|
|
|
Friday
June 30
7.30AM
Indian Witch Hunt
A
darkness has descended on the tribal belts of India. Desperate villagers are
heading out on witch-hunts, and women suspected of witchcraft are being
beaten and murdered. Heads are turning up at police stations. Nobody knows
when this madness will end knows when this madness will end or why it ever
began. Follow journalist Sohaila Kapur as she seeks out the accusers and the
accused to find the causes behind the suspicions and the hunts. And descend
into the world of witchcraft to meet sorcerers practicing their craft. |
Witchcraft is still
widely believed in and ‘practiced’ in many backward parts of India.
Jharkand in Ranchi has been dubbed ‘the witch-killing hub of India’
by journalists where women suspected of witchcraft are attacked and
not seldom killed. Historians have estimated that, in Europe until the
17th to 18th century, ca. 40,000 women were killed as witches, often
by burning at the stake. (The latest well-known witch trials in
an industrialised or developed Western country were those
at Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.) In Jharkand, five hundred cases of
witch hunts were reported in the 1990s, and they continue to occur.
The State ratified an Anti Witch-hunting Law, resulting in 400 arrests
since 2000. The journalist Sohaila Kapur - author of
“Witchcraft in Western India” followed one headline-grabbing witchcraft
killing for National Geographic TV Channel. A teenager, Gurudas
Mardi took the severed head of his aunt Maina Mardi to the police station,
having cut off her head while she was grazing cattle in her field. The
reason he gave was that his eldest brother had contracted a fever and
died within one day, his father had died within three years and his
elder brother was currently ill in hospital with the same symptoms.
Gurudas believed his brother would be cured due to his having killed
his aunt as a witch. However, all agreed that Maina had long been as
a mother to him. Gurudas was condemned for murder and is currently serving
in Ghatasila prison in Jharkand.
There
were 7 such cases in Jharkand in as many years. Most accused ‘witches’
are widows. Mostly, others benefit from their deaths or banishment from
their home and property. Part of the witchcraft rationale is that, if
prayers can heal at a distance, so can they also harm from afar. The
belief in black magic is backed up by practitioners of it, such as -
in this case - the Tantric ‘guru’ Baba Ramashankar of the popular
Kali temple at Kamakilija. National Geographic filmed the ‘guru’
and three female disciples carrying our sacrifice rituals so as to obtain
magical powers, including biting the head off a live chicken.
The death spells they cast involved use of snakes and scorpions too.
The ‘guru’ stated that the spells can cause love, hate and confusion.
Sohaila
Kapur did a follow-up investigation on the deaths in the family which
Gurudas Mardi believed due to his aunt’s witchcraft. His remaining
brother survived due to hospital treatment for TB. The doctor testified
that both the father had died from tuberculosis and had infected Gurudas’
two brothers.
Further,
Sohaila Kapur filmed the local female witch doctor who Gurudas’ family
had approached and who had pointed the finger at Maina for witchcraft
holding a trial in the village temple. While so doing Kapur was approached
by a distraught man whose mother was about to be pointed out condemned
as a witch by a same witch doctor in the village temple. A big local
landowner’s daughter was ill and many medicines had failed, so witchcraft
was suspected. Because of the TV cameras, the priest dared not to make
the announcement that the person was a witch and the villagers backed
her up. Instead the witch doctor directed for a tree to be blighted
and predicted it would die within two weeks. Of course, no effects on
the tree were visible weeks later.
The female
victims of witch hunts invariably have to seek police protection and
mostly are ostracised and so driven by the villagers to leave their
homes and even give up their properties, their houses etc. often being
burned to the ground. The harrowing lives they then live is seen clearly
in the interviews in the documentary. Inspector Mishra of Jharkand police,
who had arrested Gurudas, blamed the widespread ignorance and lack of
medical information and care in the area for the locals’ reliance
on witch-hunting.
The
police authorities do not always take any action to protect persons
persecuted for witchcraft. This is shown by the petition (by a person
accused of witchcraft) in the High Court at Mumbai published earlier
in Indian Skeptic. That this petition was deemed necessary (a tortuous
and costly procedure in India) and that it was subsequently dismissed
in favour of the police authorities’ account, illustrates clearly
the parlous state of affairs in the Indian police system and judiciary!
This is the same judicial system that judged that Sathya Sai Baba had
not contravened the Gold Control Act on the grounds that he materialises
gold out of thin air! Further, the attempt by Hari Sampath (supported
by two of India’s most famous lawyers) to get a Writ Petition against
Sathya Sai Baba considered was refused on a technicality by his own
devotee judges in the Supreme Court.
|