Similar episodes prove that the "the weaker sections of society continue to remain victims of inhuman casteist oppression" and that the violence against the Dalits by members of high castes "has become a regular feature in a number of states," lamented the editorial of the Indian daily, Asian Age.

The Hindu caste system is nearly 3,000 years old, and plays a key role in determining a person's social status. In theory there are four castes: Brahmins (those in charge of knowledge and Hindu orthodoxy), Kshatriya (the warriors) Vaishya (the merchants) and Shudras (the labourers); and then below this group are the Dalits.

Each of these castes is however subdivided into sub-castes, while in every cast there are variations linked to the local customs that still form the basis of marriage. The Khandayat are a part of the Kshatriya caste.

Among the reasons that pushed a fringe group of fundamentalist Hindus to kill Mahatma Gandhi, seemed to have been the impossibility for some Brahmins to accept that a Bania, that is a member of a component of the Vaishya caste, only a step above the Dalits, could be the spiritual father of modern India.

Today in India, Dalits ('broken' people) constitute a fifth of the population of India's one billion or more people. Christians are disproportionately represented within the lowest category - they make up 10 percent of Dalits, but only 2.5 percent of the overall population.

Despite the constitutional ban on the caste system, a recent United Nations report, said that the Dalits constitute nearly all of the labourers doing more menial jobs in the villages of India where the Dalits still experiences a "hidden apartheid."

The tradition states that in the villages the Dalits cannot visit the same temples or drink from the wells used by the members of higher castes, and that in their presence they are not allowed to even wear shoes.

After independence, in a desire to impede their emacipation, militant Hindus massacred many Dalits. The last time there were such acts of violence was in the period between 1995 and 1999, when the radical group of Ranvir Sena killed more than 400 Dalits in the state of Bihar.

A series of massacres was brutally halted in March 1999, when a group of Maoist rebels decapitated 33 members of a higher caste, announcing that they would return to strike again if the violence against the Dalits continued.

Commentators insist that the changes put in place through democracy and development, have resulted in some positive signs in recent times. Such as the case of Manta Nayak, 18, a Dalit from Orissa, who after having been a victim of repeated acts of violence because he wanted to go to the university, obtained the protection of the police who have been escorting him daily as he travels on his bicycle from his village to attend his lessons at university.