Tehelka
SOWMYA KERBART SIVAKUMAR
Jaipur

As Mali was attacked, his wife Gyarsi Devi ran to the main village half a kilometre away — at that distance, no one could hear their screams for help. She gathered a crowd; the murderers fled as they returned. “Sariya was so burnt, we couldn’t even hold him,” says Sawarmal Meena, a Dhularaoji resident. “The skin on his arms, legs and chest had completely peeled off but he was still conscious. We immediately recorded his statement on a mobile phone, fearing that he didn’t have much longer to live.” The villagers called the Jamua Ramgarh thana at once, but were told no one could come as the SHO had gone to Jaipur. “They kept telling us the thanedar is not here — doesn’t a police station have more than one officer on duty?” asks Meena. “Instead of coming here, they wanted us to bring Sariya to the thana— with his condition, how were we to do that?” It took the police three or four hours to finally arrive. Mali was then taken to the Sawai Man Singh hospital in Jaipur, about two-and-a-half hours away. His statement was recorded again, this time by the police before a magistrate, and an FIR was made out. Sariya Mali died of 90 percent burns in the wee hours of August 21. Sariya Mali died because he did not agree to sign on a stamp paper which said that he had sold his one bigha, eight biswa plot of land (less than an acre) to his murderers: Rammohan Sharma and his sidekicks, Hiralal, Kalu and Pappu Gurjar, Prakash Jogi and Siyaram Prajapat. These men are local property dealers. Villagers have it that they had recently come into large amounts of money (roughly Rs 40 lakh), having sold their lands. They were employing every Bollywood stereotype to flaunt their new wealth — car, mobile phones, lots of booze, drugs and, of course, terror. The group had entered into a ‘deal’ with Mali a few days ago, offering to buy his land for Rs 5 lakh. They paid him an advance of Rs 50,000, and were insisting that he transfer the land to their name. “Sariya did not agree. He wanted the full amount before the transfer, while they said they would pay only afterwards,” Meena says. On the day of his murder, the gang had come determined to make him sign away his land, even if they had to kill him for it. Mali was not their only target. “They destroyed my entire standing crop,” says Umrao Rebari, another farmer in the village. “They have been eyeing my one-and-a-half bigha plot and pressuring me to sell it to them.” Another small-scale farmer Jagdish Meena has only to point to the blue-black slashes across his son’s neck to testify to Rammohan’s reign of terror. The gang is even said to have encroached on the village cremation ground.

When Mali’s body was brought back to Dhularaoji on the 21st, the entire village was consumed with grief and anger. Not a single chulha was lit and all of Dhularaoji stood guard around the body, placed on a chabutra in the main square. This is how we found them when we arrived on the 22nd — not even the incessant rains had stirred them. “We have three demands. First, that the culprits be arrested within 24 hours. Second, that Sariya’s widow, who has no one to support her, be given adequate compensation. Third, that the thanedar be suspended. We will not cremate Sariya till our demands are met,” Sawarmal Meena told us. Prompt police action manifests itself in dif-ferent ways. Around noon on August 22, the police resorted to a lathi-charge and teargassed the villagers of Dhularaoji. Their “provocation”: the residents had attacked the police vehicle that had brought food for the force deployed. Scores of people were wounded. Having driven the people away, the police then took possession of Mali’s body and set off for the cremation ground. Then they tried forcing his family to cremate him, but Gyarsi Devi stood her ground and the family refused. The police were left with the body, which they took to the hospital in nearby Chandwaji late that night.

Only two of the accused have been arrested so far — the villagers themselves caught Siyaram Prajapat after the murder, and Prakash Jogi was apprehended a week later. When asked why the murderers were still at large despite the seriousness of the case, SP Mehtab Singh’s retort was: “A murder is a murder — you cannot classify it by seriousness.” The most shockingly callous response, however, came from the Jaipur Collector, Akhil Arora. “Many murders happen everyday. We cannot be giving compensations for each of them. If we start announcing such measures, it will become an incentive for people to kill each other in their own homes.” Mali’s body was finally cremated on August 23 with the villagers’ consent. After ediapersons and prominent activists visited Dhularaoji, Mali’s family was allotted four bighas of land, a sum of Rs 10,000 from the Collector’s office, a house under the Indira Awas Yojana and free schooling for the couple’s adopted child. But most of Mali’s principal assailants are still at large.

Land is one of the oldest motives for murder, but Sariya Mali is more than just another victim of the greed that can kill for a square inch. He has come to symbolise a slowly emerging battle against the ugly side of urbanisation, where small farmers will increasingly struggle against powerful land mafias to retain their land, their right to space and life.

Sep 15, 2007