Ranchi, India - Chutani Mahto says she does not want any woman branded a witch after she went through the ordeal 27 years ago.
Mahto’s neighbours in eastern India forced her to eat faeces and drink urine after a villager died from an illness blamed on the 46-year-old’s perceived black magic powers.
“It was very humiliating and I don’t want any woman to face a similar situation, even in her dreams,” said Mahto, one of a group of victims who has taken up a fight against such superstitions.
Mahto is a member of a troupe of women entertainers who perform street plays in villages urging people to shun the superstition across eastern Jharkhand state, one of India’s poorest and where witch-hunting is prevalent.
The street plays tackle the theme with a storyline familiar to many villagers: someone dies of illness, the death is blamed on a ‘witch’ and the woman is ostracised, tortured and in many cases killed.
Jharkhand state, which has a population of 27 million, accounted for a quarter of all murders nationwide attributed to witch-hunting in 2004, the year for which latest figures were gathered, the Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) said.
“There is no black magic. If a witch has special powers, then how come she can’t protect herself against villagers?” asks a woman in the drama.
There are no national statistics on the number of such cases, but the practice is prevalent in more than half-a-dozen of India’s 29 states with large tribal populations.
“Around 45 cases of murders related to witchcraft are reported in the newspapers every year from three states of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Assam,” said Suhas Chakma, director of the New Delhi-based ACHR.
About a dozen more cases are reported from other states, Chakma said, adding it was difficult to know the exact number of cases as many went unreported.
Activists say prosecutions of witch-hunters in Jharkhand are rare despite a state law called the “Prevention of Witch Practices Act”.
“The law is not sufficient to curb the problem,” said Ajay Kumar, a member of the Free Legal Aid Committee (FLAC), which works against witch-hunting and domestic violence.
“There is provision for only two years’ imprisonment for witch-hunters,” he said.
The organisation estimates the number of such murders in the state at more than 900 since 1991.
Apart from superstition, property disputes also drive influential people to label women as witches to grab their land, activists say.
And the suffering often continues for several generations of a family.
Poonam Toppo, 29, a director of FLAC, recalled how she was ridiculed at school after her grandmother was accused of practising black magic.
The awareness programme was launched more than a year ago and a majority of the state’s 24 districts now host these shows twice a month.
Activists said the campaign was making a difference.
“Earlier there used to be four or five cases cases in every village in a year, but now we hear of one or two instances,” Toppo said.