That chopper hasn’t gotten used to me yet
Its wound hasn’t gone deep enough as yet

That’s the commoners’ clarion call we hear
Not a mindless mob of elite nincompoops

These two couplets from a singular Marathi ghazal might feel a bit prickly to some, but they can touch an indignant chord among the oppressed. The first of the two couplets is the refrain, while the “clarion call” in the second gives the composition its name: Elgar. The composer who penned it, Suresh Bhat, was born in Maharashtra’s Amravati to a Brahmin family, though he later converted to Buddhism, and has a coveted auditorium in his name. The Kavivarya Suresh Bhat Auditorium in Nagpur, close to the Brahminical ultra-right headquarters, was inaugurated by the president at the time, Ramnath Kovind, in September 2017.

On the last evening of that year, the contentious Elgar Parishad—a public meeting organised for the defence of democracy in India—was convened at the august ruins of the former Peshwa capital, Shaniwar Wada, in the heart of Pune city. The next day, a spate of violence erupted over thirty kilometres away to the east in Koregaon, a well-developed village on the banks of the river Bhima, beyond the urban jurisdiction of Pune’s administrative set up. Bhima Koregaon has long been a hallowed, state-sponsored commemoration site for the most oppressed castes, and carriers of the Phule-Ambedkarite subaltern tradition.

Tracing the genesis of a 200-year-old contended narrative

On 1 January 1818, a small battalion of the East India Company, comprising around 800 men, predominantly from Dalit and Bahujan oppressed sections—the largest chunk being from the Mahar caste—forced the retreat of a 30,000-strong, battle-eager army at this very Koregaon. The army had been directed on to the field by upper-caste Brahmin commanders loyal to a largely reviled Peshwa, Bajirao II. The East India Company was the most dependable ally and generous patroniser of the Peshwas—a moniker for the prime ministers under the Maratha dynasty of Shivaji and Sambhaji Bhosale. As such, a short spell of inconsistency in the otherwise congenial Peshwa-British equation could not, historically speaking, have stood in the way of the ever-expansionist British colonial project. In fact, the temporal disturbance caused by Bajirao II’s manoeuvres could arguably have provided the reactionary momentum for laying the foundations of Bombay Presidency as a consolidated polity under the British Empire.

The Battle of Koregaon smoothly gained a legendary status, especially in India’s post-colonial era. It represented a victory not just in geo-military terms, as a heroically defended village post across a river, but also against grotesque caste, gender and communal injustices increasingly perpetrated, in the post-Shivaji-Sambhaji era, under successive Peshwa regimes. For over four decades at least, successive governments in Maharashtra have annually overlooked security arrangements for the congregations to pay homage at a martyrs’ obelisk, from dawn till late night with clockwork precision, each January 1. In 2018, the seminal 200th anniversary of the Battle of Koregaon would draw a peaceful crowd, as usual, but with the attendees raised to over 500,000.

But the Elgar Parishad became synonymous, in the labyrinthine corridors of our criminal justice system, with the Bhima Koregaon mob violence of 2018. The activists held responsible for the violence, who came to be known as the Bhima Koregaon 16—or the BK16—included both organisers of, and individuals with no relation to, the Parishad. Eminent defenders of human rights became defenders against the charge of a terrorist conspiracy, overnight. The Parishad’s intended objective, as recently released Sudhir Dhawale, one of its key organisers, would maintain, was to imbue the public with the values of valour displayed by a motley assemblage powered by their Dalit ancestors against a gargantuan Peshwa army of Bajirao II.

The decadence of the Peshwa rule is evident in historical records—besides the exclusively Brahmin army commanders, the troops were provided by southern feudal lords, and a mercenary Arab cavalry to create havoc upfront. The stately character of the army was, according to intervening generations of Marathi critics, only a reflection of the regressive social norms. Mahars, the largest segment of the downtrodden, were barred from wielding weapons, by fiat excluded from the army—in contrast to the original Maratha army of the Mawlas, led by Shivaji and Sambhaji, where some could even become officers. Norms of hierarchy, according to an anecdote from the works of Savitribai Phule’s teenage pupil Mukta Salwe—who was from another oppressed caste, the Mangs—were such that if a Mahar or Mang dared walk close to a gymnasium, in Pune, his head would be made a ball to play with; state soldiers would roll it down the slope of a hill with their swords used as bats. Women were chattel, debauchery of the powerful a matter of pride.

Unfortunately, the ideological descendants of Bajirao II among today’s proactive Hindu nationalist brigade still have nostalgic axes to grind. They tend to view his military defeat at Koregaon, rather emotively, in terms of the loss of their ancestral glory, even righteousness, with the colonial character of the late medieval, Anglican victors of the battle of 1818 lending them the political rationale for a Brahminical nationalist rhetoric. The Maratha kings Shivaji and Sambhaji Bhosale had closer genealogical and social affinity with the Shudras, who formed the fourth tier in the caste Hindu social pyramid. The Maratha prime ministers, who rose to become kings just over a century before the 1818 battle, and created a new dynastic rule, replete with a religion-sanctioned apex position in the multi-tiered society at large, were inevitably high-caste Brahmins.

Narratives, therefore, would come in handy as ideological fodder for saffron outfits to first play the victim card and then make it a ruse for aggressive retribution, aimed at further persecuting the already oppressed and marginalised. On the ground, in such a domineering milieu, whether around Koregaon or far beyond Pune, the constitutional abolition of untouchability has had little meaning for the existential reality of both the so-called former untouchables, and the lower-caste Shudras. Neither the anachronistic observance of caste nor the religious doctrine of chaturvarna—the four-tier Hindu social pyramid—has ever figured in any abolition discourse under the purview of the Indian Constitution.

So, even as the so-called former untouchables waged their daily battles for a larger slice of the sky, they tended to find even a hint of Peshwadom deplorable, macabre, even revolting. On the other hand, the unsympathetic and upwardly mobile sections of the upper castes—unlike kavivarya Suresh Bhat—tended to coalesce around the historically regressive fountainheads on the extreme right. The Hindutva right, powered by the dominant ideological regimes of the day, have found it ever more conducive in recent years to expand their nexus with both the political and the feudalistic capitalist classes on the fast-developing fringes of Pune city. The deeper questions of history and vexed issues related to social harmony were thus vulnerable to distortions and falsifications.

Bhat’s poetry was notable, in this milieu, because it reached out with deference to Ambedkar’s contribution to the upliftment of the bottommost strata of India’s subalterns: the Dalits. Now, the “clarion call” of today’s commoners stands accused of leading a spree of anarchic mob violence, in a thinly veiled effort to absolve the “elite nincompoops” who could not abide the growing indignation amongst the oppressed. It would be wise to pay heed to the poet. Who should be held responsible for the elite’s subversive reaction to the clarion call: the have-nots or the haves? Would Lady Justice be blind to the bare facts? Could the blindfolded holder of the weighing scales also stoop so low as to condone an administrative set-up that could have tacitly allied with a mindless mob?

Commission of Inquiry probes Bhima Koregaon violence

These are the questions hanging fire, till this day, as a report by a Commission of Inquiry, constituted by the state government a little over a month after the 2018 Bhima Koregaon violence, is  now awaited. The quasi-judicial body, instituted as a means to pacify protestors who had marched to the Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha holding aloft their blue flags, took about six months to begin its investigation due to the lack of bare minimum facilities. The commission’s terms of reference included, among other aspects: first, identifying the causes for the violence, the related sequence of events, and the responsibility of any groups and individuals; and second, the adequacy or otherwise of the police response to it. Seven years down the line and sixteen extensions later, the commission concluded its hearings in February 2025.

However, there seems to be no major public clamour today, as seen at the time of the commission’s formation, to arrest the alleged conspirators behind those who perpetrated the mob violence: Milind Ekbote and Sambhaji Bhide. The duo, respectively the leaders of the Hindutva groups, Samasta Hindu Aghadi and Shiv Pratishthan Hindustan, have consistently opposed the Bhima Koregaon commemoration. Ekbote and Bhide are known to have always considered the annual gathering a traitorous exercise because they eulogise the Peshwas, who are liable to be vilified—even if by implication—in the annual celebration. In fact, Ekbote even expressed this in a letter, on a Samasta Hindu Aghadi letterhead, to the Pune district collector, on 29 December 2017—on the day of the Vadhu Budruk violence. He wrote, “It has become a trait in this program to defame the Peshwas like Bajirao Peshwe, Narayanrao Peshwe, Madhavrao Peshwe, who have done excellent work for Maharashtra, the rich tradition of the Peshwas is insulted by distorting history.”

Issues from history were indeed at stake at Koregaon Bhima in 2018. That January 1 was marked by a polarisation between an influential section of the Hindu populace, with non-secular political narratives of a distinct saffron standpoint on the one hand, and the neo-Buddhist fold on the other, represented by blue Ambedkarite flags as well as the occasional Panchsheel five-coloured flag, representing the five virtues for a balanced humankind. At the time, the administration deftly managed to save the skin of the Hindutva protagonists, with a chief ministerial clean chit to Bhide, citing the lack of incriminating evidence, and a judicial bail for Ekbote after just one month in custody.

The commission’s hearings into the Koregaon-Bhima mob violence finally began in September 2018. JN Patel, a former chief justice of the Calcutta High Court, presides as its chairman, and Sumit Mullick, the chief secretary of Maharashtra at the time, as its second member. The commission is now expected to unravel the multi-layered conflict, which a section of the police apparatus has ridiculously tried to peg down as an outcome of a Maoist conspiracy.

One may also recall how a brouhaha in the national media over the Elgar Parishad case followed suit, through 2018-2019. In August 2018, Parambir Singh, the Additional Director General (Law and Order) with the Maharashtra Police, had initiated a media trial at a press conference, held on the heels of the second wave of arrests in the case. He read out unsubstantiated portions of an incriminating letter, allegedly recovered from one of the accused, Rona Wilson’s laptop. However, subsequent forensic investigations have revealed that Wilson was a victim of malware that allowed remote access to his laptop and external storage devices, and manipulation at will of evidence. But Singh proceeded to accuse Wilson of plotting with leaders of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) to assassinate the prime minister Narendra Modi, as well as arbitrary involvement in attempts to inexplicably purchase high-grade arms and ammunition for the ongoing guerrilla war in the forests. The letter was an obvious fabrication, fusing outright lies with a sprinkling of recognisable names and traces of distorted facts, planted into his system with advanced cyberespionage tools.

This January, both Sudhir Dhawale and Rona Wilson were finally released on bail by order of the Bombay High Court, after nearly seven years of incarceration, now leaving six of the BK16 still wrongfully held in custody. Do we then have before us any prospect, beyond the cold slits of prison bars, of a warm glimmer of hope as the wheels of justice move, ever so slowly, after an excruciatingly long wait?

Optimism may be in the air this spring. The evidence placed on record before the Commission of Inquiry, which The Polis Project has perused, carries not an iota of evidence to suggest any connection between the mob violence and the Elgar Parishad. In fact, the only allegations behind this fabrication are by police officials with jurisdiction in the urban part of Pune, who did not even conduct any investigation in the rural epicentre of the violence. As many as 13 police officers have recorded their testimonies and submitted affidavits before the commission, among a total of 53 witnesses. Not one of them could point out any link between the alleged cause of the violence, the Elgar Parishad, and the purported effect at Koregaon Bhima and its surrounding areas, which rippled through the district and the state at large.

Witness number 48 before the commission was Shivaji Pawar, the investigating officer who steered and carried out the arrest of 10 of the 16 suspects, in early June and late August, 2018. Pawar also authored the first two chargesheets filed on November 15, 2018 and February 21, 2019, before handing over the investigation to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) the next year. He candidly admitted before the commission that he could not identify even a single eyewitness of the violence that erupted in the vicinity of Koregaon Bhima on 1 January 2018. The admission  meant that none of the victims and eyewitnesses of the violence had any connection with the Elgar Parishad—implying thereby that the violence itself had no connect with the Parishad. He also admitted not having looked up the 36 cases of mob violence registered under various police stations within Pune district, after the Elgar Parishad—until 8 January 2018, the date on which a peculiar case was registered against Sudhir Dhawale and others at Vishrambag Police Station.

At least some of those Pune cases, going by projections from the Vishrambag case, ought to have been about acts pursuant to the alleged conspiratorial provocation at Elgar Parishad. In fact, 33 of the 36 cases brought before the commission constitute charges against the right-wing extremists led by Milind Ekbote, with Sambhaji Bhide also named at times. There are just three cases accusing Dalits for the mob violence, all concerning retaliatory protests that occurred a couple of days after the January 1 episode, not the mob violence that erupted that day itself. None of these three cases could even be imagined as connected, not even in the allegations of the police, with the speeches and performances at the Elgar Parishad on 31 December 2017.

Most of the police officials examined before the commission failed to pinpoint a cause for the mob violence. They had no explanation for why they did not register a single official FIR against the Elgar Parishad content, tone and tenor either.  They also could not explain why an ordinary private complaint by a construction-sector businessman named Tushar Damgude became the basis of the Elgar Parishad case, and the targeting of the 16 human rights defenders.

Damgude’s complaint would only reflect an ultra-right reaction to the radical Ambedkarite views expressed at the Parishad. It was initially registered under relatively minor sections of the Indian Penal Code, concerning promoting enmity between groups and hurting religious sentiments. Inexplicably, it then went on to become the foundation for charges of criminal conspiracy and dreaded offences under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. In the chargesheet filed in November that year, the police even invoked the offences of sedition and waging war against the state. So, with so many grave offences added, it would be all the more incumbent on the officers to show the correlation between the complaint, the mob violence at Koregaon Bhima, and the Elgar Parishad event, in the form of a cogent nexus. But the officers who testified before the commission failed to do so at every step of the way.

Instead, Pawar recorded his view that if he would proceed to identify any of the eyewitnesses, it would prove fatal to the Elgar Parishad prosecution, currently handled by the NIA. The statement reflected an insidious streak in what should have been an explicit acknowledgement of the absence of any connection between Elgar Parishad and the well-recorded mob violence at Koregaon Bhima.

In fact, the evidence before the commission demonstrates that the Hindutva mob violence at Koregaon Bhima is documented and substantiated not only by eyewitness and victim accounts, but also with video clips from disparate private phones and official CCTV cameras. On the other hand, the conspiracy alleged against the BK16 rests not even on mere conjectural aspersions, as one might have expected, but on empty speculations, at best, and fabricated, planted evidence, at worst—nothing in the nature of an offence actually committed. In terms of criminal law, such a situation could very well merit a reverse investigation and prosecution.

With that kind of evidence on record, the state government, which instituted the case, has patently lost the ground to build any case that could link the alleged Elgar Parishad conspiracy with any specific act of violence pursuant to it.

The real cause behind the Koregaon Bhima violence

Among the police officials who testified, one stood out as an exception, and identified, even if inadvertently, the precise circumstantial cause of the mob violence in his testimony. Sanjay Pakhale, who was an additional superintendent at the time, had actually supervised the law-and-order arrangements in the area under Pune Rural jurisdiction, where the mob violence broke out and spread on 1 January 2018. “The social fabric (harmony) was disturbed by the removal of the flex board followed by the Atrocities Act case on December 29,” Pakhale said.

Pakhale was referring to an incident in Vadhu Budruk village that occurred three days before the Koregaon Bhima violence broke out. On reconstructing the sequence of events, it emerged that violence first broke out as an ultra-right reaction to a signboard located within the neo-Buddhists’ part of the village, which pointed to a memorial of Govind Gopal Mahar. The erstwhile Mahars, who have increasingly preferred to call themselves neo-Buddhists rather than Hindus, are assertive about their history.

The board had been put up on the evening of December 28 by the Dalit residents. The very next day, a mob of upper-caste residents gathered at around 9 am and demolished the signboard, which was sponsored by an entrepreneur named Rajendra Gaekwad, a direct descendant of Govind Mahar. Gaekwad was helped by two Ambedkarite volunteers from the city, to transport the board to the village. Neither of the three responsible for it was ever found liable in any kind of conspiracy that may help connect the outbreak of the violence at Vadhu Budruk to the case on the Elgar Parishad convened two days later.

One of the impressive documents placed before the commission on record is a historical work published in Mumbai in 1967, by the renowned rationalist, Prabodhankaar Keshav Thackeray, father of the late Bal Thackeray who founded the Shiv Sena. The book, titled, Shivkalatil Shoorveer Mahar Yoddhey—The Valorous Mahar Warriors of the Age of Shivaji—is a life-sketch of two Mahar warriors of the pre-Peshwa Maratha period, Govind Gopal Mahar and Raynaak Mahar. It carries a powerful narrative suggesting that the original Maratha kings, Shivaji and his son Sambhaji, were loath to recognise caste distinctions, especially in affairs of the state, including the army.

The book explicitly spells out the role of Govind Gopal Mahar, as one of Sambhaji’s most trusted lieutenants. The book notes that in 1689, following Sambhaji’s capture and assassination by Mughal emperor Aurgangzeb, Gopal Mahar chanced upon the remains of the king, by the side of the river Bhima, in the course of an all-out search ordered by Sambhaji’s wife, Yeshubai. He had been tipped off by a widow who had been washing clothes by the Bhima, when some body parts were dumped on the river bank opposite to her, right below Vadhu Budruk. The little-known author, whose book Thackeray published, writes of how Gopal Mahar mobilised a few of his trusted comrades, amid a grave threat from the Mughal army expansively camped nearby, and arranged for the king’s clandestine cremation in that Vadhu Budruk village.

Incidentally, the trusted comrades of Sambhaji’s lieutenant, Gopal Mahar, are described in the book as having the same surnames as the upper caste Marathas of Vadhu Budruk village. It shows a comradeship between the Dalit Mahars and the upper castes from the very epicentre of our modern-day caste conflict. It points to a figment of evidence in favour of a scholarly work that theorises the belief among Maharashtra’s Phule-Ambedkarites that the wedges between castes were never as deep and wide, as they became in the Peshwa period, following the death of Sambhaji.

The signboard pointed to the location of the old Mahar memorial, situated next to Gaekwad’s village home, while succinctly describing the events of 1689 that led to an honourable cremation for the beheaded Maratha king, just a few feet away. The exact year when the Mahar memorial was built in the village is difficult to ascertain, but it was by no means a recent construction to have suddenly irked the village’s upper-caste residents in December 2017.

The new signboard had been put up in place of a larger board that was removed in 2015, as per the available evidence. That year, the management of two prominent tomb-shaped memorials in Vadhu Budruk was unilaterally taken over by a private trust, steered by Ekbote, the Samasta Hindu Aghadi chief. One of these was a samadhi of the Maratha king Sambhaji, and the other, that of his famous companion Kavi Kalash.

There is credible evidence—in the form of an application and an ongoing correspondence with revenue officials—to suggest that the earlier board mentioned Govind Gopal Mahar’s role, along with some other Maratha residents of his time, with surnames Shivale-Deshmukh and Argade, in the cremation of Sambhaji at Vadhu Budruk. Today, the board at the Sambhaji samadhi is put up by the trust run by Ekbote and his local aides, with only the names of Shivale-Deshmukh and Argade on it. So, a signboard dedicated to Govind Mahar would seem an inevitable necessity.

The evidence is too clear to ignore the role of Milind Ekbote, his outfit and his henchmen—not only in Vadhu Budruk, but also in other, contiguous villages like Koregaon and Sanaswadi. The submissions before the commission detail their role in triggering the conflict, and the removal of the original board in 2015. The role of Sambhaji Bhide, a frequent visitor and influencer in the village, cannot be far behind.

On December 29, the violent mob did not stop at the signboard, but went on to desecrate the Mahar memorial, and also demolished the canopy atop it. Subsequently, the canopy could only be rebuilt with police intervention. No evidence could be found in the record to suspect that any of the neo-Buddhists might have harboured any intent to cause an unwarranted provocation. Like every previous occasion, their memorial would be visited by the devout crowds, shortly before or after paying homage to the martyrs of the Koregaon battle, on the 1st of January. That was reason enough for putting up the signboard leading up to the less prominent Mahar memorial.

But the violence in Vadhu Budruk was a classic example of the intolerance among the Brahmanical section of upper caste Marathas towards any Dalit assertion of their volition and agency.  They could not palate the allusion to an ancestor of the neo-Buddhists carrying the Maratha king Sambhaji’s corpse and arranging for his cremation, with or without assistance from Maratha households. Most Marathas were led to believe not just a distorted history, but an entirely subverted worldview, advocated by present day Brahminical Hindutva protagonists, in which all caste barriers are an ancient, even pre-historic, reality that cannot be questioned.

One authoritative work on the subject, not part of the commission record, is the scholarly work referred to previously, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, by Susan Bayly, an emeritus historical anthropologist at the University of Cambridge. According to Bayly, “Brahman Raj” of 1700–1830 was the period when caste hierarchies actually hardened, particularly in parts of Maharashtra under Peshwa rule, in comparison to the 17^th century Maratha reign of the Mawlas led by Shivaji and his son Sambhaji. This scholarly work is in conformity with the collation of oral history published by Prabodhankaar Keshav Thackerey in the 1960s, when his son’s Shiv Sena was yet to emerge.

These prejudices were placed in context before the commission as well. The Marathi historical literature submitted to the commission delves into some of these details. This includes a product of an older version of Marathi oral historiography, which the more scientifically sound Marathi historian VS Bendre also attests to, to an extent, while writing about his own archaeological discovery of the three samadhis at Vadhu Budruk. It explains how the Mughal capture of Sambhaji was a consequence of an alleged Brahminical aversion to both Shivaji and Sambhaji, who some of the Brahmins actually considered Shudras, and even resented Sambhaji’s fluent renditions of the Vedic verses.

According to the literature on record, such Brahmins ultimately colluded with Aurangzeb to facilitate Sambhaji’s arrest at Sangameshwar, in Ratnagiri, and eventual dismemberment around Tulapur, across the river from Vadhu Budruk. Subsequently, the Peshwas, gradually rose to kingship through intrigue, in the post-Sambhaji phase, with Sambhaji and Yeshubai’s son, Shahu I eventually handing over the throne to Bajirao I.

How a mob from Vadhu Budruk attacked Koregaon Bhima

Returning to the events of 29 December 2017 at Vadhu Budruk, the removal of the signboard and desecration of the Govind Gopal memorial led one Dalit villager, Sushama Ovhal, to file a report late that evening at Shikrapur police station. Ovhal named 49 residents of the village in a complaint about the violence, accusing them under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. Ekbote was named as a visitor to Vadhu Budruk, who incited the upper caste residents.

Back-to-back developments followed, as deposed by four police officials, quite reliable in these respects but for a stray but notable detail here and there—the IPS officer Sanjay Pakhale; the former Pune Rural superintendent, Suvez Haque; a deputy superintendent, Ganesh More; and a senior inspector, Ramesh Galande. Multiple cross-cases were registered the same day at Shikrapur station, followed by the mandatory arrest of seven persons named in Ovhal’s FIR the next day. This was followed by the signing of a peace pact between the two communities in the village—which would prove to be a flimsy cover for what would follow on an exponentially larger scale on 1 January, 2018. Upper caste prejudice spread across villages around Vadhu Budruk, from Koregaon Bhima to Sanaswadi. The upper-caste residents decided to declare a “Black Day,” a protest planned for 1 January, with a view to deny all services—including food, water and toilet facilities—to the hundreds of thousands of Dalit-Bahujans expected to congregate at Koregaon Bhima and the three memorials at Vadhu Budruk.

From late evening on December 30 to the morning of January 1, the Maratha locals allied to multiple Hindutva outfits—run by Bhide, Ekbote, and their henchmen—circulated at least six visceral social media posts mobilising the violence. The widely circulated posts created, as Pakhale recognised in his cross-examination, a growing opposition to the expected commemoration at Bhima Koregaon.

Police officials, however, maintained a façade of generic ignorance about the pre-January storm clouds. They claimed to have done the needful to prevent any untoward venting of the aggressive sentiments quietly being built up by the caste-prejudiced actors among the upper castes. According to the police, they had taken adequate precautionary measures at two points identified as most sensitive: the Vadhu Budruk memorials and Perne Fata, where the Bhima Koregaon martyrs’ obelisk stood tall.

And yet, even the edited video clips placed on record by the police—in place of the more faithful CCTV recordings—reveal an aggressive upper-caste mob allowed to gather in the area. The officers Galande and More, who seem to have otherwise made flimsy attempts to cover up some of the most crucial facts, gave a larger estimate of over a thousand men. Marching with saffron flags and chanting a particularly strident, anti-secular Prerna Mantra, they assembled at the Sambhaji memorial in Vadhu Budruk by around 9 am on January 1. The saffron brigade appears to have marched in unison for a good 3.5 kilometres—some on foot, others on motorcycles—with their countless flags, renting the air with boisterous, casteist slogans.

Dalit bystanders evidently rued the Hindutva intrusion on what was supposed to be their own day of celebration, until the inevitable spark was ignited: a yet unidentified, lone young man, carrying a blue flag on a huge pole, and mindlessly waving it at the saffron flag-bearing crowd, close to Vadhu Chowk, at Koregaon-Bhima village. Whether it was a friendly gesture, or one of animosity or foolishness, or perhaps a wily instigation, remains anybody’s guess—the only available evidence for this here is copies of video clips shot by bystanders and victims of other assaults.

Within moments, the man was encircled by the charged up saffron flag-bearers, and brutally assaulted. This served as a prelude to the wanton violence that ensued. In what was patently a pre-planned aggression, the Hindutva mob could be seen carrying out physical assaults using sticks and rods; stone-pelting from rooftops, where rocks would have been sufficiently stocked in advance; and arson, using cans and bottles of stored fuel. The violence gradually spread in all directions, from the vantage point of Vadhu Chowk—eastward towards the highway leading to Ahmednagar, and westward, where it was met with resistance from Dalit youth on a bridge across the Bhima, packed with devotees heading towards and returning from the martyrs’ obelisk.

The police personnel stationed there were neither prompt enough nor sufficiently alert to the possibility of the mob violence breaking out at Koregaon Bhima. They made belated attempts to curb the warring factions. Reinforcements were summoned immediately, but they arrived too late, given the traffic congestion on their way. The mob violence continued until late in the evening, as thousands of Dalits tried to flee, many of whose means of transport were thoroughly damaged or set ablaze. One Maratha youth, named Rahul Fatangale, was assaulted at Sanaswadi by individuals yet to be identified, and succumbed to his injuries when carried to a hospital by a police team. Amid unexplained delays, a lack of coordination in relaying information, and an apparent weakness of the will to pre-empt any untoward occurrence, the violence, fear and terror continued to fester, long after it was dark, as deposed by some of the victims to the commission.

Some eyewitnesses did narrate instances of police personnel helping them out of adverse situations. But there was also evidence of neglect and procrastination, particularly in respect of filing complaints, recording statements and, generally, in pursuing the mandated investigations. It would also appear that those arrested for perpetrating the violence may have benefited from a deliberate lackadaisical attitude in respect of taking the police investigations to the logical culmination of an effective prosecution.

The evidence before the commission points to the immense likelihood of the mob violence having been premeditated and orchestrated. This includes evidence concerning Milind Ekbote’s activities in the Vadhu Budruk and Koregaon Bhima villages; the allegiance to his outfit that some of the mobsters behoved; their control over the panchayats of both the villages; and their active participation in the events leading up to the violence. Indications of a conspiracy hatched, in the run up to the 1 January 2018 commemoration, by the circulation of offensive pro-Hindutva social media posts are also evident.

There is also evidence of the manipulation of the norms and functions of multiple village panchayats to pass resolutions for a secretive bandh, to impose the “Black Day” social boycott of the congregation of visiting Dalit-Bahujans. The boycott wilfully deprived the visitors of basic human requirements like food, beverages, toilet facilities and temporary shelter. Moreover, the local Dalits who defied the bandh to provide the same, as they did each previous year, were subjected to vengeful attacks, including arson and demolition of their homes and businesses.

The evidence also suggests that the official responses to the mob violence were staggered enough to suspect that the lower echelons acted in a tacit allegiance with the ultra-right sections of the locally dominant and relatively affluent upper caste. Much of the losses—in terms of injuries to civilians and police personnel as well as the widespread damage to property, with motorcycles, cars, and buses set ablaze—were predominantly suffered by men, women, children and senior citizens visiting the martyrs’ obelisk. Moreover, the shops and houses of local Dalits vandalised on the wayside, as well as sporadic retaliatory attacks from those assaulted, could have been avoided with proper state and police intervention.

The pattern of the origin and spread of the violence suggests the involvement of a few individuals from Koregaon Bhima and its vicinity. Just a few days before the Bhima Koregaon congregation, Ekbote held a press conference at Hotel Sonai, in the vicinity of the martyrs’ obelisk, and announced his opposition to the commemoration. He then proceeded to circulate handouts to journalists, which being part of the commission record, undisputedly establishes his outfit’s oppositional stance. In hindsight, on the whole, the preventive detention of some of the key individuals, including Ekbote and Bhide, could have prevented the violence, and perhaps even led to the recovery of crude weaponry used by the Hindutva mobs that day. Ambedkarites, on the other hand, with little protection, were compelled, under threat of the assaults, to conceal their blue flags, symbolising their social identity and political affiliation, and also their neo-Buddhist Panchsheel colours.

But numerous such flags were burned down. And in yet another perfidy, the Pune Police went on to register and build upon a tenuous private complaint to conjure the myth of a “Maoist conspiracy.” The evidence, however, reflects the abject absence of any dots to join between the counter-constitutional Bhima Koregaon caste Hindutva machinations, and the anti-caste Elgar Parishad convened to reaffirm allegiance to constitutional democracy.