Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s ‘Mahadalit’ politics — extending sops to ‘most backward’ SCs to split the RJD-LJP votebank and hijack part of it for the JD(U) — has come to a bloody denouement, believe victims of Thursday night’s massacre on the Kosi-Kamla diara.

Sixteen people, mostly under the age of 30, were gunned down on the diara, allegedly by Musahars of Amausi village close by. Fourteen of the dead were Kurmis, Nitish Kumar’s caste; two were Koeris. Both Kurmis and Koeris are OBCs; Musahars are Mahadalits.

The police have detained 10 people from Amausi. Late Saturday night, Khagaria SP Indranand Mishra and Sub-divisional Police Officer Ajay Kumar Pandey were suspended. The CM told representatives from Icharua — the victims’ village — that a police post would be set up on the Kosi-Kamla diara to ensure villagers can travel safely to their lands.

But in Icharua, located some distance from the diara, the massacre is seen as a fallout of the CM’s “excessive pampering of the Musahars”, who are seen as misinterpreting, and misusing, their recent empowerment. Kurmi and Koeri villagers, who cultivate the fertile diara land and raise livestock, allege that people in Amausi and adjoining Mushahar villages have been “living on Mahadalit sops and buying arms with Indira Awas Yojana money”.

The Kurmi-Koeris of Icharua — a village of some 5,000 people — cultivate over 500 bighas of personal and bataidari land on the diara. Individual ownerships vary from 1 to 40 bighas. About 60 per cent of the bataidari land, tilled by Icharua villagers, belongs to non-resident owners from Samastipur. The diara produces wheat, maize, sunflower, mustard, lentils and a variety of vegetable crops in the rabi season and in the late summer. Many farmers keep cattle, and sell milk.

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