Within hours, witnesses say, upper-caste landlords massacred 58 Dalits, people once known as “untouchables,” most of them farmworkers in the eastern state of Bihar who had been agitating for higher wages. The next day, he lodged a police complaint, and investigators soon filed charges. He is still waiting — after conflicting verdicts and hundreds of court hearings, with some witnesses now dead or impaired by fading eyesight — for a resolution. “A cry for justice turned into a lifelong nightmare for us,” said Mr. Paswan, 45. In a vast nation with no shortage of intractable problems, it is one of the longest-running and most far-reaching: India’s staggeringly overburdened judicial system.

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Persons: Binod Paswan, Paswan’s, ”, Paswan Locations: Bihar