Introduction

On August 20, 2010, Kamla Bairwa, a dalit woman, after being dubbed as a ‘witch’ by fellow villagers, was brutally thrashed by three men and two women at Jhalara village in Tonk district of Rajasthan[1]. They dragged her to a tree and tied with it before thrashing her. In her complaint, lodged at the Uniara police station, Kamla said the village residents, particularly women, call her a witch, humiliate her and also beat her up. She feared that she would be killed by the villagers.  A dalit couple (Saheedi Bhuiyan and Samanti Bhuiyan) was killed in Jorapur village in Palamu district of Jharkhand on March 11, 2010. The villagers suspected them of practicing witchcraft. Three people who had their faces covered barged into their hut at night and took the couple away. Their bodies were found about 33 km away from their home.[2]

Witch-hunting is like an infectious disease and is slowly spreading to newer areas and solutions will have to be found to eradicate this evil practice[3]. The practice of witch[4] hunting/ killings is present in a number of states in the country, and these are generally the regions located in central and eastern India. For it generally happens in places where there is almost no economic development, with little or no access to basic education and health care. In this kind of an atmosphere, people tend to develop very strong superstitious beliefs and anything bad that might befall these villagers like bad crop, diseases, sudden and unexplained death of someone in the family, or drying of well tend to be considered the work of some evil ‘witch’. Thus begins a witch hunt to locate the person responsible.

The legacy of violence against women?

With-hunting is essentially a legacy of violence against women in our society. For almost invariably, it is women, especially dalit or adivasi women, who are branded as dayans or witches. By punishing those who are seen as vile and wild, oppressors perhaps want to send a not-so-subtle message to women: docility and domesticity gets rewarded, anything else gets punished. The accused women are subjected to extreme torture both physical and mental. In a majority of cases, the women have to suffer silently as most are unable to reach out for help, given the lack of education and poverty. The result is that they either have to flee the village leaving their house and land behind, or be subjected to humiliation, torture and death at the hands of the villagers.

The helpless ‘witches’ are hounded and punished by being stripped naked, paraded around the villages, their hair is burnt off or their heads tonsured, their faces blackened, their noses cut off, their teeth pulled out (they are supposedly defanged) so that they can no longer curse, they are whipped, they are branded, sometimes, they are forced to eat human excreta and finally, they are put to death (the victim is hanged, impaled, hacked, lynched or buried alive). Surprisingly, such stomach-churning, toe-curling torture takes place not in dingy, shadowy places, but mostly in vast, open village lands where the cheering crowd can fill a modest stadium. Where these women are left to live, they are considered inauspicious and malevolent, socially ostracized and forced to forego their livelihood. Where they don’t end up losing their life, they are made to lose their mental balance.

Macabre statistics

Statistics on witch-hunting crimes compiled by the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) are a cause of concern. The NCRB reported that in 2008, 175 cases of witchcraft-related murders were reported from different states of India. Jharkhand had the dubious distinction of reporting 52 witchcraft-related murders, followed by Haryana, where the number was around 25, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa with 23 each, Madhya Pradesh with 17,  Chhattisgarh with 15, Maharashtra with 11,  West Bengal with 4 and Meghalaya with 3 deaths in 2008[5]. These are mostly conservative and underreported estimates. The real situation must therefore be much worse.

According to a study[6] conducted by Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra (RLEK), Dehradun, more than 2,500 women have been killed in India in the past 15 years after being accused of practicing witchcraft. On an average, as many as 200 women get lynched under witch-craft related crimes.

Studies on witch-hunting in India

Women’s Rights Groups have been raising public awareness of the problem in India and several monographs have documented the problem in villages in “tribal” areas of several Indian states. In fact, a search of newspapers and internet reports reveal that there are at least twelve (12) states in India that are recognized as breeding grounds for witch hunts (Jharkhand, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Assam, and Bihar). Of late, three studies have addressed witch hunts in India and have provided some data relevant to surges and fluctuations over time as well as details on witch killings and police interventions among tribal communities from the 1950s through the early 1980s.

More recently, two studies have compiled some statistical data on witch accusations and killings in the 1990s: Mita Barman (2002) studied witch accusations and killings in West Bengal and Bihar, and Archana Mishra (2003) studied witch killings and police reports on witchcraft cases in the state of Jharkhand. Recently, Kanchan Mathur (2009) from Institute of Development Studies, Jaipur, has also conducted a study in Rajasthan to understand the local custom of such branding, analysing the major causes behind and the forms of violence meted out to the women dakans.

Superstition not the only reason

The Indian middle class loves to divide the world into the ‘educated’ and the ‘uneducated’, or us and them. So what can witch-hunt mean but one more instance of tribal or village backwardness? Perhaps these ‘educated’ beings worry: if this sort of a ‘medieval practice’ recurs with monotonous regularity, what will happen to our date with the global powers? Backwardness, ignorance, most of all, superstition – these are the easiest assumptions to fall back on.   That superstition is a vital ingredient in these incidents is undeniable. There is superstition, though it thrives in both city and village, and across caste, tribe and class. The more helpless and marginalized people are, the more vulnerable they are to manipulation by those who use superstition, power and religion. People leading lives of deprivation need to feel there’s a solution to their problems; they need to feel they can do something. The cruel irony is that their hopelessness gets exploited. They are encouraged to believe that the misery of their lives – a bad crop, a dry well, an illness or a death in the family – can be relieved by identifying the witch responsible for their misery and by punishing her.   But just beneath the easily identifiable surface of superstition lie other motives explaining the accusation of witchcraft. Women’s organizations, activists and researchers have produced considerable evidence of these other motives. They have shown that property and power – various manifestations of a power tussle – sum up the real reasons for a witch-hunt. Often witch-hunting also serves as a powerful tool in the hands of caste-Hindu men who want to persecute assertive Dalit and Adivasi women who might directly challenge caste hegemony, or indirectly subvert local power equations.

In a substantial number of reported cases, witch-hunting aims to rob the woman of her property. Sometimes it is also directed as punishment for turning down sexual advances or even to settle any grouse that some person with say in village politics might nurse against that woman. Those who seek to rob the woman may be her own family. But in situations where the woman is unprotected, i.e., she is a widow or a single woman, there’s no shortage of people eyeing her land. Witch-hunters (or property-hunters), irrespective of being family members or outsiders, often use the services of ‘ojhas’ or ‘witch-doctors’ to further their cause. In many rural communities with limited or no access to health care, these ojhas become powerful figures. Police investigation has found, in many cases, that the local ojha has accepted a bribe to name a woman as a witch.

One easy way to break a strong woman is to call her a witch and punish her. Lata Sahu, a Dalit woman in Raipur, Madhya Pradesh, contested the polls against the wishes of landowning castes. She was condemned as a witch, stripped and beaten[7]. Subhadra in the Goalpara district of Assam challenged the obscurantist practices of the local ojhas; she also compounded her ‘crime’ by seeking a share of her dead father’s property. Her stepbrother and the ojhas got together, found three sick village children, and claimed someone had cast a spell on them. Subhadra was then declared a witch by a female witch-doctor[8].   The perception of what constitutes a ‘strong’ female, or ‘a female challenge’ could be less obvious than in the cases of Lata and Subhadra. Kalo Devi of a village in Jharkhand repeatedly asked her neighbour not to graze his cattle on her land. In response, he branded Kalo a witch, accusing her of causing the death of his newborn baby. The important point is that there were no men in Kalo’s house; she was an easy target for the neighbour. With no police protection, Kalo felt she had no choice but to abandon her home and land, and she moved in with her daughter who lived 20 kilometres away.

The chastisement reserved for individual women can be scaled up, and generalized to an entire caste