On 28 November 2014, Thanjavore district collectorate in Tamil Nadu witnessed a strange incident. A frail woman, in her early 30s, named Murugayee, went to the collector’s office, the symbol of the government and constitution, with her three children to meet the collector to complain about the barbaric torture unleashed by the Tamil Nadu police.
Her effort to tell her tale could not materialise and, in a severe bout of depression, Murugayee attempted suicide by consuming poison adjacent to the collector’s office. Her daughter Thaleichelvi, seeing her consuming a drink with ‘foul smell,’ informed a police constable. Understanding the gravity of the situation, the police rushed her to hospital in an ambulance. She survived because of the timely treatment.
In another village near Thanjavore, called Muthuveeran Kandiyanpetty, you will find another woman in her early 30s called Shelvarani. Once attractive and healthy, Shelvarani now ekes out a miserable existence. Not able to withstand what she described as ‘police torture and humiliation’, she tried to douse herself in kerosene to commit suicide; she now hovers between life and death with 75 percent burns.
These are not isolated instances, nor are these women’s stories atypical. Latha, 32, in another village called Annai Shivagami Nagar, has a similar tale. She tried to kill herself at a police station in Cuddalore district after she witnessed the police brutalising her three-year-old nephew Santhosh by a method locally known as ‘Ratinam’ — hanging a person upside down by tying the body to a hook — a sight she found unbearable.
Murugayee, Shelvarani and Latha belong to the ‘Denotified Tribe’ (DNT) called Korava in Tamil Nadu, a community that is absolutely alienated and marginalised from the great Indian debate of constitutional promises and fundamental rights. Branded by the British as one of the Criminal Tribes, along with 150 other communities throughout India, the Koravas are still treated as ‘criminals by birth’ by all the institutional mechanisms of the state including the police, judiciary, political executive and, significantly, mainstream media and influential ‘high’ caste people.
As demonstrated by historians like Rajnarayan Chandravarkar, Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) was enacted by the British in 1871 to tame and domesticate different groups who did not fit into the new political economy superimposed by the British as manifest in the form of draconian forest and revenue laws.
Thus the British branded several communities that played a major part in the first major rebellion in 1857 and other communities that were thrown out of their traditional habitat. Anyone belonging to these ‘notified’ communities would be treated as ‘hereditary criminals’ as per this Act. As observed by the Renke Commission on DNT, the “amended CTA in 1911 gave more powers to local governments to declare any tribe, section or class of people as a Criminal Tribe; to order registration of members of the Criminal Tribe and taking of their fingerprints; to direct that every such registered member would report himself at fixed intervals to a police officer of the village; report to the police officer or the headman any change of residence; and to restrict the movements of Criminal Tribe members to a particular area”.
Significantly, notified communities were denied normal rights under the common law and all these punitive measures were employed for ‘preventive action’ and not for any offences committed. As underlined by Renke, “notification of the community as a Criminal Tribe was the ‘reason to believe’ that the community was addicted to crime”. By stereotyping and targeting people invoking CTA, the administration created an impression that governance exists.
Even though CTA was repealed in 1952, in keeping with the spirit of the national movement, and notified tribes were ‘denotified’, police across the states, in a direct continuum of colonial mindset, are using the provisions in the Habitual Offenders Act which replaced CTA to fill the crime statistics. The modus operandi is to frame people belonging to DNT in all unresolved criminal cases (ranging from murder to petty pickpocketing) and extract forced confessions by using third degree torture.
This is the larger historical context where Murugayee, Shelvarani and Latha are forced to use the ultimate ‘weapon of the weak’ in independent India like the peasants drowned in distress — suicide. They are not aware of the latest mantra of the Indian establishment: Make in India. But they are very familiar with the state violence of ‘Making Criminals in India’ by the guardians of Indian constitution. Like big business groups who will participate in the Make in India campaign, Koravas also receive ‘incentives’. While the former are gifted prime agricultural lands, the latter are gifted with custodial rape, torture, death, humiliation and ultimately suicide.
INNLIVE visited important catchment areas of this ‘Making Criminals’ campaign in Tamil Nadu — Thanjavore, Trichi, Villupuram, Madhurai, Chennai and bordering areas of Pondicherry — after learning about an ongoing enquiry by the National Scheduled Caste Commission into the police atrocities unleashed on people belonging to the Korava community (activists point out that sociologically, this community should be in the Scheduled Tribe list. But in Tamil Nadu majority of them are included in the Scheduled Caste category). The Commission appointed a three- member committee to study the atrocities after receiving a formal complaint from Tamil Nadu Koravan Makkal Sangham.
“Police are the only outsiders who come to our hamlet,”said Murukeshan, a middle-aged Korava man living in Manojpetti, a ‘dangerous’ area according to the police near Thanjavore town. “Denotified people in Manojpetti play an important role in the career of the police officers in Tamil Nadu. Police from different parts of the state come here whenever they are struggling to find real culprits in sensational crimes, even petty crimes. Police are happy at all childbirths that are happening here. For them, each Korava child is a potential trophy in the form of promotions and rewards”.
Pointing to a house in the hamlet, he says, “Four or five years ago, the police came and occupied this house forcefully in the name of capturing criminals. They made it into a mini-police camp. They kept our women there. They entered the pigsty and killed the pigs and poultry. They made our women to cook food for them, and wantonly assaulted them.”
“The police in Thanjavore is notorious for celebrating Ayudha Pooja festival in a bizarre manner. And without Manojpetti this celebration will not happen,” says Captain Dorai, general secretary of the Korava Sangham. During Ayudha Pooja, the ostensibly godfearing police is keen to avoid empty lockups. They fear that empty lockups will be inauspicious and hence they frame innocent people in this hamlet in fake cases to fill lockups.
“They also forcefully collect money and do special forms of torture to ensure a prosperous policing year. Properties owned by our people are also systematically looted by the police during this festival,” Dorai adds. It is said that several other police stations in adjacent districts also practise the tradition of filing cases in the name of Koravas after purification rituals during Ayudha Pooja.
“The way in which the state brings innocent Koravas into the vicious cycle of crime is a mockery at all accepted process of legal procedures and fundamental rights. Police speaks in a language not known to law. Tamil Nadu police is entrenched in a culture of impunity. Right from top to bottom, police officials treat denotified tribes as potential criminals. Very significantly many of them also know that they are convenient scapegoats,” says B S Ajeetha, high court lawyer and legal expert in the special committee constituted by National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC).
“A senior IPS officer who was IG of the Human Rights and Social Justice wing told us, ‘Whatever you say, Korava people are prone to crime.They are attracted to theft and massive robbery. It’s in their blood’. He even went to describe the ‘methods’ of their robbery. Some tales paint them to be in love with blood. Some other tales were about how they defecate in households after committing robbery. I asked him, ‘What’s your source? What statistics you have?’ He shamelessly said, ‘Oral history’,” she adds.
These ‘legends’ are transferred to successive generations of police officers during their training with religious fervour. A recently recruited sub-inspector told INNLIVE on condition of anonymity, “We are taught about the hereditary criminal traits of Koravas in our training. We were particularly told that Korava robbery gangs in Ramji Nagar in Trichi are notorious in their operations”.
Mainstream media in Tamil Nadu also parrots the police story about Ramji Nagar. There are also videos available online detailing ‘Korava gangs’ in Trichi. However, this is strongly contested by Korava Sangham activists. “If you check the revenue records, you will understand that our people are not much present in this locality. This is a myth constructed by the police and spread by media,” says Captain Dorai.
INNLIVE visited Ramji Nagar to verify the facts. Using the guise of a researcher from Delhi working on caste relations in Tamil Nadu, INNLIVE interacted with villagers. Most of the villagers identified them with a dominant caste in the state.
“There are some organised criminal gangs in this area. They are from several states and religious caste backgrounds. But whenever they are caught redhanded by the police, they say that they belong to Korava caste. In fact most of these gangs have links with corrupt elements within the police,” a villager revealed.
“From my experience as a lawyer and judge, I’m convinced about the link between police and organised gangs in several parts of the state. Gangs share the loot with police who, in turn, protects the gangs. It’s a business. And politically quiet community like Koravas can be easily made scapegoats,” said Justice Chandru, former Madras high court judge.
Interestingly, till recently police used to write the caste name Korava as a prefix to the original names of the accused in the FIRs where people from this community were accused. “Why police is not writing Brahmin Jayalalitha in the FIR where she was accused of looting public money?” says I. Pandyan, human rights lawyer involved in documenting police atrocities.
“When one Korava woman named Manimeghala was raped by a police head constable during the last regime of Jayalalitha, the opposition raised the issue in the Assembly. In her response, the chief minister referred her husband as a habitual offender and his brother as a ‘Korava’ Anandhan”.
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