On 26 May 2024, a 20-year-old arts student Anjana Ahirwar came out of the mortuary of the Bundelkhand Medical College into the punishing afternoon heat and quietly sat inside an ambulance.

She was taking her uncle’s body home to Barodia Naunagir village, in the eastern Madhya Pradesh district of Sagar, 150 km northeast of Bhopal, to perform the last rites.

Rajendra’s parents, Ramsevak Ahirwar, 60, and mother Choti Bahu, 52, sat next to the body inside the vehicle when the ambulance left the hospital.

A day earlier, men from a higher caste beat and stuck knives into her 24-year-old uncle, a daily-wage labourer, Rajendra Ahirwar, according to a police first information report (FIR) filed hours after the murderous attack.

Rajendra died of a ‘multiple organ failure’, according to the autopsy report. He was the prime witness in the August 2023 murder of his 18-year-old nephew Nitin Ahirwar, Anjana’s younger brother. Thirteen people were accused in the case, five of them were Muslims and rest were from the Dangi Thakur (other backward caste community).

But Anjana did not survive to see her uncle’s last rites.

“We were mourning the loss of our son when police personnel offered water to drink, which made us sleepy,” Ramsevak told Article14. Within an hour, the Police woke Rajendra’s father near Khurai Bypass road informing him that Anjana ‘fell off’ the ambulance and died. “I woke up when a constable shook me awake.”
This was the third death in the family in less than four years, all related to a January 2019 case which Anjana had filed accusing higher caste landlords of harassing and assaulting her. The family is demanding a CBI probe in all three cases.

“She could not have jumped off the ambulance or killed herself,” Ramsevak told Article 14. “We were played in such a way that no one knows what happened except the police personnel who were accompanying us.”




Read more - https://article-14.com/post/3-murders-over-4-years-in-a-mp-dalit-family-reflects-how-the-state-leads-india-in-crimes-against-dalits-women-66ad994472c73