Fires of Superstition

Bihar’s crumbling state governance is ensuring that witch-hunts remain a grim reality in India’s heartland.

Bihar

When a mob in rural Bihar set five members of a family on fire for alleged witchcraft, it was reminiscent of the bad old days for an often-disparaged state. It reflects poorly that India, a nuclear power with ambitions of becoming a global leader, continues to permit medieval violence to fester unchecked in its hinterland. In Purnia district, a woman named Sita Devi was blamed for the illness and death of a neighbour’s child. What followed later in the backwater Tetgama village was governance failure in its rawest form.

Fifty people barged into the family’s home, beat them with bamboo poles, doused them with inflammables, and set them alight. Five corpses were later found dumped under water hyacinth. A 16-year-old boy, Sonu Kumar, barely escaped.

In most countries, such a gruesome act would provoke national outrage, emergency interventions and even high-level resignations. But in India’s tribal and rural interiors, witch-hunting remains both a social practice and a symptom of broken policing, caste tensions, entrenched patriarchy and a political class that would rather look away.

The Purnia massacre is far from isolated. In 2021, five women were dragged out of their homes in Jharkhand’s Bokaro district and bludgeoned to death for allegedly casting evil spells. In 2022, in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj, an entire family was lynched on suspicion of practising black magic. In Khunti, Jharkhand, in 2015, women were stripped, paraded naked, and beaten for supposedly causing illness in the village. In Dumka, Bihar, in 2020, an elderly woman was tied to a tree and killed after a child died mysteriously.

Women, particularly those who are elderly. The charge of ‘witchcraft’ becomes a social weapon to settle scores, grab property, or reinforce caste and gender hierarchies. The official justification is always illness, death or misfortune. But beneath lies a more calculated cruelty that the state has done little to deter.

It is not that laws are absent. Jharkhand passed an anti-witchcraft act in 2001. Bihar and Odisha followed with their own legislation criminalising witch-hunting and penalising those who instigate or participate in such acts. But enforcement is sporadic at best. Police are either absent, under-staffed or under pressure to maintain the fiction of rural harmony. Arrests, when made, are symbolic. Villagers admit to witnessing the violence but did not intervene.

This erosion of justice is a structural malaise. Rural India, particularly tribal belts in eastern states, suffers from a yawning governance deficit. Health systems are fragile, schools ineffective and state institutions distant. In such a vacuum, centuries-old beliefs fester. Disease and death, instead of being understood through medicine, are interpreted as curses. The local ‘ojha’ or witch-doctor gains more authority than the district magistrate.

The state’s response is unforgivably weak. Awareness campaigns are patchy and underfunded. Witness protection is non-existent. Political leaders avoid confronting the issue for fear of offending dominant local sentiments. The result is an informal apartheid of reason.

The human cost is severe. According to India’s National Crime Records Bureau, over 2,500 women were murdered between 2000 and 2020 after being branded witches. Jharkhand alone has accounted for over 500 such killings. The actual number is likely higher, given widespread under-reporting and the quiet collusion of local elites in suppressing such cases. And behind each statistic is a story like that of Sita Devi - of someone beaten not just by neighbours, but by an indifferent republic.

India cannot hope to ascend on the global stage while tolerating medieval violence in its villages. The fight against witch-hunting is not just about superstition but restoring the primacy of law, reason and basic human dignity. That requires political courage, sustained education and institutional reform.

Tetgama, the village where five people were burned to death this month, is not cursed. But it is condemned by neglect, by silence and by a state that shows up after the fires have cooled.