikapathi, an Anganwadi worker, fears for the lives of her children — her son is 17 and her daughter 14 — but is relieved at the moment that they have survived the assault by the three boys, all Thevars, a dominant, intermediate Other Backward Classes (OBC) community. “My son used to keep getting harassed just because we are Dalits, at the government-aided higher secondary school in Valliyoor [about 12 kilometres away]. Those boys would keep asserting their caste superiority. They would force him to do petty tasks for them, such as buying snacks, cigarettes, and tickets to travel by private buses. When he resisted, he was beaten up,” she says.
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It was only when her son, frightened and tired of the abuse of more than two months, stopped going to school that Ambikapathi heard about the harassment, she says. She decided to submit a written complaint to the school administration. She believes that it was this act that led to the horrific incident of August 9.
A sickle, and screams
Ambikapathi wrote the complaint on the morning of that fateful day when the three OBC boys were absent from school. “That evening, they threatened him,” she says. “Frustrated, my son decided to run away to Chennai to find a job. He managed only to reach Nanguneri station. A relative who works there spotted him and sent him back home.”
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The headmistress of the school in Valliyoor, Grace Celin, says that action would have been taken against the students if the victim had brought the abuse to her notice earlier. “We closely monitor our students to avert caste-based issues on our school premises,” she says.
At around 10 p.m. on the day that Ambikapathi wrote the complaint, the three OBC boys, armed with a sickle, barged into her house on Nanguneri’s Peruntheru (big street), a Scheduled Caste (SC) locality. Ambikapathi was not at home. The boys attacked her son and daughter repeatedly. The siblings sustained multiple injuries on their hands, shoulders, and thighs. Hearing their screams, the neighbours ran in to help and saw the two children lying in a pool of blood.
The assailants fled seeing the neighbours. They escaped with the help of their friends who had been waiting for them on bikes, a few metres away. The neighbours first took the boy and his sister to the Nanguneri Government Hospital for first aid. Then they rushed the siblings to the Tirunelveli Medical College Hospital.
“The smell of the blood is gone, but we can’t stop hearing the screams of the boy and girl,” says one neighbour, shuddering.
The attack triggered panic and caused outrage in Peruntheru, which has about 150 families. The relatives of the victims staged a road roko on the stretch from the Tirunelveli–Kanniyakumari National Highway towards Nanguneri demanding the arrest of the three boys. On seeing the scene of crime and the bloodstains, the victim’s grandfather Krishnan, 55, too joined the protesters. The family faced another blow when Krishnan collapsed during the protest. He was rushed to the Nanguneri Government Hospital on a bike. He was declared dead on arrival.
The siblings have undergone surgery and are now recuperating at the Tirunelveli Medical College Hospital’s Super-Speciality Block.
“When the Annanmaar (brothers) stormed into our house that night, I thought they would verbally abuse us and leave,” recalls Ambikapathi’s daughter. “But one of them attacked my brother with a sickle. He gave the weapon to his friend to attack my brother again. When I tried to save my brother, I also suffered injuries. The third boy also assaulted us with the sickle.” She is traumatised by the attack and is still in pain.
Besides arresting the three teenagers who were directly involved in the attack, the police have also detained three of their associates, all juveniles, who are from the same community, for helping them escape. Vallikannu, 20, another associate who helped the assailants flee Nanguneri, has also been arrested by the police team, led by deputy superintendent of police Raju. The police have registered cases under six sections of the Indian Penal Code: Sections 294 (b) — sings, recites or utters obscene songs in public; 307 — attempt to murder; 324 — causing hurt by dangerous weapons; 352 — assault; 452 — house trespass; and 506 (2) — criminal intimidation. They have also registered cases under four sections of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (ST) (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.
Caste dynamics
While the dominant caste group has land and farms in Nanguneri and a few nearby villages, the SC families are largely landless and powerless and live on the fringes.
The Dalits say clashes between the two communities take place frequently. “Since we are farmhands and manual labourers, we take loans from the Thevar moneylenders even though they charge an exorbitant interest. When we cannot repay the loan with the interest, they take our properties. They stock paddy straw on our vacant lands when we don’t pay the loans on time. Then, they register the land, properly but forcibly, and it becomes theirs,” says a farmer.
Another farmer who has a small holding near Nanguneri says he had left his land barren for a couple of years when the monsoon failed. “But a moneylender ploughed my land for raising fodder. When I objected to it, he said that he had cultivated cattle fodder in the barren land and would return the land after harvesting the crop. That never happened. He later forced me to sell the land to him at a price fixed by him. Since he threatened me saying he would target my son, I had to,” he says.
S. Nagarajan from Valliyoor says unemployed SCs don’t buy autorickshaws with subsidised loans from the government as people of the intermediate caste avoid such vehicles.
Such persecution has also spilled into school. “Boys from the intermediate caste would write their caste names on the walls of the buildings and toilets and engrave their names on desks,” says a former teacher at a school in Nanguneri.
Such incidents impacted the student count at the Sankar Reddiyar Government High School in Nanguneri. The number of students has gone down to a few hundred from 1,500 a few years ago, says the teacher. Parents of all communities, including SCs and OBCs, took their children out from the school. Some of the students now attend school in places such as Valliyoor, Moolaikkaraipatti, Kalakkadu, and Palayamkottai.
Duraipandi, a resident of Peruntheru, says, “We cannot even go to the Nanguneri police station to file a complaint about caste atrocities as we have to cross four streets in which the dominant community people live in large numbers.”
Advocate A. Maria James, founder of a Nanguneri-based NGO called Rural Uplift Centre, is the head of a fact-finding team that visited Nanguneri after the attack. He says properties including land, buildings, and shops belonging to the Nanguneri Vaanamaamalai temple are given on lease only to the dominant caste people, who are already rich thanks to their farming operations, realty, and money lending businesses. “The cultural, caste, and financial dominance of these people makes them stronger, while the other side is rendered weaker. The weaker section cannot even sell their property at their own will or price as the dominant caste fixes the rates,” he says.
The festivals of the Vaanamaamalai temple are used as occasions to assert caste ‘supremacy’ as the dominant caste posits itself as the “ruling class,” he says. “This impacts children and young men, who then orchestrate attacks like this.”
The OBCs do not believe that the latest incident in Nanguneri was a result of caste. V. Maharajan, the founder of Netaji Subhash Senai, a caste outfit, and who is popular in the community, is categorical in denying conflict. “I do not support the attack on the SC teenagers. The attackers should face the legal consequences. We want harmony among all the castes,” he says. “But there was no ragging of the Dalit boy. After minor altercations broke out between the boys of the two communities, the victim, who mobilised a group of SC teenagers from Valliyoor, assaulted the three boys from our community in the first week of August and did not go to school fearing retaliation. Moreover, his mother gave a false complaint against the three boys from our community. When the parents of the three boys were informed by the teachers about the complaint, they beat the boys up. No one supported the boys. The attack happened subsequently, which cannot be justified.”
Maharajan insists that there has been no friction or clash between the two communities in Nanguneri. He says two SC boys as well as OBC boys from six hamlets around Nanguneri all played in the Vaanamaamalai Perumal Nanguneri kabaddi team. Citing another incident of “harmony”, he says Dalit boys joined him in an agitation that he had organised against ‘excess toll collection’ at the Nanguneri toll plaza.
“There was no SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act case pending in the Nanguneri police station before this. Only SC political outfits and the State government have been claiming that this is a caste clash for their own political gain. When seven boys from our community were beaten up recently by the people from the other community and one was even murdered at the Pallakkaal Pothukkudi Government Higher Secondary School near Cheranmahadevi, no one supported us,” he says.
The colours of caste groups
Members of the fact-finding committee elaborate on the other ways in which caste pride and hegemony are ingrained in the region. They say posters and banners asserting caste identity are pasted by leaders of dominant caste groups, and caste flags are hoisted during celebrations. Posters in red and yellow are used by the dominant OBCs during temple festivals, weddings, and ear-piercing ceremonies. Young men wear dhotis with red and yellow borders and some drape shawls in these colours around their neck.
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“The message taught to the younger generation of this caste by the elders of their families as well as the caste outfits makes them firmly believe that they are the supreme force in the place where they live. They see these posters, banners, flags, and photos showcasing their caste pride and feel that they have some superpower. When such power is questioned, they don’t hesitate to attack the ‘opponents’, who are mostly SC,” says Samuel Asir Raj, a professor of sociology at Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, who was part of a fact-finding committee of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, a human rights body that visited the area after the incident.
Raj also cites the recent murder of two people from an intermediate community by young men of a dominant community near Tirunelveli to illustrate his point. “The message is strong and clear: ‘whoever challenges our supremacy will be removed,’” he says.
Dalits use red and green as markers of their identity. While threads in all these colours, which were worn earlier in schools, have been banned in educational institutions, they can still be seen elsewhere — on electric poles, drinking water pipes, highway signboards, bus stops, primary health centres and overhead tanks.
When three murders with caste overtones took place in a hamlet in the southern part of neighbouring Thoothukudi district in June 2022, Superintendent of Police L. Balaji Saravanan held talks with the residents of Thalaivanvadali village in the district to remove the red and yellow caste flag fluttering atop the flag mast installed at the centre of the hamlet. Ever since he assumed this post, Saravanan has been organising ‘In Search of Change’ awareness programmes in several villages through police stations.
“When we started the drive against these ‘caste colours’ in trouble-prone villages a week ago, the villagers removed banners in these colours from 2,322 spots until August 23,” he says.
While laudable efforts are being made to stop assertion of caste identity, erasing the imprint that such practices have made on young minds will take much longer. So will the trauma of the victims. A surgeon of the Tirunelveli Medical College Hospital says that the hands of the two victims in Nanguneri will need constant physiotherapy. “If they cannot use their hands properly despite surgical procedures and physiotherapy, the government should help them in an appropriate manner,” he says. “As of now, the government has done only mandatory things mentioned in the law. Nothing beyond that.”
