Case primary details

Fact finding date

Case Incident details

Case summary

Mania village is situated under Tangi Police Station of Cuttack district, in which 25 families of Sabar tribes reside. In the recent panchayati raj election, there was high tension in the area between different political parties. Usually one major political party gets the vote of the sahi; they used to threaten the tribal people to cast the votes in favour of their candidate. This time, the tribal sahi seemed to support another political party as they joined a rally organised by that candidate. This infuriated the other prime political party; to terrorise the tribals, they launched a mass attack on the tribal sahi on 21.2.2022, the night before the polling day.

 As it reveals about the incident of that evening, the tribal inhabitants were sleeping in their houses. At about 8 P.M., a group consisting of  Mohan Bahalia S/o- Umesh Bahalia, Jayanta Behera S/o Dharaindhar, Bhaskar Das S/o Amulya Das, Tapan Mallick S/o Netrananda Mallick, Janmejaya Khillar S/o Jayadeba Khillar, Keshab Behera S/o Lt. Baya Behera, Gopal Sahoo S/o Loknath Sahoo, Prasanna Behera S/o Maku Behera, Lipun Barik S/o Bhagaban Barik, Sinu Behera S/o Bira, Jitu Behera S/o Bichitrananda Behera and others reached the sahi, entered the house of Nanda Dehury and Bimbala Dehury and forcibly took Nanda Dehury with them to the village chhak. There Nanda Dehury was beaten mercilessly by the group; in the process he sustained bleeding head injury. Bimbala Dehury, W/o Nanda Dehury cried for help and some men & women of the tribal sahi came running to the spot.  The perpetrators abused them with obscene language aspersing their tribe name and outraged modesty & threatened to rape the women. One Pramila Dehury was assaulted and suffered sprained hand. There was a tussle and the tribal people rescued Nanda Dehury from the dominant caste persons. Nanda was taken to hospital and had to have six stitches on the injured head. Bimbala lodged complaint in the police station on the next day which was registered as Tangi PS case no 33 dated 22.2.2022  U/s 363, 506, 325, 307, 336, 354-A, 294, 34 IPC with 3(1)(r)(s), (2)(v)(va) of SC & ST PoA Act. Counter case was also lodged by the opposite group which was registered too.

On the day of fact finding it was learnt that six persons from tribal sahi and four persons from dominant community sahi were arrested and later released on bail. It was found that Nanda Dehury is yet to recover fully from the effect of the head injury and mostly confined to bed.