In the searing May heat, Bhutegaon in Maharashtra's eastern Jalna districta was in a festive mode. The homes of the upper caste people were brightly lit for the marriage of Asaram Bhutekar's daughter. At the edge of the village, in the cluster of mud-walled one-room huts of the Dalits, the Shendges, who had just returned from Mumbai with their son Dilip, were also making similar preparations. Two weeks later, the swarthy, strapping 21-year-old youth, who worked as a plumber in Mumbai by the day and drove an autorickshaw in the night, was to get married. But fate intervened.

DILIP SHENDGE, Bhutegaon village The 21-year-old youth who had returned home from Mumbai for his marriage was burnt to death for daring to hit upper-caste men who reportedly harassed his sister and prevented her from drawing water from the village hand pump.

One day, Dilip's sister Lata Kumari came home sobbing. Some upper-caste boys had harassed and prevented her from drawing water from the village hand pump. In the slums of Kandivali in suburban Mumbai where Dilip lived, whoever came first to the water pipe drew water first. But the cosmopolitan metropolis could well have been located on a different planet. The reality in the remote village was very different. Dilip reached the spot and exchanged blows with upper-caste men.

That evening, as the Bhutekars' marriage procession departed, a mob of over 40 people led by Ramesh Bhutekar, a professor, approached Dilip's hut baying for his blood. A Dalit had never dared to hit an upper-caste person in the village's history. They wanted vengeance. Dilip locked himself inside his tiny hut, which was lined with a dozen dusty calendar portraits of leaders like Shivaji, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh and even P.V. Narasimha Rao, but the mob kicked down the door and pulled him out. "He challenged them to fight one on one, but they weren't in a mood to listen," says his elder brother Ramesh. They poured kerosene over the youth and set him afire. As his traumatised family and relatives watched, Dilip turned into a human torch, staggering around wildly trying to douse the flames. His horrified mother tried to help her son but got burnt in the process. Dilip died five days later in a nearby hospital.

On the face of it, Maharashtra, the nation's most industrialised state, appears to be the most socially progressive. For the first time in its history, it has a Dalit chief minister and a deputy chief minister belonging to the backward castes. But far from its cities and towns, in the villages where people travel on rutted roads, caste rules with numbing ferocity.

This is especially true of the backward rain-deficient eastern Marathwada region. All its eight districts-Aurangabad, Jalna, Parbhani, Nanded, Hingoli, Beed, Latur and Osmanabad-figure in the Sarma Committee's report of the 100 poorest districts of the country. Jalna district where Dilip lived registered the highest number of atrocities against Dalits in Marathwada-19 of the 46 cases registered so far.

Four of these clashes have erupted over water, underlining the link of tradition with necessity. In Murtigaon village, violence again broke out over the drawing of water from a hand pump. Janabai Thorat, 35, a Dalit housewife, sustained head injuries when she intervened in a fight between her husband Ankush and Bapurao Surase's upper-caste family. In the remote Anvibangla village too caste violence broke out between the upper castes and the Dalits over who would take water first from a tanker lorry.

Of course, water is not the only reason for the conflict between the upper castes and the Dalits. Two months after the Murtigaon incident, a dozen upper-caste farmers lynched Dadarao Dongre, a 50-year-old Dalit, in Beed district's Sonakhota village. His fault? He ran, sometimes unfairly, say some locals, the village's most lucrative source of power and influence-its sole ration shop. It was something that the upper-caste people resented.

ANKUSH THORAT, Murtigaon village Most of the caste fights have erupted over water. Thorat and his wife Janabai sustained injuries during a fight with upper-caste villagers over drawing of water from a hand pump. Similar incidents have been reported from across the state.

Shinde's Government which came under fire for these atrocities, not just from the opposition Sena-BJP combine but from within the ruling party, announced that such cases would now attract the provisions of the Prevention of Terrorism Act. But that may not happen at all because a fact-finding committee headed by Minister of State for Home (Rural) Kripashankar Singh has attributed these killings to village disputes, and not caste violence.

"Kripashankar Singh is trying to camouflage what are clearly caste conflicts being engineered by the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) workers to defame Chief Minister Shinde," says BJP leader Nitin Gadkari.

With the electorate neatly carved up between four parties-the Congress, NCP, Sena and the BJP, a swing in the Dalit votes could well be the deciding factor in the next assembly elections. The Shiv Sena knows that. In the previous assembly elections, it lost 22 seats across the state by margins as low as 200 votes. That loss has meant a four-year stint in the opposition. Next year's polls are also being seen as an acid test for the Sena's new leader Uddhav Thackeray. The Shiv Sena is making all-out efforts to win over the Dalits and this is reflected in the words of Shivaji Chote, president of the Jalna district chapter of the Shiv Sena. "Do you know how difficult it is for us to get votes?" he asks. "There are 35 per cent Muslims and Dalit voters in practically every constituency to whom we have no access." In Jalna, the Shiv Sena has stepped up its recruitment drive and this month alone, it opened five shakhas in the village in a bid to woo the Dalits. So far, it has been only a trickle.

"This is unlikely to turn into a flood because the Dalits traditionally follow their leaders and so far, all of them, including Prakash Ambedkar and Ramdas Athavale, have rejected the Sena's attempts to play the Dalit card,'' says political activist Avinash Dolas.

Politics has already struck deep roots in Bhutegaon's ferment of misery. A blue flag bedecked signboard of a Dalit party has sprouted near the Shendges' hut. The district administration has installed a hand pump nearby. A 12-ft high brick and granite memorial symbolising a sun and a torch, recently built by an aspiring politician from Mumbai, stands near the spot where Dilip fell. A granite plaque and a poem commemorating the martyr is illuminated by a floodlight hooked to an electricity pole nearby. The irony is inescapable here. None of the Dalit houses in the village have electricity supply.