Witch hunting is a superstitious practice which entails the worst forms of cultural violence against women in a society. It's manifestation of violence against women that is practiced in the name of culture, religion and social norms and practices, which are usually overlooked by the society.

It’s a stigmatization of specific groups of people, which mostly contains widowed women, women who are childless, old women, women of lower caste etc.

Socio-Cultural Deprivation: Practice of witchcraft and ‘witch-hunting' in parts of India appears to be prevalent predominantly among certain castes and tribes. These communities have lived a socially, economically, educationally excluded and deprived life for centuries.

According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), more than 2,500 Indians have been chased, tortured and killed in such hunts between 2000 and 2016 and Jharkhand topped the chart of witchhunting murders.

Human Right Violation: Guwahati High Court has observed that branding of a man or a woman as a witch and then resorting to witch hunting is the most dehumanising act and is one of the worst forms of human rights violations.

Reason for Its Prevalence

• Patriarchal Attitude in Society: In a survey it was found that, women who dare to protest and speak up against the social hegemonic structure are targeted as witch by exploiting India’s caste system and culture of patriarchy.

• Vested Interest: Many times, branding women as witches is a tool used by land grabbers to deprive families of their property. Sometime people instigate such practices against the lower caste men and women in order to maintain their status in the society. It is also used as a weapon of revenge against
women who refuse to yield to sexual advances.

• Personal Gain: Practice of witch hunting has become a social and religious business for the local doctors/medicine men/Ojhas to fulfil their materialistic requirements.

• Issue with the criminal justice system. Many of the cases registered were closed because of shoddy investigation, lack of evidence and witnesses or a compromise being worked out between the victims and the perpetrators.

• Lack of proper scientific awareness and education are one of the reasons of large prevalence of witch hunting in India eg: women were held responsible for all the calamities like rising infant mortality, famine, flood, and epidemic diseases etc.

Challenges

• Absence of National Legislation: India does not have any specific national legislation or laws for preventing witch hunting. Most of the cases are dealt with in Section 323 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which prescribes one year’s imprisonment and a Rs 1,000 fine to anyone who causes harm voluntarily.

• Poor implementation of prevalent laws: Ineffectiveness of states legislation is witnessed through the increasing incidents of witch-hunting.

• Lack of provisions for providing rehabilitation, relief, or any form of compensation to women after they have been identified as witches.

• Social Rigidities: As a social evil, witch hunting is difficult to tackle because the motivation of such action is often rooted in the traditional spiritual and cultural belief system of the communities.

Way Forward

• Promoting scientific temper under Article 51-A for ensuring the empowerment of fringe communities.

• Comprehensive approach consisting of legal remedies, psychosocial support, economic empowerment, education, persecution of the perpetrator, to achieve better indicators in human development.

• Improving access to health care by ensuring that mental health care and support reaches villages with the appointment of psychiatrists and psychologists at the block level while ensuring delivery of justice to accused women through all mean with accelerated programmatic and policy action.

• Supporting awareness programmes and campaigns to aware people about the debilitating psychological and economic impacts on women who are made victim of accusations of being a witch and alter the deep-rooted value system of patriarchy that discriminate and subordinate women.