March 22, 2007	Thursday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 2, 1428

LONDON: When I first encounter Sona Bindya, this small 10-year-old girl is perching barefoot on a mound of rubbish, squinting into the sunlight by the side of a cratered road. Beckoned to the car, she sits primly on the back seat in her grubby clothes, confidently answering my questions.

Her nickname is Pinky, she says. Except for a mouth full of adult teeth, she looks young for her age.

Until a few months ago, Sona lived in a one-room hut in an unremarkable slum hamlet of just 12 buildings with her mother, Ramani. Ramani had been bringing Sona up alone since her husband died from an unknown illness. Every day at 6am Ramani left home for her job as a labourer (painting the factories in an industrial area in the eastern Indian state of Jharkand), returning home 12 hours later.

One night in January, Ramani and Sona were fast asleep when two neighbours broke down their rickety front door and dragged Ramani out of bed. As Sona fled to a neighbour's hut, she saw one of the men's hands cover her mother's mouth and another close round her throat. Next morning, no one stopped Sona from seeing the pools of blood that had darkened on her doorstep. On the railway line 100m away, Ramani’s mutilated body had been dumped on the tracks. Her severed limbs pointed in opposite directions.

Ramani’s death was not reported by India’s rolling news stations and fast-proliferating newspapers, because, sadly, there was nothing distinctively “new” about the way in which she had died. Specifically, her death was the result of being branded a witch.

Police in Jharkand receive around five reports a month of women denounced as witches, but nationally the figure is believed to run to thousands. These incidents usually occur when a community faces misfortune such as disease, a child’s death or failing crops, and a woman is suddenly made a scapegoat. Those whose lives are spared face humiliation, torture and banishment from their village: some are forcibly stripped and paraded in public; some have their mouths crammed with human excreta or their eyes gouged out. The belief is that shaming a woman weakens her evil powers. And because these crimes are sanctioned by the victim’s community, experts say many of them go unreported.

Ramani and her neighbours belong to one of the country’s many distinct tribes, who speak their own language and hold animist beliefs, insulating them from mainstream Indian society. The country’s “tribals” are among its poorest people, often living without access to doctors, schools or electricity. People in the neighbourhood are predominantly of the Ho tribe, having migrated from their ancestral forests to the fringes of this part of urban India, carrying with them superstitions and a belief in the supernatural.

Although police have arrested three men in the hamlet for her murder, none of the locals condemns Ramani’s killing as a crime. Sona now lives with another family in a nearby village, and as I walk with her through her old neighbourhood, other residents avert their eyes. In the aftermath of the murder, many have fled until the dust settles. Those who remain are evasive. Even the murdered woman’s own cousin denies any knowledge of what happened. He says he came back to the slum at 10pm that night. “I went straight to sleep so I didn’t hear anything and I don’t know anything,” he says.

Ramani was killed because she had been deemed a malignant force, wreaking death and misfortune on the hamlet. When a child fell ill in the slum, diagnosis and solutions were sought, as usual, from the resident medicine man or ojha. The ojha is a central figure in the community, believed to have insights into evil forces affecting the health and wealth of the village. When his magical incantations fail to cure a patient, he turns to divination, gathering together water, oil, leaves, twigs, vermilion, a mirror and dung, asking the villager for the payment necessary for him to enter a trance. He then hints at, or directly names, the “culprit” behind the illness. In this case, the ojha told the father of the sick child that Ramani was to blame, says Sona, and claimed that taking her life would lift the curse.

This violence is part of an India that has perhaps been obscured by stories of its software boom and nuclear prowess; a culture sometimes forgotten amid news of such successes as the steel company Tata, which recently swallowed British giant Corus.

Caught between the clash of tribal India and the modern-day nation is Shubhra Dwivedy, chief executive of Seeds, a Jharkand-based development organisation that focuses on girls and women. In the decade that Dwivedy has shuttled between the villages and her urban office, she has seen no decline in witch-hunting. “It’s been so deeply ingrained for generations, socially and culturally, that it can’t just be undone,” she says.

A Seeds report explains that the “witch” label is also used against women as a weapon of control; branding a woman is a way to humiliate her if she has refused sexual advances or tried to assert herself. And the deep fear of witches can also be whipped up to grab a woman’s land or settle old family scores. “It is easy for influential villagers to pay the ojha to have a woman branded to usurp her property,” states the report.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service