This document provides an introduction and overview of "witch" hunting related violence against women in Jharkhand, India. It discusses how women accused of being "witches" face severe physical and psychological violence, including assault, rape, and murder. It notes that "witch" hunting disproportionately impacts women and violates their fundamental rights. The organization Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiatives (AALI) aims to address this issue through legal support for victims and their families. While "witch" hunting is often seen as a tribal practice, evidence shows it also occurs in non-tribal areas. The document acknowledges those who made the research and report possible and provides an index of topics to be covered.

1. Where There is No Road to Justice-
“Witch” Hunting Related Violence against
Women and The Law in Jharkhand
Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiative
407 Dr. Baijnath Road, New Hyderabad Colony, Lucknow Utter Pradesh – 226007
Ph: 0522-2782060, Fax: 05222782066; email: aali@legal.org

2. PREFACE
When Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiatives set up office in Jharkhand in the year
2013, we knew that the issues we address and challenges we encounter shall be unprecedented
for us. The nature of violation of human rights of women through gender based violence in the
context of Jharkhand manifested in forms that was, if not new to us conceptually, definitely
demanding of newer strategies of intervention. “Witch” hunting related violence against women
was one such issue where facilitating women’s access to justice posed a great many challenges
that required much introspection and deliberation on our part. While the wide prevalence of
witch hunting related violence and the sanction it receives from the community is reflected year
after year in government data and media reports from various sources, it is also highly
conspicuous that many of the cases do not reach the formal institutions of justice delivery at all.
The discourse around “witch” hunting related violence is often moulded in a language of
“superstition,” and “custom,” validating the state’s “non-interference” in many ways. Further,
Jharkhand poses challenges of accessibility in difficult geographical terrains, thus complicating
the acknowledgement of the violence by the state. Thus, in our experience, cases of “witch”
hunting are often not cognized by the state unless women have lost their limbs or their lives. This
testifies for the justice system’s inability to protect the fundamental rights of dignified life and
liberty for women. An understanding of these gaps has given us pressing reasons to make
attempts to change the discourse around “witch” hunting related violence as a simplistic
“cultural” life-way to it being a blatant violation of women’s human and fundamental rights as
enshrined in the Constitution of India and under various international instruments that oblige the
state of India to protect women from all forms of discrimination, exclusion and violence. Further,
it has also become important for us to ensure that more and more women, irrespective of how
“unserious” the community or state assumes the violence to be must be given full and proper
access to justice as substantially as is guaranteed by Law. As an organization committed to
ensuring women their human rights, and holding a unique insight through grassroots work in
Jharkhand on the issue vis-a-vis casework and advocacy, we believe that a multi-stakeholder
coordinated response to “witch” hunting related violence must be advocated for as soon as
possible. Hence, this research, which we believe is the stepping stone to ensuring this vision.
Renu Mishra
Executive Director
Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiatives (AALI)

3. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We would like to thank Edelgive Foundation for their support in making this research and
publication possible. Their constant interest and encouragement have been valuable to us.
We would like to acknowledge the sincere efforts of our colleagues and team mates for
anchoring this research and seeing it through to its fruitful end. We would like to thank Reshma,
Kanak, and Babli for collecting these narratives from the field, Himalika and Pratikshya for
drafting this report and Shubhangi for moulding and shaping the study throughout its course with
her insights.
Finally, we would like to thank all the informants in the study to have agreed to participate in the
research and allowing us to take a leaf out of their lived experiences.
Team AALI

4. INDEX
1. Introduction……………………………………………………………
i. “Witch” Hunting related violence in Jharkhand
2. Methodology……………………………………………………………
i. Research Objectives
ii. Research Design
3. Emerging Themes……………………………………………………..
i. Labeling of “Witches”- Penalizing non-conformity
ii. Inaccessibility to the Police
iii. Preference for alternative dispute resolution
iv. Lapses in Investigation
v. Lack of Witness Protection in Cases of Witch Hunting
vi. Lack of awareness on the rights and processes
vii. Inaccessibility to Courts
viii. Speed of Trial
ix. Absence of feminist and rights based critiques in the Judicial Narratives
x. Lack of access to victim compensation
xi. Inadequate number of legal awareness drives
4. Conclusion and Recommendations…………………………………..

5. I. INTRODUCTION
“Witch”-Hunting is a prevalent practice in many parts of India. Rooted in the harmful
stereotypes and patriarchal socio-cultural conventions that discriminate against women
throughout the subcontinent, “witch”-hunting is a persistent inhumane reality with life-changing
implications of directly affecting the life and liberty of the people who are victimized by it and is
incompatible with India’s Constitutional guarantees to its people. While “witch”-hunting affects
both men and women, the numbers are heavily skewed towards women who are mostly the
primary victims of the practice. Men, on the other hand, are mostly affected in the ways that they
have ancillary relationships with the women who are branded as “witches” in terms of family
and kinship, though men may also be labelled as “witches” occasionally. Having said that, it is
important to recognize and acknowledge that “witch”-hunting disproportionately affects women.
In fact, just the prevalence of a multitude of terms to describe women as “witches” in the
vernaculars such as dayan, daini, dahani, tohni, chudail, and the like makes it evident that
“witch”-hunting is dominantly gendered.[1]
Most negative events in the community are attributed
to the so called “diabolism” of the women who are not conventionally in the communities
control or have greater mobility a.k.a. “witches” and organized efforts are made to either
dispossess the woman of her assets or completely annihilate her. This is done in a number of
ways - by creating an image of mysticism and fear around the woman as a veil and
simultaneously maligning her and her mere existence, sometimes going to the extent of inflicting
grave physical and psychological violence on her or her property. Agarwal and Mehra (2014)
observe, that in some cases, “witch”-hunting might be accompanied by extreme brutality and
violence such as but not restricted to forcible stripping, being paraded naked in public, cutting or
tonsuring of the hair, blackening of the face, cutting off the nose, pulling of the teeth to ‘defang,’
gouging out of the eye, whipping, gang rape, forcible consumption of human excreta, cow dung,
or other noxious substances, sexual assault, and killing by hanging, hacking, lynching or burying
alive.[2]
All of these acts recognised as one or another form of violent crime under the Indian
Penal Code, 1860. Besides these, the psychological stigma of name-calling 1
and social
ostracization figure as prolonged trauma for the woman. Other material costs come in the form of
1
Shiv Singh Sahay, “The witches of Jharkhand,” The Hindu (2016) https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/The-
%E2%80%98witches%E2%80%99-of-Jharkhand/article16933528.ece

6. economic losses such as withdrawal of access to livelihood opportunities and resources, forcible
displacement from home and/or dispossession of agricultural lands. Women labelled as
“witches” are systematically deprived of their rights and entitlements by breaking down their
social and economic standing, provided they actually survive.
Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiatives (AALI), established in 1998, is a women-led and
women-run human rights organization committed to the protection and advancement of the
human rights of women, children and other marginalized communities through direct
intervention, capacity building, research and advocacy. With direct field presence in Uttar
Pradesh and Jharkhand, AALI has been providing technical support to various human rights
organisations and groups across India. Through its journey in Jharkhand since 2011, AALI has
closely identified many cases of “witch”-hunting through its regular media scanning and is now
also providing legal support to the families of women who have been subjected to grave violence
on “witch”-hunting accusations. “Witch”-hunting amounts to violations of women’s fundamental
rights under Part III of the Constitution, i.e., it deprives a woman of her Right to Equality under
article 14, the prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place
of birth under article 15, the Right to Protection of life and personal liberty under article 21
which espouses within it the right to life with dignity and prohibition of torture. "Witch" hunting
also violates the Protection of the interests of minorities under article 29 of the Constitution.
"Witch"-hunting also amounts to a violation of the terms of international human rights law
including those in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights and Convention of Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
Women. With this backdrop AALI recognizes that "witch"-hunting entails grave violations of
women’s human rights and thus, there is a need to make evidence-based interventions in the
issue.

7. “Witch” Hunting related Violence in Jharkhand
Most of the literature available on "witch" hunting in India has taken the dominant perspective
that "witch" hunting is mostly a Tribal phenomenon. At the same time, an evidence based study
of the trends on "witch"-hunting in three states, i.e., Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Bihar offers a
perspective different from the present scholarship on the issue.[5]
While "witch"-hunting has been
considered a practice prevalent mostly in tribal societies, an analysis of the cases registered with
the Police suggests otherwise. Citing data from Police records, a report published by Partners for
Law in Development says,
“Studies show that "witch" hunting was originally associated with tribal communities, but that is
no longer the case. Out of the 88 primary victims in the police records, data about caste was
available for 80, out of which only 10, that is 12.5%, belonged to the ST. The highest number of
victims – 30 – were from the SC; from the remaining, 24 were OBC, 14 were from the General
category and two were Muslim. It is inferred from the names of the appellant/accused in the case
law that as many as 29 cases out of the 59, that is approximately 49%, involve non-tribals as the
accused.”
However, for Jharkhand, the Police records do not reflect the registration of a lot of cases. The
above statistic is based on data from Police record for 88 cases from three states, out of which
only 9 cases were from Jharkhand. Since the report does not represent a disaggregation
according to social category with respect to cases from each state, there is ambiguity as to
specifically in Jharkhand, what number of victims would belong to what social category. The
huge gap between the number of cases that the Police records reflect and the visibility of such
cases in the media and in anecdotal history shows not just discrepant documentation practices of
the Police but could also indicate a deliberate non-registration of complaints.[6]
In this situation, a
look at the case studies that PLD picked up on its own from selected districts in the three states
shows that for Jharkhand, 86.66% of the victims belonged to the Scheduled Tribe category.
Thus, while "witch" hunting might not be a strictly Tribal phenomenon taking into consideration
the data from all three states, it definitely shows a typical prevalence among the tribal
communities in Jharkhand and therefore, could be read as being a Gender Based Violence with
deep roots in the power structures of the community in the context of Jharkhand.

8. The National Crime Records Bureau released the “Crime in India Statistics” report for the year
2016 which included data for all states and UTs regarding murders committed wherein
"witchcraft” was the motive for the crime. According to the report, Jharkhand tops the list of
murders committed over witchcraft accusations with 27 such murders being reported from the
state in one year.[1]
An aggregation of data under the same head since 2001 shows that 523
women had been lynched by branding them witches till the .year 2016 in Jharkhand which is the
highest in the country.[2]
Yet, there are other sources of information that suggest that the numbers
might be actually much higher than reported in government statistics. For instance, in a written
response to an MP, the Minister of State for Home, Hansraj Gangaram Ahir used data from
Police records to inform that 44 women had been killed under the guise of witchcraft in 2016 as
against 27 women as quoted in NCRB data.[3]
Similarly, the Police data says that in the year
2015, 51 women had been killed over accusations of being witches while NCRB statistics report
the numbers as being 32.[4]
Additionally, a look at the media reports collated by AALI on
instances on accusations of witchcraft against women shows that as many as 56 instances of
witch hunting related murders or violence have been reported in the media in 2016 while 25 such
cases in 2015 received media attention. A number of such cases that are highlighted by the media
are not even reported to the Police or taken cognisance of by the Justice Delivery mechanism. On
the other hand, an analysis of the 66 cases intervened in by paralegal community based
caseworkers supported by AALI in 13 districts of Jharkhand show the following identity
distribution.

10. For the 66 cases that AALI has intervened in for the years 2017-2018, the levels of intervention
have been the following:
As is visible in the data above, most of AALI’s intervention in cases of witch hunting has been
with regard to assisting in filing or following up on FIRs with the police, which overwhelmingly
skews the graph. It is important to understand at this point that AALI’s caseworkers get to know
of the cases only when the violence has escalated to points where it is not perceived as “normal”
by the community anymore and they feel compelled to let the caseworkers know during
investigation. Thus, in all cases where AALI’s caseworkers have helped the survivor file an FIR,
serious IPC criminal sections can be seen accompanying the special law against witch hunting.
Further, laying bare the details of intervention would show that caseworkers have had to
intervene at the stage of the police because of how difficult it is for the survivor to access and
navigate the power dynamics with the police all by herself.

11. II. METHODOLOGY
a. Research Objectives
1) To understand the complex socio-political contexts in which “witch”-hunting related
gender based violence is based.
2) To assess the accessibility of the survivors or families of victims to the institutions of
criminal justice system and their experiences with it.
3) To understand from the experiences of the families of the victims as to how social
reintegration processes in accordance with law are being implemented.
b. Research Design
The design for the study followed a Qualitative Research Methodology. We engaged in an in-
depth Case Study of 10 cases of survivors/victims of Witch Hunting and examined their contexts
and their journeys within the Justice Delivery System.
i) Field of Study - The study took place in 8 districts of Jharkhand, with informants drawn from
all the districts. The districts of Ranchi, Khunti, Lohardaga, Garhwa, Chatra, Sahibganj,
Koderma and Dumka came under the purview of the research.
ii) Methods -
➢ Case Studies- The study entailed analysis of 10 case studies brought forth through
accessing files in the district courts. An analysis of the FIRs, chargesheets, order sheets
and judgments in these cases was made to understand the perspective of the Justice
Delivery Mechanism in cases related to witch hunting.
➢ Interviews- Semi-structured, in-depth interviews with victims’ family members,
investigating officers, lawyers and public prosecutors having prosecuted cases of witch-
hunting related violence and survivors/survivors’ families of such violence were
conducted.
➢ Secondary Sources- Any existing rules and laws, judgments from Supreme Court, High
Court, and Trial Courts and existing researches and materials supplied literature for the
study. Information obtained under RTI Act was also examined.

12. iii) Sampling - Purposive Sampling methods were followed wherein 10 cases were particularly
identified for the study. Within the 10 cases so identified, an attempt was made to speak to the
said stakeholders as mentioned before.
iv) Informants -
➢ 5 Family members of 5 women victims of witch hunting related violence from 3 districts
of Jharkhand, namely, Khunti, Gumla and Ranchi.
➢ 6 paralegal community based caseworkers from 6 districts of Jharkhand, namely, Dumka,
Chatra, Koderma, Lohardaga, Sahibganj and Garhwa.
➢ 2 Investigating officers from 2 districts of Jharkhand, namely, Gumla and Khunti
➢ 4 Public prosecutors and lawyers from Khunti and Ranchi
➢ In addition to conducting semi-structured personal interviews with the above mentioned
people and analysing the ongoing cases they were concerned with, we further textually
explored another five cases based on the documents we obtained from the court.

13. III. EMERGING THEMES
1. Labeling of “Witches”- Penalizing non-conformity
Though witch-hunting is often associated with notions of simply “superstitions,” scholarship
suggests that these superstitions are not as unfounded or independent of the socio-economic
relationships within the community. Mehra and Agarwal (2016) point out that interpersonal
jealousy, conflicts, tensions and sexual advances often become important reasons for the
violence perpetrated against women in the form of witch-hunting. These are rooted in the
complex nature of relationships within the community and transgression from the norms which
potentially unsettle the terms of these relationships.[1]
Thus, single/widowed women or assertive
and powerful female figures in the community often become the subject of these perceived
transgressions and are at the end of such violence.[2]
Nathan, Kelkar and Satija (2013) further
deconstruct these notions of “superstitions” by bringing in the concept of “envy” or “hisinga”
that is a well-established schema in many tribal socio-economic life worlds. They propose that
with the change in the production orientation of many rural indigenous communities from
subsistence driven economies to accumulation driven economies and a decline in the prevalence
of a dissipation process such as community feasts, witch hunting became a “leveling”
mechanism to prevent accumulation. With increasing state control over forest land, limited
agricultural opportunities within kinships made it more difficult for the families to bring new
land under cultivation and ensure growth. As such, newer avenues of gaining wealth were
explored. Newer needs were created with better education and medical facilities and
communication expansion ensured that more and more people moved from agriculture to trade
and service based occupation. Nathan, Kelkar and Satija (2013) suggest that with such newer
forms of accumulation of wealth and limits on the dissipation potential of the wealth by sharing
because of steady inflow, witch hunting became a leveling mechanism wherein envious members
of the community would target women of the house where such wealth was being accumulated.
They would be accused of having accumulated such wealth by the use of some evil or occult
practices or in other words, through witchcraft. This wealth, therefore, had to be non-sanctioned
since it had been accumulated by persons who were not supposed to accumulate it. Thus, witch
hunting has gained communal sanction through such ‘leveling’ practices that are intimately
related to economic relations within kinships. Besides this, Kelkar et al. (2013) and Bosu-

14. Mullick (2000)[3]
both argue that with the patrilineal descent system could be a major reason for
the practice of witch hunting. Bosu-Mullick (2000) elaborates on this by saying that with the
decrease in communal access to forests because of privatization and state control, women’s
dependence on agriculture has increased, leading to an increasing assertion of women’s
traditional rights on family land for independent survival. As such, witch hunting, killing and
driving out of women labeled as “witches” is a deliberate attempt by the menfolk in the kinship
to oppress such assertive voices and restore women’s economic dependence on men.
Sundar (2001) and Mehra and Agarwal (2016) seem to suggest that the fundamental nature of
witch hunting is such that it is typically followed by events of illness or death in the community.
In such instances witchcraft is rationalized as being the only explanation for such occurrences
and this becomes the basis for witch hunting. Sundar (2001) and Mehra and Agarwal (2016)
believe that lack of proper education, health facilities and sanitation, land and livelihood are the
primary reason why the practice has still sustained. Sundar (2001) cites instances where witch
hunting has even obtained state sanction in the past in Chhattisgarh as the state received benefits
from the renting out of the ang deo or the hunting palanquin during the ritual. Thus, there exist
strands of opinion that suggest that witch hunting has more than just economic or socio-cultural
relations behind it. It is also actively sanctioned directly or indirectly by the state, its
infrastructure and its law and order situation.
Thus, the rich literature around witch hunting related violence speaks of the exhibition of the
gender based violence in a specific nature. It is often centered around escalation of matters when
typical consequences of poor access to healthcare services, education or other such civil rights
arise. The trend of the sampled cases shows that while the women against whom witch hunting
related violence occurred were not isolated cases of physical violence. The incidents of violence,
beginning with labeling, have taken place over a sustained period of time culminating in physical
violence leading to death. In situations as such, even though the special law also recognizes the
need for penalizing offences such as labeling and verbal abuse, the incidents have failed to enter
the system, indicating the normalization of these practices in the area.

15. Analyzing cases files reveals some common threads that speak for theoretical perspectives on
witch hunting related violence. The victim from Hoont in Khunti is a single mother who bore her
children while she was in a live-in relationship with her partner. She had recently moved back
into her brother’s home and was taking care of her children by herself. On the other hand, the
victim from Bishunpur in Gumla was a landowning woman who was involved in land dispute
with the accused. Similarly, our interviews with community based paralegal caseworkers
revealed that they have encountered cases where women who are heads of households, especially
women whose husbands are either disabled or unemployed. paralegal caseworker from Koderma
shares, “In one case that I saw, the woman’s husband was mute. She used to take care of the
entire household. This did not go well with the community people. They probably wanted to take
her house and property.”
Thus, these patterns indicate that women who held any resources or position of power in the
community, or those who stepped out of socially defined roles within institutions of marriage
and family, are more vulnerable to such labels and violence. Further, another revelation during
the process was the patterns through which grave physical violence was precipitated. During
field work, we were told a number of times by informants that witch hunting was a result of
“superstitious beliefs” prevalent in the community. The idea that witch hunting is a form of
superstition seemed to be common knowledge. However, it is noteworthy that despite the
reiteration of this understanding, violence against women in the name of witch-hunting
continues. In communities where there is a basic lack of accessibility to healthcare and
education, death and ill health continue to act as smokescreens for perpetrating this systemic
form of gender based violence.
2. Inaccessibility to the Police
The police play a very important role in setting the justice delivery process of the state into
motion. The major process of recognizing the crime through the filing of an FIR and the
subsequent investigation and filing of charge-sheet is done by the police. Hence, it is important
to record and understand the experience of the survivors of violence, or the families or friends of
the victims of the violence with respect to their interactions with the police.

16. “Our experience with the police has been good. They helped me take my wife’s body to the
hospital, and also helped us in registering an FIR. We don’t know how to write, so they wrote it
for us and then we signed it,” says victim’s husband, aged around 60, a resident of Narkopi, a
district on the outskirts of Ranchi. He lost his wife, to an isolated incident of witch hunting in his
village, Khardewari, where his neighbor, attacked her with a sickle after his son died. He called
her a witch and blamed her for his son’s death. At the time of the incident, the victim was alone
at home. Her son and husband found her in a bleeding state when they returned from the field in
the afternoon for lunch. They rushed to the police station. They were familiar with the officials
and had friendly relations with them. The police helped the informant take his wife to the
hospital, but she died on the way. The informant and his son, who was also present when his
father found his mother in a bleeding state said, “The police gave us their van to take my
mother’s body for post mortem. They also gave us money to eat lunch along the way.” The
informants spoke to us at length regarding how the police were friendly with them and helped
them a lot following the incident. However, when asked whether they had been provided with a
copy of the said FIR, the son replied that they had not been provided with any such document.
They were under the impression, though, that an FIR had been registered positively because the
police had written the facts of the incident and made them sign the document.
In another case of witch hunting in Gumla, around 90 kms from Ranchi, a victim whose case we
were able to explore was shot by a gun outside her home in the night by a few young adults from
their clan in the village. They had previously called her a witch, and did so before firing the shot
too. On discovering the news regarding the incident in the newspaper, the team decided to visit
the victim’s husband at his village of Champa Toli to interview him. It was a difficult drive,
mainly because of the rugged terrain, unpaved roads, and the broken bridge. This was a large
bridge in the middle of the route that had broken down in one part and was slanting into the
waterbody below. This had been the state of the bridge for some months then, and while
construction work was active on the road around the bridge, vehicles, including ours, plowed up
and down the bridge as if it wasn’t broken.
On reaching Champa Toli, we asked around for the victim’s husband’s house, but also
discovered soon that he was not home. On enquiring about his whereabouts, we were told that he

17. had gone to collect wood, and his son, a young boy of 10 or 12 was out in the field grazing cows.
We decided to interact with the residents of the village but found out soon enough that everyone
had consciously chosen to maintain stoic silence about the incident. We struck up a conversation
with a few women working on a nearby plot of land and discovered that they had been friends
with the victim. Yet when we asked about the day the victim was killed, they told us “it was late
at night”, and “we were sleeping. We only found out the next morning. But I dont know why she
was killed.” We also spoke to the anganwadi center worker in the village. She also knew the
victim but did not know what caused her death. Two other women that we met in the village told
us that they were from the neighbouring village and did not know the victim at all, although they
had heard that she had died in the night.
The victim’s husband, our informant in the research, came back in another half an hour and
agreed to speak to us. He told us that there had been a land dispute sometime back between the
boys who killed his wife and him - they wanted the title deed of the house, but he wasn’t
agreeing to that. Soon after this, the incident took place. When asked about the police assistance
in this case, he told us that “the police helped us take the body for post mortem. However, they
have not visited me for investigation after that. They have only spoken to some other people in
the village. I have not received any monetary assistance from anyone, neither do I have a copy of
the FIR nor the post mortem.”
In none of the cases that we have been able to speak to have the family members been given a
copy of the FIR. In even fewer cases have the police visited the village of the aggrieved more
than once after registering the FIR. And yet, the informants of our study feel that the police have
been very helpful. This is perhaps a reflection of a highly tangible imbalance of power that exists
between the police and the community in our area of study, wherein any degree of response or
any attempts of the police to abide by their basic duties is seen as an anomaly so profound that
the community sees this as a “favour” rather than simply as the state fulfilling its duties to ensure
the victims their rights. It is for this reason that there is hardly any gatekeeping of the police’s
actions in the community.

18. ‘Trends in case files analyzed show that the police takes 4 days after the incident on an
average to register the FIR, with the highest gap being 10 days post incident. The charges
in all the cases analyzed showed that in all the cases, the Prevention of Witch (Daain)
Practices Act, 2001 has been used as a supplement to serious IPC offences such as
murder, criminal intimdation, breach of peace, rioting armed with deadly weapon and
gang rape.’
3. Preference for alternative dispute resolution
Our experiences of visiting the informants in their respective villages brought forth for us a
realization that perhaps could only be ascertained by being present there. In the absence of
connectivity to police stations due to lack of proper roads and means of transportation, the
struggle begins with bringing cases of witch hunting related violence into cognizance of the state
in the first place. Thus, cases of witch hunting related violence fail to reach the police unless
there are other serious offences such as physical harm or murder involved. For cases that do
manage to reach the police station on the basis of verbal violence or physical violence, and
especially in cases where the survivor herself is alive and is attempting to assert her right to
remedy and justice, the police do not treat the matter seriously. Refusal or delay in filing FIRs in
cases of witch hunting, for behaviour that qualifies under the special law, is a normalized
practice among the police. In such situations, most survivors prefer to take cases to the local
tribal panchayats or gram panchayats for dispute resolution.
Paralegal social worker from Dumka district who works with AALI as a community based
caseworker says, “Cases of witch hunting related violence are very common in the areas we
work in. “Daain” is a regular part of the vocabulary of people. Any tensions in the community,
within families or among individuals, may lead to the labeling of women involved in these
tensions as witches. There is a stigma associated with the word. Mostly when these accusations
are hurled at women, it creates the potential for more serious abuse. However, in my experience,
such cases are rarely ever taken out of the purview of the community. There is an attempt to
resolve the matter through arbitration at the level of the alternate traditional tribal panchayats
that are governed by their own systems of customary laws. Such arbitrations, of course, are
highly based on the whims and caprices of the powerful. The tribal panchayats reiterate the

19. stigma, and sometimes make decisions wherein they might force the victimized woman to pay
fines or arrange for community feasts to ‘repent.’ Such cases hardly ever reach the police
because there is an understanding that the police will not take the matter seriously.”
Another paralegal social worker from Koderma district speaks of her experience regarding
linking survivors of witch hunting related violence with the police, “Women find it very difficult
to reach the police station. Once they are labelled as witches, the whole community tends to
ostracize her. The police also tells the woman that it must be her fault that she is being labelled a
witch. They do not want to file FIRs. It is only when I go and point out to them that this is a
punishable offence that there is an attempt to register the FIR.”
Paralegal community based case worker from Loherdagga, who encounters cases of
"witch"hunting related violence while working in the community on a regular basis, shares her
experiences for the field with us, “Most women who are labelled witches are single women. They
are worried about their position in the community, which is already precarious. Such women
who go through "witch"hunting related violence often insist that the matter is settled in the
Panchayat. Sometimes the Panchayat is sympathetic and if the woman has suffered physical
injuries as a consequence of the violence, the Panchayat might extend some financial help too.
But mostly, the Panchayat reflects the sentiments of the community and does not really offer any
real relief.”
In their article, Madhu Mehra and Anuja Agrawal comment on the interaction of victims of
"witch"hunting with the law:
“It is significant to observe that a great number of cases are never taken to the police. (...) one-
third never approached the police and about one-fourth were prevented from doing so. (...) more
than half had been dismissed due to factors such as lack of proper investigation, absence of
witnesses, minor punishments to the perpetrators, compromise between the victim and the
perpetrator, etc. The police records (FIRs/charge sheets) as well as reported appeal court
judgments provide some insights into the point at which the criminal justice system begins to
interact with victimisation connected with witch-hunting. These records and judgments show that
even though the actual spectrum of violence involved in cases of witch-hunting is very broad, it

20. is usually only when physical violence occurs, often publicly orchestrated by a group of accused,
that the criminal justice system comes into play.”2
There is a clear understanding that while most survivors and victims’ families seek recourse in
the Panchayat system through alternative dispute resolution, the systems themselves are highly
biased and ill-equipped to mediate in these matters. There is a complete denial of the concept of
rights and the influence of the community in the process is clearly visible. As such, it is very
important to flag that if there is a trend visible in tracing women’s accessibility and trust in the
Panchayat systems, there is perhaps a need to build the capacities of these systems in the first
place to respond to the violence in a rights-based framework. There is also a need to point out
that the insulation that customary laws receive from critique also needs to be addressed with
concern, especially in the face where they blatantly violate the rights of women who have gone
through gender based violence in the name of “superstition” and “beliefs.”
4. Lapses in Investigation
In March 2019, we decided to visit Gumla to speak to the family members of one of the victims
we had discovered. We had received the information from a news article of the incident in a
leading daily. The incident took place in September of 2018. We visited the concerning police
station in Bishunpur, Gumla to get some facts from the police of the case before heading to meet
the family. We got to speak to the Investigating Officer (IO) of the case in order to understand
their experience of investigating in matters of "witch"hunting.
The IO on the case told us that he had taken over the case from his senior at the time who was
transferred elsewhere soon after the occurrence of the incident. He told us that this case wasn’t
one of "witch"hunting at all, it was a case of land dispute: “The victim’s husband had been in
feud for some time about his land with his cousins over the lease of his house. But he wasn’t
relenting to their demands, and hence they killed his wife.” He also told us that they hadn’t
charged the accused under The Prevention of "witch"(Daain) Practices Act, 2001, because “it
clearly isn’t a case of witch hunting”. When asked about the investigation of the case, the IO told
us, “She was killed by someone from her husband’s clan. They were trying to take the victim’s
2
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21. husband’s property. We have pressed charges of murder and the Arms Act, because the accused
killed her with a gun... I have been to the village to speak to the accused’s family. They
supported us in the case, so we could file the chargesheet within 60 days. But it was not a witch
hunting case. They only called her a witch before shooting her. In the three years I have been
here, there have been no cases of witch hunting. I mean it would have been a challenge for us,
too, if the villagers were uncooperative. But because it was a land dispute case, they were very
cooperative. I don’t think they would have been very cooperative if this were a witch hunting
case.” He further added, “Most of the villagers are illiterate. Hence there is a lot of superstition
in the villages around here. That is the foremost reason for witch hunting cases, I believe. There
isn’t that much awareness about witch hunting around here.”
When we asked them to provide us with an address for the village, the IO tried to dissuade us
from going by using the regular tropes of fear that exist for these regions in the minds of
outsiders - “it is a naxal affected region”, “the roads are not good, and there is a half broken
bridge there”. When we asked them if the appointed chowkidar of the village can accompany us
there, they told us that the chowkidar hadn’t been available for some days. They also informed us
that if something were to happen to us, they would be held responsible for not warning us, and
hence we should rethink our decision to go.
In conversation with another IO in Khunti who had investigated a case of witch hunting in which
a young woman was killed and her body dumped in a nearby forest, we were told that the reason
the police may be perceived as negligent in some cases is because of the paucity of police forces
in the area: “Due to scant police forces, we cannot concentrate on one case for too long. We
need to keep shifting our attention from one case to the other, and the nature of the investigation
may become scattered due to that.”
It is important to note that in cases of witch hunting, the police system only enters the picture
when the violence has escalated to much serious intensity, mostly in cases where the victim is
either severely injured or dead. The police often is required to investigate cases involving serious
cognizable offences. However, the police’s understanding of violence as not being a mere
isolated incident but motivated systemically in a sustained manner is lacking. The police might
not be equipped to recognize the motive behind the violence, or might deliberately invisibilize it

22. to evade accountability of a failing law and order system. Further, the inaccessibility is further
compounded by political contexts of the community, leading to complete isolation of the
community from the police, becoming a roadblock in the investigation process or further diluting
the evidence collection process. In addition, concerns of the police regarding infrastructure that
is required to navigate the investigation process in difficult territories needs to be addressed
‘For the cases sampled in the study, the average time gap between filing of FIR and filing of
chargesheets is 101 days. The law requires chargesheets to be filed within 90 days.’
Data obtained through Right to Information Act in the sampled districts regarding FIR,
investigation and chargesheeting process through the State Crime Records Bureau returned
very little substantial data. Only 5 police stations spread across the sampled districts sent us
data on their cases, despite the RTIs having been filed for more than 8 months. The trend on
data obtained from the 5 police stations can be represented as follows:
In 2015, for the 5 police stations, only 8 cases under the Prevention of DAAIN Practices Act,
2001 was registered. Chargesheets were filed in 2 of the cases. 2 of the cases were closed due
to lack of evidence. 1 of the cases was closed as false and 3 of the cases were closed citing
mistake of fact.
In 2016, out of the 4 cases registered, 1 case was chargesheeted, 1 case was closed due to lack

23. of evidence, 1 case was closed as false, and 1 was case was closed citing mistake of fact.
In 2017, 5 cases were registered in the 5 police stations out of which chargesheets were filed in
4 cases and 1 case was closed citing mistake of fact.
For all three years, in the 17 cases that were filed under the act in 5 police stations of
Jharkhand, chargesheets were filed in 41.17% of the cases, 17.6% of the cases were
closed citing lack of evidence, 11.76% of the cases were closed citing falsehood and
29.41% of the cases were closed citing mistake of fact.
5. Lack of Witness Protection in Cases of Witch Hunting
In one of the cases in our sample, a widowed woman from Khunti who had been living with her
daughter and son-in-law for sometime had been killed by the ojha whose wife was sick, and who
blamed the victim for her ill health and his accomplices, a few other villagers. While it was the
son-in-law who had filed a complaint with the police, at the time of testimony in court all the
witnesses, including him, turned hostile. They deposed that while they had seen the body of the
victim none of them knew who had killed her or how she died. The son-in-law later also went on
to deny having filed the complaint. The judgment for the case describes the hostility of the
witnesses as follows:
“The informant also specifically deposed that he did not make any statement before the police
regarding the commission of the alleged occurrence and police secured his signature on blank
paper. In absence of these material witnesses whose evidence was of no use and conducive for
the prosecution case, the prosecution could not be able to establish its own case by examining its
oral and documentary evidence.”
In another case, one of our informants from Bishunpur, Gumla, whose parents-in-law were killed
in their village after being called witches, was forced to leave their village with her family. They
did not feel safe there, and since then have been changing addresses frequently, so as not to get
noticed. In Sukridih too, a victim’s son told us that his brother and him both had to see their
parents getting lynched, but that he managed to run away from the scene eventually. He was
scared, he told us and came back only the next morning. And this fear is still there, he says. He

24. lived in a neighbouring village for some time after the incident, and now has moved back to their
previous village. But when asked whether he isn’t scared anymore, he tells us that “one can’t be
sure. Who’s to say they won’t come back and attack me or my family again?”
Community based paralegal caseworker from Garhwa district, comments on the matter, “There is
a great degree of fear among people. They do not want to lose their homes, their lands. They
know that they have to continue living in the same village. There is pressure from multiple
places, the accused and his family, the panchayat, some times within their own families to close
the matter and move on.”
Community based caseworker who intervenes in matters of witch hunting as a paralegal in
Sahibganj district, asks us, “You tell me who would be willing to risk more violence after such a
grave incident. Women who are vulnerable to witch hunting related violence are already the
most marginalized. Do you think they would want to testify against the perpetrators and lose
whatever little they have left?”
The witch hunting law in Jharkhand (The Witch Practices Prevention Act, 2001) majorly
criminalizes the abuse, name calling, use of ojhas to “cure” the “witch” and physical assault and
murder. But provisions for witness protection is absent in the Act. An act that is specific to
certain regions where this crime is taking place should also take into consideration the specific
difficulties in the region that might deter the access to justice in any way. Public prosecutor from
Khunti also tells us: “Witnesses turn hostile mostly because of fear – fear of being ostracized,
fear even of Naxalites. And once the witness turns hostile, it gets very easy for the case to get
disposed. Witness protection schemes are also not very helpful in these cases because funding
for the witnesses is fine, but till what stage is it actually possible to protect the witness? They
don’t get adequate protection and hence their feeling of fear wins. In a few cases, the people
fighting those cases are strong, they don’t get scared. They will fight till the end. They get threats
that they will be murdered or killed if they testify against the perpetrators in court. But once a
case reaches its end and the perpetrators are convicted, at least in my tenure as lawyer I have
never seen the witnesses getting killed after the testimonies were done. We try to reduce this fear
in the witnesses and the families even in our counseling procedures. All you need to do is keep

25. the fear aside. Sometimes we also scold the witnesses. For instance, in one of the cases a man
was murdered. His son was working very fast to get the case heard in court and get the
conviction, so I told him let the culprit be behind bars for a few more days, we can proceed more
leniently.” The fear that the public prosecutor speaks about is also the fear that another of our
informant PPs mentioned in his interview to us: “Fear is a very dominant emotion among the
witnesses and the victim and the victim’s family.”
The above information points to the fact compromises in cases of witch hunting are not
unprecedented. Because witch hunting related laws are mostly used as identifiers in other
cognizable IPC crimes, the cases are rarely ever compoundable in nature. However, there seems
to be ample evidence of compromise which results in the victims turning hostile. There may be
several reasons for this, based on our observations from field work. There may be various factors
playing into such compromises. Ostracization by the community, the difficulty of living in the
place of violence and fighting against it, inadequate protection and assistance provided by the
police in cases of witch hunting and the tedious nature of the trials can all become reasons why
such extrajudicial settlements might take place in such cases. Our argument is in the case of
police negligence is that while risk of ostracization is known to the victims and survivors of this
form of violence, the failure of the criminal justice system in responding ethically and effectively
comes as an unexpected outcome of the process because of the information, or the lack thereof,
of the justice system that exists among the victims and survivors.
6. Lack of awareness on rights and processes
Working on this study exposed to us the stark reality that there is a gap in communication
between our legal statutes and the populations they are meant for, often during the course of our
field work, we would find ourselves telling our informants that it is within the ambit of their
rights to ask the police what the status of their case is. But in the absence of substantial
knowledge surrounding rights, access to justice becomes a steep road. Usually the people who
are most affected by this violence feel that the police will carry out the due procedure, even if
they do not continuously speak to the police. This absence of adequate information perpetuates
the cultivation of fear and apprehension towards this system. This fear is fed by not just the
absence of an access to information, but also by the exploitation this absence of information can

26. encourage. This exploitation is mostly made easy by officials of the State, who are in the know
of the law and also understand where the absence of information can be used to skirt around a
crime.
The absence of information, though, is not only that the individuals living in the remote parts of
the country do not know of their rights and duties within the legal ambit. There is also a sense
among people that there needs to be some kind of subservience to the State. For instance, when
we asked the family members of the survivors whether they are in touch with the police who
filed their FIR about the case, or even if they have a copy of the FIR they registered, they told us
they didn’t know about the status of the case, neither did they have a copy of the FIR. And when
asked how many times the police has visited them for investigation after the incidents or if they
have given their statement to the police, they will all reluctantly say no, leading to an uninformed
acknowledgment of the police for having done the bare minimum.
What is most telling about our interactions with the different victims’ families is that they do not
have an opinion about their court cases, majorly because they do not know if their cases have
gone to court. It is the responsibility of the police to initiate proceedings in any case - by
commencing investigations, by recording the statement of the informants, collecting evidence
and by filing the charge sheet. When the police give you no information of your case, for months
after the FIR is registered, the gap between the law and the people only gets more pronounced.
Public prosecutor in the Khunti Civil Court, in conversation with us on the court procedures of
witch hunting cases, gave us an idea of this gap between the State and the people: “These areas
are self-farming areas. Most people have their own lands where they farm, as a result there is a
self-governance sentiment here. People don’t want to be governed by the state. And because the
state hasn’t been able to reach these areas, these areas are not developed at all. So there isn’t
any sentiment for being governed by the state. (...) No schemes reach the most remote villages
here. Government makes the schemes for people’s welfare, but people in the deepest interiors of
regions don’t get the benefit of these schemes. It is very difficult to traverse these places because
the geographical terrain is very rugged here. If you told me I would have to live in these places I
wouldn’t want to. I wouldn’t even want to visit these places, because it is so difficult to reach
there. So if schemes don’t reach the intended groups, what is the point of the schemes? The

27. Pathalgarhi issue ended due to the Kochang gang rape (in which five women activists were
raped by villagers in Kochang). You know why? Because it was then that roads were finally
made better so that police could reach those places.”
7. Inaccessibility of Court
At this juncture, it is important to understand is that the justice delivery system does not work in
silos. It has to take into account the lived realities of the people it has to cater to. All cases in the
sample of this study are daily wage labourers or landed farmers. Court procedures have a
tendency to be time consuming - it often involves days of going for hearings, until the final
judgment is given. While it is the responsibility of the police to ascertain that the witnesses reach
court on the assigned date and time, when we asked the IOs we met, told us that they cannot
afford to send forces to the court with the witness physically, because of the difficult terrain and
scant police forces. Devanand Rana and his colleagues in Gumla told us that they have a nodal
officer who is in charge of making sure that summons are sent to the right address and also to
provide transport for the witnesses and informants to go to court. However, according to the
respondent and his colleagues, they need to provide fuel themselves for the transport - they do
not get the fuel from the police department. Hence both the IOs and their colleagues told us that
they usually deliver the summons to the intended parties, but oftentimes they are not able to
provide transport for them. In the absence of transport facilities, and sometimes even the
information of court dates, the intended parties choose to not forego their work day and attend
court. Yetwa Munda told the team that he had gone to court to give witness testimonies, but that
the hearing was postponed that day, and he could not testify. He has not been to court after that,
and the testimony has not taken place. As a result of that, there is a gap between the justice
system and the way it has been utilized without intention.
8. Speed of Trial
For the cases in which order sheets could be accessed, we made an attempt to trace the timelines
of the effective dates of the case in order to understand where the courts stand on the question of
speed of trials. Examination of the timelines of the cases suggests that on an average, there are 1
(1.35) court dates that are pursued in the courts each month in cases of witch hunting.About
53.08% of all the court dates are regarding presentation of accused on remand. Almost 98% of

28. the dates have been effective. Similarly, for the only case in which the matter has reached the
stage of trial, a noticeable aspect is that the prime witness 1, the victim’s family member who
registered the FIR, came to the court for evidence after 6 dates. In the rest of the cases, the
matters seemed to move at a good pace with multiple effective dates. The only delay that is
visible is at the stage of evidence, which perhaps indicates not just lax on part of the state to get
summons received but could also be indicative of the sociopolitical pressures, resulting in a
deliberate absence of the victim’s family members from the trial.
9. Absence of feminist and rights based critiques in the Judicial Narratives
For our study, we also analysed the judgments of the cases that are registered in court to
understand the way the cases are understood within that space. In August of 2015, five women
were labelled witches and killed in a village in Mandar in Jharkhand. Five women were killed
when a boy died in the village. The boy had jaundice, but the villagers gathered together at
midnight to drag the women out of their houses and lynched them. The daughter of one of the
women escaped from the scene that night to go to the police station, but by the time the police
arrived, the five women had died.
AALI’s team was involved from the informant’s side in this case from the very beginning. The
Mandar case carried on till August 2018, which was when the final judgement was given. While
40 people from the village were taken into custody and were under trial, only eleven were
sentenced to rigorous life imprisonment in the cases registered against them.
In the judgment, the Honourable Judge asserted that: “superstition among the tribals is rampant
and it may be looked into by circumspection of a yearly round of rituals connected with the
agricultural cycle, along with life cycle rituals for birth, marriage and burial at death, involves
petitions to the spirits and offerings that include the sacrifice of animals, usually birds… the
psycho-analysis of the occurrence is highly needed because the occurrence was committed by a
large number of villagers and no one came forward to protect the victims and the villagers and
no one came forward to protect the victims…”

29. Defining the tribals as perpetuating superstitious values within them is to take away the realities
of the material existence of the people and the gender based discrimination faced by women. All
our informants at some point have condemned the superior status accorded to superstition in
these regions. But that is a simplistic reading of this phenomenon. Judgments around the
phenomenon say, “Freud has categorized the mind into conscious, unconscious and super
conscious. The unconscious mind is very important in a crime because the unconscious mind
contains thoughts, perceptions, memories (stored knowledge), instincts - sexual and aggressive,
fears, unacceptable sexual desires, violent motives, irrational wishes, immoral urges, selfish
needs, shameful experience and traumatic experience. The unconscious mind is the real cause of
most behavior… Normally a criminal uses shortcuts or logic to interpret arguments and prefers
short term benefits when making decisions, letting their unconscious to do the thinking and they
like simple explainable hypotheses.”
To attest this phenomenon to the unconscious, with very little commentary made on the lack of
access to education - the judgment mentions soon after this that “superstition related crimes are
on the rise in some of the Maoist affected districts and the major cause behind witch hunt is
illiteracy.” Superstition defined formally is the “excessively credulous belief in and reverence
for the supernatural.” When attested to ideas that belong to the sphere of non-materialities, it
seems to be an escape from questions of the status of education and health in these areas.
In a study conducted by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in 15 states of the country, which
includes Jharkhand, it was seen that the three tier health care system comprising of sub centers
(SCs), primary health centers (PHCs) and community health centers (CHCs) does not meet the
standards set by the Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS). “CPR found that as on March 2018,
of the 1.58 lakh SCs, only 11,000 centers (a mere 6 per cent) met IPHS norms. Similarly, of the
25,700 PHCs, only 3,000 (12 per cent) adhered to the norms while in case of CHCs, only 728 of
the 5,600 follow basic standards.”[iii] Adding the status of education to this context, in 2012 a
study conducted by the National University Education Planning and Administration ranked
Jharkhand 34 out of 35 states and union territories on the question of elementary education. This
status of education and health may be worsening the situation of the phenomenon in Jharkhand.

30. In a study conducted by Madhu Mehra and Anuja Agrawal in Chattisgarh, Bihar and Jharkhand
on the phenomenon of witch hunting in these state and the need for special laws, they say:
“The areas from where the case studies were collected suffer from acute neglect and dismal
administration that has manifested in poor healthcare, sanitation and education, with large
sections of the population being below the poverty line. Illness, deaths and tragedies that cannot
be explained, particularly in the context where education, health facilities, and sanitation are
lacking, tend to get rationalised through witch-blaming. ”3
In the same judgment, the court also invokes traditional gender roles and provides a picture of
the protectionism espoused by the State by saying: “Unfortunate on the part of the deceased
ladies is that they were brutally assaulted in the presence of their relatives such as husband, son
and daughters but no one was able to protect them. Even police came and the crowd forced them
to depart from there. Alas! The Lord Krishna would have come to protect them like Droupadi.”
But the judgments do not highlight the need to better the state of education and health in the
remote areas of the country, where such incidents are not rare, that the incidents which would
raise eyebrows years ago are now so commonplace that people don’t even flinch an eye.
Similarly so ingrained is the low quality of education and health systems for the people who
cannot afford private healthcare in this country that it seems like we have internalized this state
of affairs.
The theoretical rhetoric used here holds the potential for skirting around issues of social welfare
that are glaring in these incidents. Even the question of why the young boy in this case died from
a non-terminal disease like jaundice, medicines for which are easily available today, is
interesting to understand. The prevalence of ojhas in these areas to deal with and cure sicknesses
signifies the state of healthcare available in these areas, and the lack of information around
modern medicine available. As aforementioned, the status of healthcare in India today is under
the scanner, and stories of superstition and black magic only add to the gaping hole in our
system.
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31. An additional judicial commissioner from a court in Khunti also spoke to us about the
“idiosyncrasies” of the adivasis:
“I have noticed that these crimes happen because family ties are not very strong between the
people in the adivasi community. One time two brothers and their wives and children who lived
together were sitting down to eat. A fight ensued between the two brothers. One of the brothers
got very angry and smashed his head with a “sila” (stone). Then he moved the body to the side
of the room. The rest of the family ate and went to sleep. Next day the children went to school as
if nothing had happened and the other brother took a bath and got changed and went to the
police station and confessed his crime. When the police asked him why he did this, he said
because “jhagra ho gaya tha.” There is no remorse, and hence inter-familial murders in cases of
witch hunting is very strong. The thought of killing someone like my brother or father even if we
fight would never even occur to me. For them it is very normal. And then we see that they confess
to their crimes easily which means that they are not fully aware of the consequences of their
confessions.”
But is it merely enough to say that the high incidence of such crimes are connected to questions
of family ties? Do such narratives help normalize these atrocities? Because to insinuate that there
may be reasons other than the irresponsibility of the State to secure all welfare and development
provisions for these reasons is to allow for the State to avoid accountability.
10. Lack of access to victim compensation
In the three-tier Access To Justice of our Justice Delivery System, rehabilitation is the third and
very significant aspect of the system, and also the most complex strand of it.
The Victim Compensation Scheme of 2018, after being amended twice, does not contain
compensation for victims of witch hunting in particular. There is compensation, however, for
separate issues like murder, grievous injury and accidents, among other things. The Standard
Operating Procedure of this Scheme is to compensate monetarily for any harm or hurt done to
any individual in India by crimes, based on the theory that any crime inflicted in the form of
rape, acid attack, trafficking, murder and grievous injury, among others, is the responsibility of
the state because the state was unable to provide safety for its citizens from these crimes.

32. As aforementioned, there isn’t any compensation under a separate category for witch hunting.
Instead injuries and assault that happens in such incidents are covered under exactly that -
murder, assault, hurt. RTI replies juxtaposed with the information on how many people applied
for compensation in these three years, of the ten districts we received replies from, we see that
only Gumla has registered applications from ten individuals for compensation, of which only six
were granted compensation. In the other nine districts, no application for compensation for
witch hunting victims was given, even though there have been cases of witch hunting in several
of those districts. The question then arises: if applications are given, why is compensation
(interim, to begin with), not being given?
Of the five families we met, only one family in Sukridih, Namkum was awarded twenty-five
thousand rupees as compensation, along with two sacks of rice. This case created a lot of noise
when the FIR was registered after a week of the incident, attracting a lot of attention from civil
society organizations. It was due to this that their compensation was fast-tracked. None of the
other families have received any compensation from the State, and requested for help from the
team for beginning the process needed to get compensation. All the families that we spoke to feel
that compensation should be given to them, but they are not aware of the procedure for
compensation, some not even aware that they can avail of such a facility.
However, it is also important to note here that providing compensation isn’t the only aspect of
rehabilitation. In most of cases of witch hunting, because they are public acts of mob lynching,
they leave behind a great deal of trauma and pain for the kith and kin of the victims of witch
hunting. Members of all of the five families that we interviewed for the study, as well as the
families that we couldn’t interview, in all of those incidents the family members saw their
mothers, fathers and/or wives getting lynched by a mob. The kind of post trauma stress such
incidents can inflict is something that our rehabilitation process does not try to address. It is the
responsibility of the State to ascertain that everyone feels safe in their place of residence, or that
safer spaces are facilitated and that fear does not rule the life of any individual. Our rehabilitative
processes need to take into account subjectivities, and not only practicalities.

33. 11. Inadequate number of legal awareness drives
We also enquired about awareness drives held by the State Legal Services Authority in the
districts of Jharkhand. Of the ten districts that reverted to our queries, seven districts told us that
they had awareness camps for witch hunting in the following forms:
1. Street plays
2. Legal awareness programmes
3. Nukkad natak
4. Door to door campaigning
5. Village level programmes
6. Pamphlet distribution
7. Literacy programmes
8. Seminars
None of the DLSAs gave us specific numbers on how many of such programs had been
conducted. Further, even with the prevalence of awareness programmes in these districts of
Jharkhand, there have been incidents of witch hunting in several districts. Khunti, which Mr.
Jaiswal told us was a hotbed for such crimes has several programmes surrounding awareness on
witch hunting, and yet these crimes continue unabated. Further, on enquiring regarding the
provision of rehabilitation schemes and programs running in the state with respect to witch
hunting, the Directorate of Social Justice informed us that Jharkhand brought into effect the
Prevention of Social Evil Scheme (सामाजिक कु रीति तिवारण योििा) in October 2018 for creating
awareness on a cocktail of issues such as child marriage, witch hunting, domestic violence, and
SC/ST pension. Under the said scheme, the state is supposed to conduct awareness drives and
seminars to sensitize people against witch hunting. According to RTI data, the Rs. 4.5 crore was
allocated to the program in the year 2018. Out of it, Rs. 4.05 crore was earmarked for
programmatic activities specifically related to witch hunting. According to data obtained in April
2019, Rs. 74, 11, 756 (18.3%) of the allocated amount had been spent under the programmatic
head for witch hunting in the first two quarters of the program, which indicates that much is left
to be done in order to get the machinery working on socio-legal literacy around the issue.

34. IV. CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Witch Hunting related violence against women is a systemic form of discrimination that is
wrapped in the garb of cultural sanctions. There is ample evidence in literature, as well as
through the findings of this study, to verify that only women with specific identities and social
standings are targetted in these forms of violence. While all our informants agree with the fact
that superstition is the major reason for the perpetration of such crimes, there seems to be no real
effort to address it. The state government in Jharkhand has the provisions for using The Witch
(Daain) Practices Act, 2001, but conversations with the informants in our sample imply that the
act simply has very little teeth in reality. Used as a supplementary identifier in cases of grave
physical violence or murder, the act does nothing to prevent either labeling of women as witches
nor the escalation following it. Further, the language of the law is as problematic. The witch
hunting law condemns labelling of women (or anyone) as witches, but also uses the term
“identification” for this purpose, indicating that some women are “identified” as witches, which
would literally mean “establishing or indicating what someone is”. This is problematic because if
witches have to be “identified”, then we are playing into the superstitious narrative that there are
some people who have magical powers, and can affect adverse changes in other people.
The biggest roadblock to justice, though, is that there is no road to it. Many informants
throughout the research have reiterated again and again that they do not want to take their cases
to the police station because there is very little physical accessibility to the thanas. Additionally,
the apathetic attitude of the police creates great mistrust in the people, who then choose to rather
take their cases to the tribal panchayats and gram panchayats and arrive at highly skewed
compromises than enter the formal criminal justice system. In cases where the criminal justice
system has no choice but to take cognizance of the violence, sociopolitical pressure against the
survivors results in complete dismissal of such cases. Further, at no point during the process are
the survivors/victim’s families made a real, informed decision maker in the legal ambit. The
entire procedure is driven by keeping them from becoming a participant in the process and rather
only by utilizing them when needed. The “gaze” adopted by the makers and implementers of the
law against adivasis and their customs otherizes the adivasis and reduces them to mere objects
and passages in the process of law by mysticising their lifeworlds and underestimating their
capability to under a system of law that is alternate to them. Lastly, in the absence of any real

35. efforts for compensating and rehabilitating survivors and victims of the violence, the state clearly
reflects that its priorities are still largely based around a concentration on penalty and not around
relief and reintegration.
For the purpose of addressing the issues identified through the findings of this research, we
would like to recommend the following:
1. Develop Standard Operational Protocols for all levels of governance and justice
delivery elected to respond to issues of witch hunting- In the absence of physical
accessibility to the police stations in the state and lack of effective implementation of the
special law as a standalone legislation, it is obvious that most cases of witch hunting are
directed towards arbitration by the panchayat. However, such arbitration has the potential
to violate the rights of the survivor or families of victims through uncodified practices.
The local governance bodies, local health systems, district administration, etc. need to be
sensitized on the issue and made equal participants in facilitating women’s access to
formal criminal justice institutions. For this purpose, a Standard Operational Protocol
must be developed for the capacity building of local governance bodies on facilitating
women’s access to justice in cases of witch hunting related violence.
2. Department of Police to introduce structural reforms and Standard Operational
Protocol for increasing accessibility - In physically inaccessible territories, the absence
of criminal justice institutions is what prevents the violence to become normalized, and
justice becoming arbitrary decisions drawing up on socio political influence and power.
Lack of access to police stations, even though police stations exist and function is a
strong comment on the lack of substantive equality within the legal system. It is because
of this reason, added to a general mistrust and lack of familiarity with the criminal justice
system and the police, that most women or their families after them choose not to take
their cases to the police. The Jharkhand Police Department must see this as a major
concern and introduce structural reforms to address the issue of inaccessibility by further
decentralizing power and responsibilities and bringing in Standard Operational Protocol
for the police to set accountability in cases of witch hunting related violence.

36. 3. Department of Prosecution to sensitize public prosecutors and build Standard
Operational Protocols for them- Public Prosecutors must be made familiar with the
sociopolitical realities of working with cases of witch hunting, where there is a grave risk
of violence against the witnesses. Public Prosecutors must prosecute such cases swiftly
and strategically, while ensuring that the testimonies are informed and effective. Further,
they must ensure that the witnesses are taken into full confidence and are protected from
any further risks of violence. It is therefore, recommended, that the department of
prosecutions must build SOPs for public prosecutors to respond in cases of witch hunting
related violence and introduce it to them through rigorous practice and training.
4. Ensure compulsory implementation of the draft Witness Protection Scheme, 2018-
The police and legal services authority must be sensitized and trained on the provision of
the draft Witness Protection Scheme approved by the Supreme Court in December 2018.
The scheme provides for state protection to witnesses through the legal process in
accordance to the perceived level of threat. At the same time, the Central government
must finalize a plan for witness protection as soon as possible.
5. Coordinate multi-stakeholder response to witch hunting related violence- Witch
hunting related violence requires multi-level intervention. Aspects of mental health and
trauma, shelter and safe spaces and legal aid and assistance go hand in hand for women
who go through witch hunting related violence. They often have to navigate these aspects
simultaneously as well. As such, it is absolutely important to clarify linkages between
One Stop Crisis Centers, Safe Shelters and Legal Services Authority when it comes to
responding to witch hunting related violence. The Jharkhand State Legal Services
Authority and the Department of Women and Child Development must take up the task
of building the capacities of the said stakeholders for a coordinated holistic response to
witch hunting related violence.
6. Amending the Jharkhand Victim Compensation Scheme to include direct provision
of compensation for victims of witch hunting related violence- The Jharkhand Victim

37. Compensation Scheme must be amended in order to include a provision for compensation
for victims of witch hunting directly. The DLSAs must take responsibility of ensuring
proper awareness and implementation regarding the said scheme and sensitizing partner
stakeholders to also facilitate women’s access to the provisions to the scheme directly.
7. JHLSA to redesign and monitor awareness campaigns on witch hunting related
violence- The JHLSA must revisit the awareness campaigns on witch hunting related
violence. It must move away from the narrative of “superstitions” to including the
narrative of witch hunting being form of systemic gender based violence. The PLVs must
work closely with elected representatives and local community based organizations
working on gender responses to witch hunting related violence to develop a more
nuanced and contextual curricula to address the violence. The sensitization programs
must be designed to include a knowledge of not just rights in the law but also rights with
the police and court stakeholders as mediated by the procedure. Regular quality check
and accountability must be ensured from all DLSAs by the JHLSA.
8. The Jharkhand Prevention of DAAIN (Witch) Practices Act, 2001 to be revisited
and amended- The special law in Jharkhand concerned with addressing witch hunting
related violence clearly is a highly ineffective law with no real impact. In the light of the
above findings, the act must be revisited and amended in order to accommodate questions
of compensation, rehabilitation, legal aid, safe space and healthcare for the victim to
reflect a truly holistic response to violence. The procedures in the act must be clearly
documented and laid down in the form of rules. The nature of violence needs to be
recognised like acid attack.

38. REFERENCES
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on Social Trends and the Interface with Law. Partners for Law in Development.
2. Ojhas: a person who claims that he has got power or knowledge to identify witches and
to have a capacity to attain control over them or who uses Jhad Phoonk, either to cure or
protect from evil spirit or who causes damage, suffering or harm for the purposes of
healing any disease by giving Tabij, Mantra or any substance claiming to have the power
to heal from witchcraft sufferings and includes persons known as Guni, Shekha or Jan or
by any other name
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15. Special Article 54 March 26, 2016 vol lI no 13 EPW Economic & Political Weekly