Global Courant 2023-05-13 14:00:33
They let the young woman into their house and closed the door behind her. Then the beating started.
“You’re a witch,” one of the attackers yelled, as she, her parents and her uncle delivered punches, kicks and blows to the 26-year-old woman’s stomach, chest and face.
When the beating finally ended after nearly two hours, the young woman was pulled out by her hair, dragged through her village and dumped unconscious next to a temple, her clothing barely clinging to her battered body.
The attack, in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand in 2021, was proof that India is still struggling to eradicate the age-old scourge of witch-hunting, despite a series of laws and other initiatives.
For centuries, the branding of witches was largely driven by superstition. A crop would fail, a well would run dry, or a family member would fall ill, and villagers would find someone—almost always a woman—to blame for an accident they couldn’t understand the cause of.
Superstition didn’t leave. But witchcraft accusations are now often just a means of oppressing women, say victims’ advocates. The motives may be to conquer land, to exile a woman to settle a score, or to justify violence.
In the Jharkhand case, the young woman who was assaulted, Durga Mahato, said the trouble started when she refused the sexual advances of a prominent man in the village. He, his brother, his wife and their daughter then declared that Mrs. Mahato was a witch before luring her to their home and attacking her.
Ms. Mahato, her husband, Nirmal, and a local police officer described the attack, with the prominent man threatening to rape her, she said. All four attackers have been charged under anti-witch hunting laws; the man and his brother are out on bail after serving a few months in prison.
For Ms. Mahato, the consequences of being labeled a witch didn’t end with the savage beating. She was not allowed to swim in the village pond and draw water from the communal tap. A wooden fence was built around her house to prevent her from wandering into the village. Villagers blame her for problems such as the death of a cow. Only a few people talk to her now. She still has pain in her waist and back.
“What did I do wrong, that God gave me such a huge punishment?” she said one night recently, sitting on a bright yellow charpoy, a woven bed, outside her brick home. “Call me a witch all you want,” she added, bursting into tears.
“I have three young children. I don’t dare think about suicide,” she said.
Witch-hunting still exists to varying degrees in nearly a dozen Indian states, mostly in indigenous tribal areas in central and eastern parts of the country, experts say. Many states have passed laws against practice. Some, like Assam, have made the punishments more severe, with provisions of life imprisonment. Others, such as Odisha, have supplemented legal efforts with setting up memorials to victims at police stations to sensitize people.
Women labeled as witches had their fingernails pulled out, forced to eat feces, paraded naked, or beaten black and blue. They were burned or lynched. More than 1,500 people have been killed in India between 2010 and 2021 following witchcraft accusations, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.
Witch hunts are particularly common in Jharkhand, a mineral-rich but poverty-stricken state where indigenous tribes make up about a quarter of the population. The attack on Ms. Mahato was one of 854 witchcraft cases recorded in the state in 2021, 32 of which resulted in death.
Jharkhand has taken a hands-on approach to address the practice. A state-run program called Project Garima has deployed about 25 “witch-hunt prevention teams,” who hold street games to raise awareness. Village-level protection committees help survivors of violence. Centers have been set up to provide legal aid and short stay arrangements for victims. Workers manning a help desk call survivors directly to get an update on their psychological and economic status.
But law enforcement can be weak. Madhu Mehra, the founder of a women’s legal aid group, said her organization, in a study on witch-hunts in three states, including Jharkhand, found that the police usually intervened only in cases of murder or attempted murder. That, and the difficulty of changing entrenched beliefs, has helped allow the practice to persist, activists say.
While state officials had set 2023 as target year for banning witch-hunts, officials said they are now moving the target back by at least three years.
In Ms Mahato’s case, the most helpful help came not from the government, but from another victim of the witch hunt, Chhutni Mahato, who has been recognized by the Indian government for her efforts to eradicate the practice.
Durga Mahato’s aunt had heard about Chhutni Mahato’s work (the two women are not related). Durga found shelter in Chhutni’s house with mud and tile roofs for weeks after spending two weeks in the hospital.
Chhutni Mahato’s broken teeth testify to the torture she once endured at the hands of villagers who blamed her for a girl’s illness. She ran away and started working for a non-governmental organization years later.
She often bursts into police stations demanding action in witch-hunt cases and berates village chiefs over the phone. Victims now reach her through word of mouth. She has helped more than 150 women in the state.
One of them is Dukhu Majhi, who lives in a picturesque village a few hundred kilometers from Mahato’s Durga.
In Mrs. Majhi’s case, suspicion fell on her simply because she did not live up to the neighbors’ expectations. Villagers wondered how a “normal woman” could live alone with her young children, deep in the woods, while her husband was away for work.
Then they labeled her a witch.
“If someone has a stomach ache, I get the blame. If a headache occurs, I will be blamed. They stood outside my house and shouted, ‘She is the witch who gives us grief,’” Ms Majhi said. “I’d answer: Do I become a witch just because you say so?”
Last July, villagers chased her with axes and sticks. She ran home; they banged on the door and tried to break it open.
“I clung to my children. We were all shaking,’ Mrs Majhi said.
She and her husband went to the police to report the incident. Pintu Mahato, a local police official, tried to downplay the matter.
Mr. Mahato, recently sitting on a plastic chair outside the police station, said the matter was resolved by the village elders and everyone was living happily together again.
He clearly hadn’t followed the case.
Ms. Majhi had in fact moved out of her home shortly after the attack. She and her family took shelter with Chhutni Mahato for a few days before finding a room near a larger town. Her husband found a new job.
Occasionally they visit their house in the middle of the woods to check on their meager belongings and their vegetable garden, and to give their children a chance to stretch out on the charpoy beds.