Bihar residents grieve over killings  ALSO: BIHAR PROFILE

March 18, 1999
Web posted at: 10:39 p.m. EDT (2239 GMT)

PATNA, India (CNN) -- Gunmen from a communist faction massacred at least 35 sleeping villagers late Thursday in the most recent caste-related killings in one of India's poorest regions, authorities said.

The victims of the shooting spree just before midnight (1830 GMT) in the village of Senari included children, said Neelmani, the police inspector-general of Bihar's Central Range.

The attackers had fled by the time police arrived, he added.

The Jehanabad region has been at the center of recent caste violence in Bihar in eastern India, one of India's least literate and most violent states.

Authorities blamed the latest attack on the Maoist Communist Center, which has fought with other leftist militia groups for low-caste, landless villagers.

Neelmani said the victims were believed to have links with the upper-caste private army Ranvir Sena, which over the past six weeks has killed at least 33 Dalits, people from the lowest caste.

One of India's worst caste massacres occurred in the same district in December 1997, when the Ranvir Sena struck in Jehanabad's Lakshmanpur Bathe village, killing 61 Dalits with guns, machetes and spears.

Responding to the string of caste-motivated massacres in the state, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has tried twice without success to remove the 18-month-old socialist government.

Vajpayee's fragile minority coalition government fired Rabri Devi, the chief minister of Bihar, in February. But last week New Delhi reversed the decision when parliament's upper house opposed the move.

Last September, India's President K.R. Narayanan canceled Vajpayee's first attempt to fire Rabri Devi's government by refusing to accept a recommendation for dismissal.

Rabri Devi won a confidence vote Wednesday. Her husband, Laloo Prasad Yadav, a charismatic lower-caste leader, has pledged the distribution of land to poor sharecroppers to stem the growing spiral of violence.

The caste conflict escalated in rural Bihar early this decade when Marxist activists began organizing landless field hands to rebel against ancient traditions of caste that restrict a person's station and occupation according to birth.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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