Surekha Bhotmange

Surekha Bhotmange was a Mahar Dalit woman from the village of Khairlanji in Bhandara district, Maharashtra, who became a martyr of the anti-caste movement following her murder on 29 September 2006 — a crime that came to be known as the Khairlanji massacre. She lived with her husband Bhaiyalal Bhotmange and their four children: daughter Priyanka (17) and sons Roshan and Sudhir, the latter of whom was visually impaired. Within her community she was known for her assertiveness, her education, and her insistence on constitutional rights in a social environment designed to deny them.

Despite the constrained circumstances characteristic of Dalit life in rural Maharashtra, Surekha owned agricultural land, managed her household through independent means, and had built a permanent pucca home for her family — material gains that made her a target of resentment from dominant-caste neighbors. Her troubles with upper-caste villagers were not new: as early as 2002 she had filed a police complaint against a neighboring farmer for casteist trespass, and records document a sickle attack against her by upper-caste women.

The events that culminated in the massacre began in September 2006 when a wage dispute escalated into violence involving a Mahar policeman, Siddharth Gajbhiye. Surekha and her daughter Priyanka intervened to stop the violence and subsequently appeared as witnesses at the police station, helping secure the detention of upper-caste accused Sakru Binjeswar. On the evening of 29 September 2006 — the day Binjeswar and the others were released — a mob of approximately 40 armed men descended on the Bhotmange home. Surekha, Priyanka, and both sons were dragged out, stripped, and paraded naked through the village. Surekha and Priyanka were gang-raped and killed. Both sons were murdered when they attempted to defend them. Only Bhaiyalal, who concealed himself in nearby bushes, survived to witness and later testify.

The massacre received almost no mainstream media coverage in the weeks immediately following — what coverage there was omitted any mention of caste. It was Dalit-led protests across Maharashtra, beginning in November 2006, that forced national attention, compelled the Central Bureau of Investigation to take up the case, and ultimately secured criminal convictions. Scholars across Dalit studies and feminist theory have since identified Surekha Bhotmange's case as paradigmatic of the intersection of caste and gender violence: her "crime," in the eyes of her killers, was her land ownership, her legal agency, and her refusal to perform the subordination demanded of Dalit women. Her name is commemorated annually at Khairlanji and invoked in Dalit feminist discourse as a symbol of both the violence of brahmanical patriarchy and the courage of resistance.