Palani, India - At sundown, Pusanidevi Manjhi recalled, nine village men stormed into her house shouting, "Witch, witch!" and dragged her out by her hair as her six small children watched helplessly.
"This woman is a witch!" the men announced to the villagers, said Manjhi, 36. She said they tied her ankles and locked her in a dark room.
"They beat me with bamboo sticks and metal rods and tried to pull my nails out. 'You are a witch; admit it,' they screamed at me again and again," Manjhi said, tearfully recalling four days of captivity in June in this village in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand.
"They accused me of casting an evil spell on their paddy crop that was destroyed in a fire. I begged them and told them I was not a witch," she said, showing wounds on her legs, thighs, hips and shoulders.
After a police investigation, the men who attacked Manjhi were arrested. An official said the attack was spurred by a powerful landowner who used local superstition to mask his attempts to maintain control.
Indian newspapers periodically publish reports about women who, after being accused of being witches, have been beaten or killed. Some reported that their heads were shaved or strings of shoes were hung around their necks.
"Superstition is only an excuse. Often a woman is branded a witch so that you can throw her out of the village and grab her land, or to settle scores, family rivalry, or because powerful men want to punish her for spurning their sexual advances. Sometimes it is used to punish women who question social norms," said Pooja Singhal Purwar, an official at the Jharkhand social-welfare department.
"Women from well-to-do homes in the village are never branded witches," Purwar said. "It is always the socially and economically vulnerable women who are targeted and boycotted."
Purwar said she sees an average of five women a month being denounced as witches and tortured in rural Jharkhand. Her department has a public-information project to oppose the practice, providing information at village fairs and conducting street performances and puppet shows. Local police have been alerted to track cases of women who are attacked, she said.
While her captors imprisoned Manjhi, her husband, a farmhand, sought help from village elders, who called a meeting to determine whether Manjhi was a witch and summoned a witch doctor for verification. By then, word spread and the police arrived.
The nine men were charged under a Jharkhand state law that forbids accusing people of being witches. One was Gahan Lal, the man whose paddy had caught fire. Lal later confessed to torturing Manjhi.
"Gahan Lal was a powerful landlord. There were fights all the time in the village over land and wages," said Jayant Tirkey, the police officer investigating the case. "When his paddy caught fire, he blamed [Manjhi] for casting an evil spell. But that is merely an excuse. His real motive is to instill fear among the poor."
Tirkey said he thinks village witch doctors are to blame for superstitious practices but added that witch doctors are not arrested because they are not directly involved in the violence.
"I never name a witch. I only give villagers some clues to find her," said Leena Oraon, who is known as a witch doctor in Aragate village and who says she studies rice grains to ascertain the presence of a witch in the village.
According to a study by the Free Legal Aid Committee, only 2 percent of people charged with witch hunting are convicted.
"People go scot-free because witnesses are hard to come by. Villagers often approve of the torture meted out to these women," said Girija Shankar Jaiswal, a lawyer who heads the committee. "They think witch hunting is a heroic act and that it will clean the society of evil."
Only two Indian states, Jharkhand and Bihar, have outlawed witch hunting. Last year, after a daylong debate, the legislative assembly of the northeastern state Tripura unanimously decided that killing people for practicing witchcraft should be prevented.