Kherlanji Massacre

Coordinates: 21°22′10″N 79°34′16″E / 21.36944°N 79.57111°E / 21.36944; 79.57111 The Kherlanji massacre (or Khairlanji massacre) refers to the 2006 lynching-style murders of a Mahar Dalit family by members of the politically dominant, but backward Kunbi caste. The killings took place in a small village in India named Kherlanji, located in the Bhandara district of the state of Maharashtra. On 29 September 2006, four members of the Bhotmange family belonging to the Dalit underclass were slaughtered in Khairlanji, a small village in Bhandara district of Maharashtra. The women of the family, Surekha and Priyanka, were paraded naked in public, before being murdered. The Indian media did not cover this incident until the Nagpur riots by the Dalits and then uniformly and wrongly ascribed the killings to "upper castes", a claim picked up by Human Rights organisations and the international media, reinforcing the stereotype of "upper castes" versus "lower castes". Later it was discovered that the criminal act was carried out by assailants from the politically powerful Kunbi caste (classified as Other Backward Castes by Government of India) for "opposing" the requisition of their field to have a road built over it. Initial reports suggested that the women were allegedly gang-raped before being murdered. Though CBI investigations revealed that the women were not raped, there are allegations of bribery of doctors who performed the post-mortem, and of corruption.

There were allegations that the local police shielded the alleged perpetrators in the ongoing investigation. A government report on the killings, prepared by the social justice department and YASHADA—the state academy of developmental administration, has implicated top police officers, doctors and even a BJP member of the Legislative Assembly, Madhukar Kukade in an alleged coverup and hindering the investigations. Kukade has denied these charges, saying that he had not even been in Kherlanji in months. The state Home Minister R. R. Patil admitted to initial lapses in police investigation and said that five policemen suspended in killings have been sacked. In December 2006, CBI filed a chargesheet against 11 persons under charges of murder, criminal conspiracy, unlawful assembly with deadly weapons and outraging the modesty of women. CBI also said that it will investigate the role of the 36 people under detention.

The media coverage of the incident was initially weak, but picked up momentum after an investigative feature article by Sabrina Buckwalter in The Times of India provided the first mainstream, in depth coverage of the massacre. The Indian blogosphere responded significantly, with thousands of bloggers expressing outrage at the media for "poor coverage" of the incident. A famous expatriate Indians' blog posts:

"As coverage of India in the mainstream media has moved on from snake-charmers to Bollywood and now to its economic strengths; its own politicians and foreign journalists gloss over the fact that deep in the heartlands there remain serious social problems".

In September 2008, six people were awarded the death sentence for the crime. However, on 14 July 2010, the Nagpur bench of the High Court commuted the death penalty awarded to the six convicted to a 25-year rigorous imprisonment jail sentence.