Madurai court convicts 10 in 2015 Dalit youth beheading case, five acquitted

Ten of the 17 accused in the 2015 murder case of 21-year-old Dalit youth Gokulraj were convicted by a Madurai Special Sessions Court on Saturday. The court acquitted five others and fixed March 8 for pronouncing the sentence of the convicts. One of the accused died during the trial while another is still absconding.

One of the convicts is S Yuvaraj, leader of Dheeran Chinnamalai Peravai, a caste-centric outfit that gained notoriety for running an intelligence network and using force to prevent inter-caste marriages.

Gokulraj was abducted and killed in June 2015 by a group of men on suspicion of his relationship with a girl from the Gounder community, the most dominant caste in Western Tamil Nadu.

The accused were booked under sections 120(b) (criminal conspiracy), 364 (kidnap) read with 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention), 109 (punishment of abetment), 384 (extortion), 465 (forgery), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 471 (using as genuine a forged document or electronic record) r/w 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 465 (forgery), 302 (murder), 201 (tampering with evidence), 212 (harbouring offender), 216 (harbouring offender who escaped from custody) of the Indian Penal Code and section 3(2) (v) of the Prevention of Atrocities against SC/ST Act.

Other than Yuvaraj, his aides Arun, Kumar, Sankar, Arul Vasantham, Selvakumar, Yuvaraj’s brother Thangadurai, Sathishkumar, Raghu alias Sridhar and Ranjith were also convicted.

Gokulraj was abducted from the premises of Thiruchengode temple where he was present with an upper-caste girl from the OBC-Gounder community. Later, his beheaded body was recovered from a rail track near Erode.

The first crucial tip-off in identifying the accused was the recording of a telephonic conversation between the girl and victim’s brother, in which the girl revealed that Gokulraj was abducted by a group led by Yuvaraj from the Tiruchengode temple. The girl was also heard saying that the group had snatched her phone and told her to go home before taking Gokulraj in their custody.

The girl and Gokulraj were classmates and the murder happened soon after they completed their engineering course.
The case faced several hurdles as the police couldn’t lay their hands at main accused Yuvaraj who surrendered months after the murder. The suspected suicide by Tiruchengode DSP Vishnupriya, who was investigating the case, was yet another controversy. A separate case was filed in connection with Vishnupriya’s suicide in September 2015, and the Gokulraj murder case was transferred to the CB-CID later.

Nearly a year before Gokulraj’s murder, Tiruchengode witnessed another controversy after the majority Gounder community launched protests against ‘One Part Woman,’ a book written by Perumal Murugan, forcing the author to withdraw all his books from the market.

Courtesy : Indian express

Note: This news piece was originally published in indianexpress.com and used purely for non-profit/non-commercial purposes exclusively for Human Rights objectives.