August 31, 1998

With the Dalit Sena imparting weapons training to its women, there's a decline in crimes against them.

By Bharat Desai

The women huddled on the banks of the Sone look harmless enough till one of them casually lifts her hands. A rifle glints in the afternoon sun as she takes careful aim at the target and fires. The past of the region is drenched in blood and the present is inextricably linked with the past. The village is a mere 50 km from Lakshmanpur-Bathe where nearly 60 Dalits were gunned down by a hit squad of the Ranvir Sena, the private army of landlords, last December. Eight months have passed but the carnage refuses to become a distant memory. Rather than become easy prey to rampaging marauders, the women have decided to take the fight to the enemy camp. And learn to retaliate.

The weapons training couldn't be more basic. Each woman is given a rifle, shown how it works and then told to fire at a target placed a few metres away. Few shots find their mark. But the sense of empowerment this brings is tremendous. A mere two bullets shot from the rifle and Indu Kumari, a frail woman in her mid-20s, is a changed person. Oozing confidence, she nonchalantly bangs the rifle's butt on the sandy bank and says, "Yeh samaan itna bhari hoga, yeh pata nahin tha (I didn't know this thing would be this heavy)." The perfunctory training may not be enough to make her a sharpshooter but it is enough to make her conversant with the current jargon. In Bihar's lawless countryside, samaan is the code word for guns.

Indu Kumari is one of the 8,000 women in 500 villages of the state who have been given basic arms training by the women's wing of the Dalit Sena, the army of the Backwards. The sena started the training course four years ago. Though there has been no instance of the women actually using arms, organisers of the programme say there has been a marked drop in the atrocities against women.

Bihar's past is full of haunting instances when Dalit women were brutalised. There is the infamous case of Bhukli Devi who was paraded naked on the charge of stealing four potatoes from a field in Samastipur district in 1996. To guard against the recurrence of such incidents, the sena redoubled its efforts to train women so they could defend themselves. As many as 16 women in Belchi, the village which shot into notoriety in the late '70s following the burning alive of 21 persons, have been given arms training. The recent release of 20 of those convicted and imprisoned for the Belchi massacre have made the Dalits wary of retaliatory attacks. "Now everybody knows our women have been trained. This will act as a deterrent," says a villager. Belchi is not an isolated incident. At Gohin village in Rohtas, women staked claim over 150 acres of disputed land which they alleged had been grabbed by rich landowners. The women emerged winners with the local administration recognising their right to cultivate the land.

Many see the recent developments as a harbinger of change. "The impact of the training is psychological. It builds the self-confidence of the women. The feudal elements, who view Dalit women as objects of desire, are now scared to harass them," says Satyanand Sharma, a former state minister, who now spearheads the sena's operations. Anar Devi, a resident of a village near Phatua, is witness to the transformation: "Earlier, the landlords did not allow us to draw water from their wells. Now, they are scared to stop us from doing so." Women with weapons invariably inspire awe. Two weeks ago, the sleepy town of Dehri-on-Sone was abuzz with excitement when three armed women activists accompanied a visiting sena team from Patna. Because of the clandestine nature of the programme, the weapons' training is held in desolate places. So far, camps have been held in 40 districts. Surprisingly, men are not part of the training plan. This stems from the sena's belief that men tend to misuse the training and the weapons. Poonam Gupta, who recently underwent training at a camp in Giridih district, says, "Women use arms for self-defence. Men would threaten people and commit dacoities."

The arms cult has many votaries. Vishnu Paswan, sena's vice-president, justifies it, saying the state machinery has failed to protect the poor. Activist Saraswati Devi says the arms training has worked wonders. "It's difficult to survive in Bihar without weapons. Unarmed people are always at the mercy of the exploiting class," she says. Many see in the arming of the women an effort to bridge the wide gulf between the exploiter and the exploited. "Mutual respect will come only if the feudal elements among the upper castes realise that the Dalits have weapons," says B.N. Singh, a retired IAS officer and office-bearer of the Dalit Samaj Party (DSP), the sena's political wing. The DSP, formed just before the recent Lok Sabha elections, cornered nearly five lakh votes and was recognised by the Election Commission as a bona fide regional party. Party spokesman Nagendra Prasad Singh is a firm advocate of the training programme. Despite being a former police officer, he feels that members of the force have an inherent bias against the poor. "Where's the question of breaking the law?" he asks. "There exists no law here," he asserts.

Such is the interest in the arms training that many upper-caste women are reported to be keen on it. Sena activists assert that caste is no bar in their programme. But fear of the police has forced them to keep the training under wraps. Initially, the police threatened to clamp down on it. But with crime on the rise, the training plan carries on unchecked. And Dalit women, heady with the taste of power, are unlikely to abandon it in a hurry.

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