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The State, Prejudice and the Marginalised
- The adivasis of Vachati village in Tamil Nadu secure justice for state violence conducted two decades ago.
- The judgment by the principal judge in Dharmapuri on the Vachati incidents of 20 June 1992 finally punishes the law enforcement agencies for at least one event of what has become a horrific pattern in parts of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka since the 1990s – the brutal persecution of adivasis, particularly the “denotified tribes”, dalits and other marginalised groups.
- The judgment by the principal judge in Dharmapuri on the Vachati incidents of 20 June 1992 finally punishes the law enforcement agencies
- In an unprecedented judgment, 215 officials from the police, revenue and forest departments of the Government of Tamil Nadu were pronounced guilty of various crimes, with 17 of them guilty of rape.
- but 54 of them have since died.
- The Malayali adivasis of Vachati had been subjected to a “crackdown” for three days by government officials who suspected them of illegally hoarding sandalwood taken from the forests nearby.
- If not for the steps taken by the adivasi and women’s mass organisations of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to approach the courts and by the CBI to meticulously investigate the claims of the adivasis, justice would never have been delivered
- The justice Sadashiva panel of the National Human Rights Commission brought to light incidents of human rights violations that had been perpetrated in the mid-1990s by the joint task force that had been constituted by the two states to capture Veerappan.
- Verdicts such as that by the sessions court in Dharmapuri on the 1992 atrocities in Vachati should caution the state government in Tamil Nadu against allowing the law enforcement bodies to act in line with caste and other prejudice against the marginalised.
