In a shocking incident, parts of both the hands of a young daily-wager from a backward caste in Bihar were chopped off by upper-caste people forcing him to work for a contractor in return for only Rs 300 he owed them.
Ramsagar Chandravan-shi, a lanky 20-year-old who married a few months ago, looked hopeless and still stunned as he showed his thickly bandaged hands to journalists and Opposition politicians visiting him at the Patna Medical College and Hospital on Friday. While his right hand was almost completely chopped off by his oppressors, three fingers in his left hand could be seen.
“They began chopping off my hands with an axe when I refused to work for their contractors and told them I would soon pay back the Rs 300 I owed them. I fell unconscious in pain. I do not remember how much of my hands fell off,” said Chandravanshi, recalling his fatal torment in the southern Arwal district some 11 days ago. “Sushil Singh and his men showed me no mercy,” he added.
While the police in chief minister Nitish Kumar’s “rapidly progressing” Bihar, first refused to register Chandravanshi’s FIR and then dismissed his injuries as results of a train accident, doctors at the PMCH left the youth to lie on the hospital floor for eight days, scarcely attended to. He was given a bed only after the local media’s attention focused on his plight.
Although Arwal SP Vimal Kumar had denied that Chandravanshi’s hands were chopped off by some people and that such reports were found to be “concocted” in a preliminary investigation, six people were named accused on Friday following another probe ordered by DIG (Magadh) Nayyar Hasnain Khan.