Ramnarayan, a resident of Chhattisgarh, was beaten to death by a mob at Attapallam in Palakkad district of Kerala on 17 December. The mob mistook him for a thief and accused him of being a Bangladeshi.
Ramnarayan belonged to Karhi village of Shakti district of Chhattisgarh. This village is struggling for basic needs. Ground water is rapidly depleting, the health system is broken and the nearest high school is 15 km away. This was the house of Ramnarayan Baghel, where he along with three others had gone to Kerala for work. However, soon after reaching Kerala he wanted to go back.
Ramnarayan wanted to go back to the village
40 year old Ranjit Kumar Baghel also went with Ramnarayan. Speaking on the phone from Kerala, Ranjit said, “Ramnarayan had said that I would not like to, it is too far, I would work in Chhattisgarh only. The very next day after reaching Kerala, we left for work and Ramnarayan said that he was returning home. It seemed that he was missing his wife. We could not convince him to stay, but now I wish I had stopped him.”
Karahi is a paddy-growing village with about 4,000 inhabitants. Over the past decade, the villagers have made their own arrangements for irrigation, allowing them to sow rice twice a year. Villagers say most of them choose to remain unemployed for a few months between paddy crops or work as laborers for groups that illegally extract sand from the Mahanadi river.
Ramnarayan did not have many options
Ramnarayan did not have much choice. He could either stay in his village and watch his debts mount. He could watch his two sons, aged 9 and 10, struggle in school and see his dream house incomplete due to lack of money, or he could go to Kerala for a few months.
What did the wife say?
Ramnarayan’s wife Lalita said, “He did not want to leave Chhattisgarh. But earlier this year, he fell ill due to the dust at the construction sites where he worked and had to take rest for a month. We borrowed about Rs 60,000 to meet his medical expenses and to run the house. We also took a loan under the PM Awas Yojana to complete the construction of the house. He used to tell me that other people in the village were earning good money in Kerala and He will also go there.”
Ramnarayan’s house being built under PM Awas Yojana
The Baghel family lives as one large family, consisting of four to five houses next to each other in brick and asbestos houses in the Dalit (Satnami) part of the village. Ramnarayan, the youngest of three siblings, had two small rooms here. These rooms (which were bricked up and had curtains in place of doors) were mostly empty, except for a cot in one room and some utensils and cow dung cakes. But right in front of these rooms, apart from a place with some bushes, was Ramnarayan’s house which was being built under the PM Awas Yojana. Lalita says that Ramnarayan had run out of money after the walls were built.
Three months ago, Ramnarayan and Lalita contacted their cousin Shashikant Baghel, 35, who had started working as a migrant laborer at the age of 16 and had progressed so much that he had built a separate house for his family on the side of the main road. Shashikant moved to Kerala six months ago and is now a labor supervisor.
Shashikant explains, “Ramnarayan had never worked outside Chhattisgarh. But he said he needed money for his sons’ education, his mother’s health and to complete his house. He asked me if I could get him some work in Kerala. I said some other people were coming to Kerala and he could come with them. I gave him Rs 1,500. A skilled laborer in Raipur gets Rs 500 but no overtime. There is no scope. If one earns Rs 15,000 a month, in Kerala I have taken 60 people to Palakkad so far.”
Ramnarayan went to Kerala on 13 December
On 13 December, Ramnarayan said goodbye to his mother and left in a bus with three others. After a 45-km bus journey to Champa railway station, he traveled for two nights and a day in the general coach of the Korba-Thiruvananthapuram Superfast Express. Ranjit said, “He found a seat a little away from us and sat quietly for most of the time. While leaving the house, he said that he would work hard and earn good money.”
Five days later, Ramnarayan’s mother received a call from the Kerala Police. He gave the phone to his 51-year-old brother-in-law Lakheshwar Baghel. Lakheshwar says, “They started inquiring about Ramnarayan’s behavior on the phone, whether he had any criminal record, whether he used to get into fights. I told them, no, he is a simple man. And now he is gone.”