Surekha Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange had filed a complaint with local police on 28 September 2006, objecting to the requisition of her family's field for a road. The dispute was with members of the numerically dominant Kunbi caste, classified as Other Backward Classes. The complaint should have been routine -- a property matter, the kind rural police handle constantly. But in a village where caste hierarchies shaped every interaction, a Dalit woman challenging the majority community's plans was an act of defiance that the community would not tolerate. The next day, a mob dragged Surekha, her daughter, and two sons from their home. The family was paraded naked through the village, beaten, and killed. Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange, the father and husband, was the only family member not home that day. He survived to become the sole witness and a symbol of loss that no government compensation could address.

For weeks after the killings, the story barely registered beyond Bhandara district. Mainstream media was slow to cover the massacre, and allegations soon emerged that local police had shielded the accused. A government report prepared by the social justice department and YASHADA, the state academy of developmental administration, later implicated police officers, doctors who performed the post-mortem, and a BJP member of the Legislative Assembly in an alleged cover-up. Initial reports suggested the women had been gang-raped before being killed. CBI investigations concluded they had not, but serious doubts were raised about the reliability of those findings, including allegations of bribery of the examining doctors. It took an investigative article by Sabrina Buckwalter in The Times of India, aided by social activist Deelip Mhaske, to bring the massacre into sustained national attention. The gap between the event and its coverage became its own indictment -- evidence of how easily violence against Dalits could be buried.

Once the news broke through, the response was volcanic. On 19 November 2006, over 4,000 Scheduled Caste citizens gathered at Azad Maidan in Mumbai to protest. Four days later, demonstrations in nearby Chandrapur district turned tense when police baton-charged protesters they accused of throwing stones -- a charge community leaders denied, insisting their people were "protesting in peace." Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh announced ex-gratia payments of Rs 600,000 to the family's next of kin, plus housing and jobs for affected relatives, with an additional Rs 200,000 from the Chief Minister's Relief Fund. In November and December, the desecration of an Ambedkar statue in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, triggered further protests by Buddhists across Maharashtra. Officials including the Mumbai Police Commissioner acknowledged that the Khairlanji killings had fueled the unrest. The massacre had become something larger than one village's crime; it was a lens through which millions viewed the persistence of caste violence in democratic India.

The CBI filed charges against 11 people in December 2006 for murder, criminal conspiracy, unlawful assembly with deadly weapons, and outraging the modesty of women. In September 2008, the Bhandara Sessions Court found eight guilty and acquitted three. Six received death sentences; two received life imprisonment. For a brief moment, the verdict felt like accountability. Then, on 14 July 2010, the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court commuted all death sentences to 25 years' rigorous imprisonment, ruling that the murders resulted from "an act of revenge" rather than caste-motivated violence. The commutation triggered fresh protests statewide. Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange, told the CBI would appeal to the Supreme Court, waited. After two weeks of inaction, he announced he would file the appeal himself. The case was last listed for hearing on 14 August 2015. Bhaiyyalal died of a heart attack on 20 January 2017, at the age of 62, without seeing the Supreme Court resolve the matter. The village of Khairlanji returned to its anonymity. The questions it raised have not.