The witching hour

There are some crimes that cannot be conceived by the modern urban consciousness and seem to have defied the imagination of the law-giver, crimes like child sacrifice, for instance, or the branding of women as witches. A recent report from Raipur that this newspaper carried, indicates how prevalent is the practice of hunting down so-called witches in the tiny hamlets of interior Madhya Pradesh 8212; or those of UP and Bihar, for that matter 8212; and how futile have been the efforts of the local administrators to check the heinous crime.

The fear of the witch has, of course, been something of a leitmotif in human civilisation. In medieval Europe, the Church and the Inquisition played a particularly reprehensible role in chastising, torturing and killing thousands of women believed to possess supernatural powers and termed 8220;sorceresses8221;. It was not just Joan of Arc who burnt at the stake, but numerous nameless, faceless women, who paid for their behaviour, or the knowledge and property they possessed, by being subjected to public trials and executions. The notorious trial of witches in 1692 at Salem, Massachusetts, which was so effectively recreated by Arthur Miller in his play, The Crucible, saw some 30 punished severely by the primitive justice system of Colonial America. Many of them happened to be children. These practices reflected belief systems of pre-modern societies, but what prevails in places like Raipur today is an irksome compact of old means and new ends. Sometimes, unscrupulous elements in these far corners of theRepublic exploit the widespread fear of witchcraft among tribal or non-literate communities in the most cynical fashion possible. For instance, the Express reported the hunting down of Lata Sahu in Bijli village, Raipur. The unfortunate woman was stripped naked, dragged and paraded, and all to settle political scores, since she had once entertained ambitions of being a sarpanch.

There are other reasons too for women to be subjected to such humiliation and injury. Often, it could be a case of higher castes interested in keeping potential upstarts from lower-caste communities in place. The terror they can instill by labeling the woman a tonahi is instantaneous and efficacious, through the quick mobilisation of the lynch mob. In other instances, it may be nothing more than a family dispute or an effort to rob a woman of her property. There are then very material reasons for these displays of atavistic barbarity, even if they are sometimes accompanied by religious ritual. In Bastar, for instance, tribals carry the image of their god on their shoulders, and believe that the idol indicates the presence of witches. The difficulty the police and local administrators face in dealing with cases of witch-hunting is precisely because of this quasi-religious fervour that often accompanies it. This, compounded by the remoteness of the regions where such practices flourish, makes punishmenta very distant prospect indeed.