The Khairlanji Massacre (29 September 2006)

On 29 September 2006, four members of the Bhotmange family — a Mahar Dalit household in the small village of Khairlanji, Bhandara district, Maharashtra — were murdered by a mob of approximately 40 to 70 men from the dominant Kunbi OBC community. The victims were Surekha Bhotmange (approximately 40–45 years old), her daughter Priyanka (17), and her sons Roshan (21) and Sudhir (19, who was visually impaired). The sole survivor, Bhaiyalal Bhotmange, escaped by hiding in nearby fields and later testified: "The entire village was involved, sir. Entire village." He named approximately 60–70 perpetrators, including the village sarpanch and deputy sarpanch.

The immediate trigger was a wage dispute on 13 September 2006 between local man Sakru Binjewar and a Mahar policeman, Siddharth Gajbhiye. Surekha and Priyanka witnessed and testified to the altercation, leading to Binjewar's arrest. On 29 September — the day Binjewar was released on bail — the mob attacked. The underlying context was deeper: the Bhotmanges were a conspicuously upwardly mobile Dalit family who had acquired agricultural land and resisted pressure to cede fields for a road. Surekha had filed repeated police complaints about crop destruction and intimidation. Her assertion of constitutional rights — as an educated, economically independent, low-caste woman — made the family a target. The four victims were stripped, beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed; their bodies were dumped in a canal.

The massacre went largely unreported for weeks. Local authorities initially framed it as a personal dispute and omitted caste. Dalit activists conducted fact-finding missions and forced the story into public view. In November 2006 mass protests erupted across Maharashtra: the first morcha, organized by the Dalit women's front Samrudha Baudha Mahila Sangathan, drew 1,000 people in Bhandara; on 8 November, approximately 50 women stormed the Chief Minister's office in Nagpur; on 14 November a march of roughly 20,000 was met with police baton-charges and gunfire, killing one Dalit protester; on 19 November over 4,000 gathered at Azad Maidan in Mumbai. The CBI filed a chargesheet against 11 individuals in December 2006. Investigative journalist Sabrina Buckwalter of the Times of India provided the first major mainstream coverage, shifting public understanding.

The Bhandara Sessions Court, in its September 2008 verdict, convicted eight accused of murder and sentenced six to death (Shatrughana Dhande, Vishwanath Dhande, Ramu Dhande, Sakru Binjewar, Jagdish Mandlekar, Prabhakar Mandlekar) and two to life imprisonment; three were acquitted. Critically, the court declined to apply the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, characterizing the killings as a "revenge killing" rather than a caste atrocity. On 14 July 2010, the Bombay High Court's Nagpur bench upheld the convictions but commuted all death sentences to 25 years' rigorous imprisonment, reaffirming the refusal to invoke the SC/ST Act. On 24 May 2019 the Supreme Court of India (Justices Arun Mishra, Surya Kant, and B.R. Gavai) upheld the High Court's ruling in full in CBI vs Sakru Mahagu Binjewar & Others, confirming life imprisonment with a mandatory 25-year minimum. The court's continued refusal to apply the Atrocities Act — despite the victims' identities, the sexual violence, and the collective mob targeting — was widely condemned as a structural failure of India's caste-atrocity legal framework.

Bhaiyalal Bhotmange died on 20 January 2017 of a heart attack at age 62, without witnessing the final resolution of the case. The Khairlanji massacre remains one of the most widely cited instances of anti-Dalit atrocity in post-independence India, a defining reference point in discourse on caste violence, Dalit women's bodily autonomy, institutional impunity, and the limits of constitutional protection.