A High Court in India has handed down a death sentence to three men for their involvement in a brutal massacre of 24 people from the Dalit community.
The trio were sentenced for being part of a gang of bandits, who shot victims, including women and children, in Dehuli village, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, leading to their death.
13 of the 17 men accused in the case have died in the 44 years since the crime was committed, while one has fled the village a long time ago to avoid prosecution.
During their proceedings yesterday, the men, who insisted they were innocent of the charges leveled against them, pleaded not guilty to the crime.
However, the court held that the killing fell into the “rarest of the rare,” which justifies capital punishment in the country, thereby ruling they be executed.
The crime took place on November 18, 1981, when 17 men, most of them from the upper caste, wearing police uniforms stormed a community in Dalit, which sits at the bottom of India’s rigid caste hierarchy, and started shooting at villagers.
According to the police complaint registered at the time, the violence followed the murder of a Dalit member of the robbers’ gang by his upper-caste colleagues.
The gang members then attacked the village because they suspected that some Dalit villagers were providing information to the police in the murder case.
The crime led to an exodus of Dalits from Dehuli, and the local administration sent police personnel to the village, where they stayed for months in a bid to reassure people.
It also triggered a political uproar, and then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited Dehuli to meet the victims.
In 1984, the case was transferred from a district court to the Allahabad Sessions Court on the orders of the state’s high court. The trial continued there on and off until 2024, when the case was shifted to the special court in Mainpuri, which found the men guilty.
