Why are women being killed as ‘witches’ in Jharkhand? | True Story

[00:00:03]We only hear about witch hunts [music] when women are murdered.

[00:00:07]>> Who are these women who are being killed as witches?

[00:00:09]>> So, a lot of victims of witch hunting tend to be from Adivasi and lower caste communities. Very often, if someone falls seriously ill in a village or someone dies, then it's easiest to blame a woman. And there is a lot of resource extraction and massive deforestation [music] that's happening. The violence that emerges because of such massive dispossession and oppression, it's not getting getting an outlet. [music] What ends up happening is that you pick the most vulnerable person to let out that violence on.

[00:00:40]>> Has the government [music] actually tried to address this? Has the government done anything about it?

[00:00:45]>> People I spoke to on the ground said that belief in witches is part of the belief system of communities.

[00:00:53]>> [music] >> One or two sessions on how [clears throat] witch hunting is illegal is not going to improve things.

[00:01:20]>> Women killed after being labeled witches.

[00:01:23]This isn't a line from a medieval era text. It's from news reports that appear every now and then about women in rural India being killed on the suspicion that they practice witchcraft.

[00:01:35]The headlines are sensational.

[00:01:37]But the reports rarely tell you what's behind the violence.

[00:01:41]There's actually a whole lot, as my colleague Nolina Minj found out while reporting from the villages of Jharkhand, the state that sees the highest number of such murders.

[00:01:51]Hi, Nolina.

[00:01:52]>> Hi, Supriya.

[00:01:53]>> Nolina, what were the patterns that emerged in the course of your reporting?

[00:01:57]What did you find? Who are these women who are being killed as witches?

[00:02:01]>> So, a lot of victims of witch hunting tend to be from Adivasi and lower caste communities, also known as Mulwasi communities in Jharkhand.

[00:02:10]Um over the years, there's this pattern that has emerged, which is that, you know, they tend to be elderly, they tend to be widows or unmarried women, or they'll be women from economically weaker families, or in some cases their husbands will be alcoholics.

[00:02:26]Um so, largely women who are um easier to prey upon. And um in terms of geographical spread, a lot of these women come from villages which are deep in the interiors. So, often times there's not a lot of health care access available in those villages.

[00:02:44]>> That's very interesting. How is health care linked to witch hunting?

[00:02:48]Uh the fact that you said that villages with poor access to health care are where women are more vulnerable. What explains that?

[00:02:55]>> So, actually a lot of times um witch hunt accusations begin because um people in villages where there isn't a lot of health care end up going to um Ojhas or witch doctors for their health care needs. And um very often, if someone falls seriously ill in a village or someone dies, um then it's easiest to blame a woman, and a vulnerable woman. So, um people say that, you know, once there is regular proper health care access available, um people go to the doctor, and they stop going to witch doctors, and lesser people fall sick or people heal faster.

[00:03:39]So, yeah, some people tend to see um witch hunting as um people being deprived of uh adequate health care. It's very striking that uh women are being blamed for disease and sickness in the community. But you also mentioned that women from Adivasi communities are especially vulnerable.

[00:03:57]Why is that so?

[00:03:59]>> So, um a lot of the accusations actually come from within the community. So, it is other Adivasi men and other Adivasi women who are accusing these women of being witches.

[00:04:11]Um I spoke to a lot of people on the ground and researchers and community members.

[00:04:18]And what I found was that um there is this understanding that Adivasi communities are going through massive upheavals, right?

[00:04:28]Um and this has been going on since like the past 200 years. First, the British came in and then the Indian state.

[00:04:35]Um and there is a lot of resource extraction and massive deforestation that's happening, which threatens Jal, Jangal, Jameen, which is the um foundation of Adivasi tradition and lives.

[00:04:52]So, um people tend to think of it in a way that um the violence that uh you know, emerges because of such massive dispossession and um oppression, um it's not getting an outlet. People uh are not able to challenge these larger power structures.

[00:05:14]And so, what ends up happening is that you pick the most vulnerable person to um let out [clears throat] that violence on, which is women.

[00:05:24]>> Again, uh all this while, we've always thought of Adivasi communities as being more gender equal.

[00:05:32]And the fact that women in these communities are vulnerable, are being accused of being witches, and are being killed, uh sits very uncomfortably with uh you know, this general impression of of considerably greater gender equality.

[00:05:45]Um but another story, Dolina, that you reported also uh put the spotlight on another very uncomfortable fact, which is that Adivasi women are denied inheritance rights over ancestral property.

[00:05:57]>> Yeah. So, um actually, this is because of uh Adivasi customary law. So, the Indian Constitution Article 244 and um the Fifth and Sixth Schedule offer significant powers of um self-governance to tribal communities um both in mainland India and northeast India.

[00:06:20]And so, when it comes to inheritance rights, um at least in central and eastern India, uh Adivasi women do not traditionally inherit ancestral land.

[00:06:31]And that's that's been the tradition and it has sustained so over the years, even though other um very progressive laws have come up, you know, for religious communities and women are able to inherit um ancestral land in the rest of India who are from non-Adivasi communities.

[00:06:49]>> But but this has been legally challenged in the courts, right? Adivasi women have gone to courts asking for inheritance rights?

[00:06:56]>> Yes, that's true.

[00:06:58]Um over the years, several Adivasi women um have gone to the courts and challenged this uh customary law.

[00:07:06]Um a lot of times, we have to understand that these women are coming from rural areas. They are not very economically empowered. Um they also lack social standing, so it takes a lot for them to even approach the courts.

[00:07:21]And um in my reporting, what I found was that um when they approach low courts, most of the times, they're just shut down there. They're not even able to file cases because they're told that this is your customary law and this is how things have always been. This cannot be challenged.

[00:07:35]Um but women have gone to the high courts. Women have gone to the Supreme Courts.

[00:07:41]Uh recently, last year in fact, um, there was a major, um, case in Chhattisgarh, um, which went up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court ruled that customary law cannot override constitutional rights, and that female exclusion from inheritance is discriminatory.

[00:08:00]>> And what was the reaction within the community to this? Was there Was this welcomed?

[00:08:05]>> So So women were, um, women who especially who have been, um, struggling for land rights were definitely, um, overjoyed at this verdict. Um, but the community was not necessarily happy.

[00:08:19]Uh, there is a pervasive fear amongst Adivasi communities that if women are allowed to inherit ancestral land, then outsiders, that is non-Adivasi men, will find a way to lure Adivasi women and grab Adivasi land. And that would mean the end of essentially fifth schedule areas because, um, land grab is the one major problem that, um, Adivasi areas are facing today and since a long time now.

[00:08:53]>> Well, we have a lot to talk about, but just a digression at this point. As you can see, Nalina brings a lot of depth and understanding to the stories that she reports. She's among a handful of Adivasi journalists reporting in the national media. You can literally count them on one hand.

[00:09:12]Um, we're really lucky to have Nalina in the newsroom, not just for the nuance she brings to her reporting on Adivasi communities, but all the reporting that she does on marginalized communities at large. If you'd like to support her work, please consider subscribing to Scroll.

[00:09:28]Nalina, back to what you were saying.

[00:09:30]Women were in fact at the center of a campaign by the Bharatiya Janata Party in the last assembly election precisely this claim of love jihad, land jihad, which is Muslim men are luring Adivasi women in order to grab hold of Adivasi land. You actually investigated this. What did you find?

[00:09:49]Was this true?

[00:09:51]>> No, this was not true.

[00:09:53]Um so I actually traveled to Sahibganj district of Jharkhand to investigate um uh these very specific claims made by uh a BJP leader who um went on the news on news media and she read out a list of 10 names of women who um she claimed had married um Muslim men and um had been subjected to love jihad or land jihad.

[00:10:17]So what I found was that um four of these claims did not hold true at all because um three of the women were married to Adivasi men.

[00:10:29]One woman was uh married to an outsider.

[00:10:33]She didn't marry within her community, but she had married a Hindu man and not a Muslim man.

[00:10:38]And the remaining six women had indeed married Muslim men, but I went to each of their homes and I spoke with them at length and they had all married with their consent and they had not been forced into these marriages and were very happy in their marriages in fact.

[00:10:56]>> And given that Adivasi women do not have inheritance rights to land, there was hardly a case where their husbands were able to take over their family land, right?

[00:11:05]>> Exactly. That's the exact same thing that they told me.

[00:11:09]>> Well, regardless of the truth, the fact is that they are really serious deep anxieties in Adivasi society about land dispossession and much of this comes from actual lived experiences. It's just that um you know, it's the state and corporate groups that have been taking away Adivasi land at a large scale. You recently traveled to Bokaro where one of India's first thermal power plants came up in the 1950s.

[00:11:36]Uh Adivasi land was taken for the project. This is a project that temples of modern India, one of the temples of modern India.

[00:11:43]All these years later, what's happened to the Adivasi community that lost its land to the project?

[00:11:50]>> Yes.

[00:11:51]Um so, these are actually communities who are living around uh what is now the Chandrapura thermal power plant.

[00:12:00]And um it's very unfortunate because um the community living there presently, it was their ancestors who were displaced in the 19 in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

[00:12:16]And um none of them ever received proper compensation or were given uh were rehabilitated properly.

[00:12:26]So, a lot of communities ended up um shifting over to farmland that they had nearby, but some communities didn't have any land left to go and live on.

[00:12:39]And so, they're now living on like these fringes of land around the power plant.

[00:12:44]And you know, you you can find like really poor Adivasis, but they often the one thing that is going is going well for them is that they own that the land that they live on. But unfortunately, these communities do not even own the land that they live on. So, the fear of displacement is ever present. And um what has happened is that the communities living there now have never really experienced the um benefits or advantages that the temples of modern India was supposed to deliver, which was both economic and human development.

[00:13:23]Um communities there are still struggling for basic needs like drinking water, electricity, and proper roads.

[00:13:33]>> Well, imagine living in the backyard of a thermal power plant and not having electricity. There's just been decades of of injustice done to Adivasi communities not just in Jharkhand, but we see that in Chhattisgarh, in Madhya Pradesh, in Odisha, virtually across Central and Eastern India.

[00:13:49]Um uniformly government welfare doesn't seem to be reaching these communities.

[00:13:54]One of the stories that you reported, Nolina, looked at one specific Central Government scheme, the PM Janman Yojana, uh which is meant to bring welfare to particularly vulnerable tribal groups.

[00:14:05]These are PVTGs. Um you know, again, in terms of numbers, these are small communities. These are communities that often live in remote interior villages.

[00:14:14]You actually traveled to those villages.

[00:14:17]What did you find? Was the scheme actually successful on ground?

[00:14:21]>> Yeah.

[00:14:22]Um the scheme, unfortunately, uh I did not deem it very successful because what I found on the ground was that um people were not really aware of what the scheme was meant for.

[00:14:36]Um when you read the scheme online about the scheme online, um it has very overarching provisions. So, it's supposed to help with education, livelihoods, health care, all sorts of things.

[00:14:50]But the one main thing that it's supposed to do is also construct multi-purpose centers in villages. And so, these centers are again supposed to um offer educational or health care or livelihood opportunities or trans schemes and programs.

[00:15:10]I went to a village where um the multi-purpose center was coming up, and I could tell that it was the center because of the I it was the same architecture in every single village.

[00:15:24]So, I went to four villages.

[00:15:26]And people there told me that the center was going to be a Shadi Mandap. Mandap. It was going to be a marriage hall for um weddings. And I was like, "What scheme did uh the government start to uh introduce marriage halls for people?"

[00:15:45]And they were like, "We don't know the scheme, but this is definitely a marriage hall."

[00:15:49]>> Because the government never really bothered uh communicating with the local community, not even with local representatives, right?

[00:15:56]>> Yes, exactly. It did not.

[00:16:00]And in the other villages I went to um the centers were mostly just locked away. And in one particular village, which was really high up on a hill, um people are again struggling for electricity. They don't have access to um piped drinking water.

[00:16:18]But the multi-purpose sits there locked.

[00:16:22]>> That's classic top-down approach which we've seen not just in Adivasi areas of Jharkhand, but also in Chhattisgarh, in Madhya Pradesh, in Orissa.

[00:16:30]Um coming back to witch hunting, has the government actually tried to address this? Has the government done anything about it?

[00:16:39]>> Yes, the government has um spent a lot of money on awareness campaigns to stop witch hunting.

[00:16:47]And um the unfortunate fact is that these campaigns do not seem to be working.

[00:16:53]Um people I spoke to on the ground said that um belief in witches is part of the belief system of communities.

[00:17:04]And one or two sessions on how witch hunting is illegal and it's superstitious is not going to um improve things.

[00:17:14]Um my reporting also proved this, because I uh visited a village where two women were brutally murdered. And while people in that village weren't very open and talkative, there was an adjoining village 5 minutes away where people still said that they believed in witches. And they also remarked that um the people in the village where those two women were murdered, um they seemed to be doing way better now and they were healthier.

[00:17:49]>> So, awareness campaigns are only scratching the surface as most government interventions in Adivasi areas do.

[00:17:55]Um, there's a lot for us to talk about.

[00:17:57]Uh, Nalini, your reporting from Jharkhand has been very rich. Uh, but we're running out of time now. There's one thing though I wanted to ask you about. When you joined our newsroom, you were based in Mumbai.

[00:18:08]But, you said you wanted to move to Jharkhand. You wanted to report from the state.

[00:18:13]Why did you want to make that shift? And how's it been for you as a journalist?

[00:18:19]>> Yeah. So, um Jharkhand is actually my home state. I have visited the state ever since I was a child. Um, every winter, some summers.

[00:18:31]And um I grew up in Delhi and Bombay, so I never really heard a lot of stories from Jharkhand.

[00:18:39]And I basically wanted to tell stories or rather find out what the stories from that region were and find a way of telling them.

[00:18:50]Um, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha are also very under-covered states um when it comes to the news media.

[00:18:58]So, yes, that shift was important for me to be able to tell these stories.

[00:19:05]>> And that shift was very good for us as a newsroom and for our readers. Thanks for all the work that you do, Nalina.

[00:19:13]If you'd like to support the work of Nalina and other Scroll reporters who bring stories to you that the rest of the media ignores, please consider subscribing to Scroll. The information is in the description below. Thanks for watching.