Witches are still hunted in India—and blinded and beaten and killed

AT LEAST Ramkanya Sen is alive. The grandmother spent three weeks locked in a windowless storeroom in the searing heat, refusing to eat, until a tip-off alerted a journalist to her predicament. The rescue came just in time, say doctors who revived Ms Sen (pictured) at a government hospital in Bhilwara, a small city in southern Rajasthan. Sent home in August, she is still weak, shaken and disoriented, but safe for now.

Indian police records suggest that on average more than 150 less lucky women die every year for the same reason that Ms Sen was locked away: being fingered as a dayan (witch). They are burned, hacked or bludgeoned to death, typically by mobs made up of their neighbours and, sometimes, their own relatives. Ritual humiliation often precedes death. A suspected witch may expect to be stripped naked, smeared with filth, dragged by her hair and forced to eat excrement. Kanya Devi, from a village 120km north of Bhilwara, had all those things done to her on August 2nd. The 40-year-old mother of two was also blinded with red-hot coals and severely beaten. She did not survive.

Tara Ahluwalia, the head of an NGO in Bhilwara that defends women from violence, says that of the 86 witch-hunts she has documented in the past two decades in the surrounding district, which has a population of 2m, only three have led to death. Yet nearly all the cases have ended with severe and lasting ostracism, or forced banishment. “The worst thing is the social stigma,” she says. Whole families suffer, she explains: no one will marry into them and they often end up feuding with one another when it turns out that a close relative was after the supposed dayan’s land.

To own a property that someone else covets is one of several risk factors. Being a Dalit (formerly known as untouchable), or belonging to a caste that happens to be both lowly and uncommon in the area, does not help. The family of Ms Sen, for instance, belongs to a “helper” class. Her husband is a barber, a profession considered unclean. They were the sole Dalits among 60 households of Jats, a poor but proud landowning community.

The trouble started when Pooja, a 16-year-old Jat girl, developed pains in her belly. Her family took her to a bhopa, or shaman, who quickly detected witchery. Either Pooja herself or someone else suggested the source might be Ms Sen, who sometimes sits on a doorstep close to Pooja’s school, and had acted a bit oddly since accidentally banging her head a few years ago.

Witch murders are concentrated across the centre of India, in the largely rural states of Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha. All have large populations of tribal peoples, among whom illiteracy is common.

Five Indian states have passed laws that explicitly penalise accusations of witchcraft, and in some cases can punish entire communities. But the example of Rajasthan, which passed one of the most comprehensive such laws in 2015, is dispiriting. Despite the filing of 50 cases since then—seven by Ms Ahluwalia herself—not one has been prosecuted. “Now that we have one, why aren’t they using the law?” she asks. “Because the police have no will to act.” That said, she notes that the problem is often better dealt with by reconciliation.

Ms Sen, for her part, does not seem to want the police to get involved. It is all too confusing. The Jats had first warned her family to banish her or keep her out of sight. Then they came in a mob, beat her husband and threatened to burn down the house, until her three sons calmed them with a promise that they would imprison their own mother. So who is the criminal? Besides, says Ms Sen, “I am old and my children and grandchildren have to live here.”