At least four elderly members of the tribal community, including a couple, were dragged out of their houses and beaten to death by an enraged mob on charges of practicing witchcraft in the interiors of Jharkhand’s Gumla district, about 100 Kilometers west of capital Ranchi, in the wee hours of Sunday.
“Prima facie, it seems that they were killed on the suspicion of practicing witchcraft. The four victims were dragged out of their houses and taken to the village’s Akhra, where they were beaten to death at around 3.30 am on Sunday,” said Gumla’s Superintendent of Police, Anjani Kumar Jha.
Akhra is a meeting point, usually at the centre of a tribal village, where villagers hold regular meetings to address social issues and organise events for entertainment.
The fact that the perpetrators chose the Akhra for executing the crime indicates that some of the locals might be behind the act, police sources said. It also indicates that the perpetrators wanted to project the crime as an act done for safety of the villagers,
they added. The police recovered bloodstained batons from the spot.
The incident occurred at Piskari village in Sisai block. The tribal-dominated village, police said, is at least 15 Kilometers away from the Sisai Police Station. The deceased have been identified as 62-year-old Suna Oraon, 60-year-old Fagni, 67-year-old Chapa Bhagat and his wife, Piri Devi, 60. “During interrogation, some of the villagers admitted that the deceased were involved in occultism,” said Jha.
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Four lynched in Gumla for practicing ‘witchcraft’
While the recent mob lynching of Tabrez Ansari in the State’s Saraikela district has already painted a negative picture of Jharkhand, Sunday’s incident adds impetus to the need of putting a check on the trend of mob justice in the interiors of the tribal state.
Superstitious practices in the interiors have remained a major concern for the Government here since several years. The tribal dominated state witnessed at least 590 cases of witch-hunting from 2001 to 2018, says combined figures of the State police and the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). According to NCRB, Jharkhand witnessed maximum incidents of witch-hunting in India from 2008 to 2014. Besides, several incidents of occultists trying to resurrect dead people and women getting married off to snakes and dogs to ward off evil spirits have been reported from far off villages here in the past, highlighting the extent to which superstition is embedded in the rural lifestyle in Jharkhand.
Despite several initiatives taken by the State to spread awareness against witch-hunting and other superstitious beliefs, Jharkhand has failed to bring an end to violence triggered by superstition. Activists, however, say that many cases of witch-hunting are actually coldblooded killings executed with the motive of ending property disputes and silencing the growing voice of dissent among women in villages.