Propitiating Evil Fate
"The attackers armed with machetes and other crude implements descended on the village and took away Moni Orang from her house and then brutally killed her."
"She was decapitated and her limbs were chopped off."
Senior Police official Manabendra Dev Roy
"Moni was a witch and had cast evil spells on her enemies. ... There is no place for such sorcerers and so her killing is justified."
Villager, Indian state of Assam
"It generally happens in places where there is almost no economic development, with little or no access to basic education and health care."
"In this kind of an atmosphere, people tend to develop very strong superstitious beliefs and anything bad that might befall these villagers like a bad crop, diseases, sudden and unexplained death of someone in the family, or drying of a well tends to be considered the work of some evil 'witch'."
"Thus begins a witch hunt to locate the person responsible."
Rakesh K. Singh, Indian scholar
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| Police say villagers blamed a woman for their illnesses |
While in one part of the world, a billionaire Russian high-tech entrepreneur is using a portion of his vast wealth to fund a search for extraterrestrial life in the universe with the blessing of astrophysicist Dr. Stephen Hawking of worldwide renown, harnessing the world's most powerful radio telescopes and millions of computers to create the world's most powerful computing system, in India backward tribal peasants have resorted to witch-hunting to cure their societal ills.
Should there exist in that vast universe intelligent minds they would without doubt consider it abhorrent that their societies in coming in contact with our blighted one might inconceivably be infected with human stupidity. Little wonder years of searching in the vast and timeless space of the universe there have been no signals detected that might alert our anxious searchers to the presence of other life-forms; they would shrink from contact with us.
A self-appointed "goddess" incited a mob in the Indian state of Assam to accuse a woman of 60 of witchcraft. A mob of some 200 barbarians descended on the woman's home, and tore her away from her family. She was beheaded, her body dismembered. She was a member of an ethnic group taken to the province by the British as workers on tea plantations during the British Raj. They are Adivasis people, poor and uneducated.
Witch hunts appear to be on the rise in some parts of India. A year ago a woman in Bihar by the name of Saraswati Devi was beaten to death after having been forced to eat human excrement. The villagers who perpetrated this disgusting atrocity on the woman then found it useful to kill her. A year earlier, in the state of Jharkhand, no fewer than 54 women were accused of witchcraft, and then murdered.
In this latest bewildering instance of human bestiality in the tribal state of Assam, in the village of Bhimajuli, Anima Ronghanti, 35, "who claims to be a goddess", brought people at a temple to the belief that the Adivasi woman was a witch and her presence would bring ill fortune to the village. She had already, claimed the goddess, caused people in the village to fall ill.
That being the case, the people had little option left to them but to murder the woman and to behead and dismember her. The deed done, they could return home confident in the certainty that they had contributed to the village's future increased good fortune.
Teerath Sahu was paraded naked through her village and beaten until she fainted after a witch doctor accused her and two other women of being witches [Baba Tamim]
Labels: Crimes, Human Relations, India, Social Failures
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, July 23, 2015
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