Download Witch hunts targeting women are common in central India.
And the pre-dominantly tribal state of Chhattisgarh is among those with the highest number of cases.
Women accused of witchcraft are often blamed for illnesses, deaths and even bad crops.
Dozens are killed every year on suspicion of being witches.
The state passed the Witchcraft Prevention Act in 2005 but the hunts continue.
Gayatri Parameswaran travels to the state of Chhattisgarh to meet a group of people working to dispel myths and protect persecuted women.
It’s Sunday afternoon but the state’s university lecture hall is packed with students, mostly from surrounding tribal areas.
On stage, Dr Dinesh Mishra is performing an experiment.
He’s a doctor who heads an NGO that fights against the harassment of women accused of witchcraft.
He squeezes a wedge of lime onto a white sheet of paper. The extract leaves red stains on the paper which looks like real blood.
The trick seems familiar to students as village doctors often perform it as witchcraft, still part of India’s rural culture.
He explains that this is a chemical reaction, not black magic.
Having come across hundreds of cases of women accused of being witches, Dr Mishra says the main reason for the phenomenon is poor education.
“In Chhattisgarh, almost 99.9 per cent of the cases of witch-craft accusations I come across are because of illnesses and diseases. The biggest reason for the “witch phenomenon” is blind faith, illiteracy and lack of awareness. People are not informed about diseases. They think that someone can fall ill because someone did some black magic. We talk to these people and tell them that every disease and disorder has scientific reasons. We tell them, nobody falls ill because someone performed witchcraft. People fall ill because of bacteria or fungus or viruses. We ask them to look through a microscope and see what these beings look like. We ask them to read their children’s textbooks.”
Working in a private hospital, Dr Mishra deals with patients every day. Some of them are victims of village quack doctors.
“I met a patient who couldn’t walk because he was suffering from paraplegia. The villagers around him believed that someone had performed black magic on him. He went to the local witch doctor or a quack who told him that he’d saved him from death. Since the patient couldn’t travel to a hospital, I went to the village with a friend. The villagers told me that they were treating him. But I found out that the village quack was just performing bogus rituals on him. They would bring the patient on a bullock cart to the quack and pay the quack 200 to 400 USD. They would sell their jewels for that or get into debt for offering that kind of money. They were very poor, vulnerable people.”
And when the patients are not healed, the quack doctors often blame someone in the community – often a woman – for the illness.
The accused woman is then harassed by the villagers.
Local newspaper reports suggest there are more than 200 witch hunts across India ever year.
Chhattisgarh leads the table along with a few other states in central and eastern India.
In 2005, the state passed the Witchcraft Prevention Act which carries a 3-year sentence for those who accuse women of practising witchcraft.
Three women in Lachkera, a tiny village about 80 kilometres from the state’s capital, fought for their rights using this law.
Twelve years ago, villagers accused them of being witches because of a fight in the village over religious matters.
Teerath Bai tells me what happened that day.
“They took away all our clothes and set them on fire. And there we were sitting without any dignity in front of the village – without clothes. They had shaved our heads. We were crying, all three of us women. There was no one, in the name of god, to stop any of this. And my friend, Bisahin Bai, had her period and kept bleeding from down there. The onlookers were all sitting and laughing, applauding! Oh God! Then they asked us to jump in the fire. “Come on jump, come on jump.” We refused and then they announced in the village: “Everybody shut your doors and the women stay indoors. These witches are going to walk naked in the village.” They paraded us naked through the village. Oh my God!”
They were humiliated and brutally beaten for over eight hours. They were lucky to survive.
In many cases, witch accusations turn fatal. State officials say a dozen women are killed every year.
With help from a local women’s rights NGO, Teerath Bai took her case to court in 2006.
Shashi Sail heads the women’s group that assisted during the trial.
“It is a positive law, it is in support of the women. It has done good for the society as such that there is a fear now that this law can be used. For the woman who has been victimised or accused of being a witch, we have witnessed a change in her attitude that she no longer feels helpless and with very little support, moral support and encouragement from an organ..., a women’s organisation, she is ready to walk all the way for justice.”
Remarkably they became the first women to ever win a legal victory in such a case.
But the 17 men convicted of assaulting them only served a year in prison.
The women were awarded over 2,000 US dollars in compensation, but they have only received money for medical expenses.
According to the group, more awareness about the law is required for real progress.
Back in the university lecture hall, Dr Dinesh Mishra vows to keep educating people against the blind faith in so-called black magic.
“What’s happening these days that we have a lot of educated, young, local leaders who understand what we are trying to do. But the environment in a village is such that an elderly person presides over major decisions. People respect and follow orders of an older person. These are strict hierarchies that cannot be opposed. If he agrees that someone is a witch, no young kid, whatever his qualifications are, can oppose that.”
The road, he admits, is still a bit rocky.
