Under the Sentence of Caste: Twin Peak Dalit Massacres in the Siwalik

Abstract

The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) launched the ‘People’s War’ from 1996 to 2006. The 10-year long insurgency in Nepal claimed over 13, 000 lives, and left over 1, 300 missing. As the Maoists professed themselves as a vanguard of a rebellion against the structural inequalities, they lured the members of the Dalit community into their ideology, and drafted many of them in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). State security forces, on the other hand, in a rapid escalation, targeted Dalit as Maoists or their allies. The shift in combat strategy of the Maoists in 2001, and the counter-insurgency tactics resulted in an increase of human rights violations against Dalit in the western hinterlands. By a qualitative interviewing of 17 Dalit families, of the two adjoining villages of west Nepal, of which 20 men were killed in two separate incidents by then Royal Nepal Army (RNA) in 2002, this article expounds the broad structural issues, the liberation and security discourses, and the local geography-time susceptibility of the families as the targets of state power enmeshed in the massacres as narrated by the family members, the contexts and grounds that culminated in the two events, and the social aftermath.