New Delhi, Dec 5: The Supreme Court has sentenced to life six upper-caste Thakurs for butchering seven Dalits 30 years ago, overturning a high court acquittal and handing justice to a survivor who had even approached Indira Gandhi and Jagjivan Ram.

A bench of Justices Dalveer Bhandari and A.K. Patnaik directed the Uttar Pradesh government to arrest the six within four weeks if they didn’t surrender.

The state government had filed the appeal against Allahabad High Court’s 2001 acquittal of the six and 12 others. The accused had killed the seven, Harijans and Chamars, after barging into their homes posing as police officers on September 9-10, 1979, at a village in Hussainganj near Lucknow. The bodies were thrown in the nearby Ganga and only one survivor, Kallu, remained as an eyewitness.

The police had passed off the massacre as a dacoity, but the trial court had rejected the claim and sentenced the 18 to life before the high court acquitted them on appeal.

Passing the judgment yesterday, the apex court gave the benefit of the doubt to 11 of the accused. One of the accused had died while the case was on. The six, who had been in jail a few years before the high court acquitted them, will have to go back to prison.

Kallu, the survivor, whose wife was among those killed, had told the court he had sent his complaints “in 50 papers” to Indira and Jagjivan Ram. He told the court that the police were initially reluctant to probe the case but did so only at the intervention of a senior leader.

The prosecution examined 32 other witnesses but most of them turned hostile in the lower courts. The Supreme Court didn’t appear surprised, though.

“In a case of this nature, witnesses turning hostile is not unusual where upper caste people have created a fear psyche. Witnesses cannot be faulted for not supporting the prosecution version,” the court said.

The judges said the “findings of the high court are not based on proper analysis and marshalling of the entire evidence on record”.

“The high court ought to have appreciated the mental frame of Jasodiya (Kallu’s wife) when she gave a statement which was construed as a dying declaration,” the Supreme Court said.