This Independence Day, there are black flags all over Bhadevra in Pratapgarh.

Anger is boiling over, a fortnight after the first Dalit boy from the village who got into a professional college was killed allegedly by upper-caste men.

Villagers say Chakrasen Gautam was killed because he was a Dalit and because he made it to the Institute of Engineering and Rural Technology in Allahabad.

The police first named a dead man as prime accused, arrested two Dalits after the villagers protested. The two accused, Santosh Mishra and Akash Dubey, are still absconding.

It was a journey of hope and hard work that was cut short. Chakrasen was 22 and he was doing his BA while preparing for his Uttar Pradesh Technical University entrance exam. He worked to pay for his education and was killed when he came home to take money to pay his fees in the engineering college.

“He was one of the most brilliant boys in the village and spoke English as good as any city-bred boy,” says the village pradhan, Shivnath Yadav.

Chakrasen was murdered allegedly by Mishra and Dubey when he went for a morning walk on August 1. Both Dubey and Mishra and the Gautams have been fighting over a PDS shop for ten months. “They could not bear the fact that a Dalit became the ration shop owner instead of them,” says Shivmurti Gautam, 70, Chakrasen’s grandfather. “They often used to forcibly take foodgrains from my shop, would not pay and would sell it in their shop at a higher rate,” he says.

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