Black magic: An ojha plies his craft (Reuters)

Nov. 7: Literacy may be the road to progress but knowing reading, writing and arithmetic is certainly no guarantee to freedom from ignorance, as a recent survey reveals.

The myth that only illiterates are in the grip of superstition has been dispelled by the results of a survey conducted by the Kokrajhar Government College and Kokrajhar Nehru Yuva Kendra last month in parts of the Bodoland Territorial Council-administered district. The survey revealed that the educated class has joined the ranks of the uneducated in terms of their acceptance of superstitious beliefs.

According to statistics compiled during the survey, 27 per cent of educated men and women believe in the existence of witchcraft.

Gobinda Boro, a lecturer at Kokrajhar Government College, and his colleague Anjali Brahma drafted the questionnaire for the 300 respondents.

Boro told The Telegraph that superstitious beliefs among educated people was a major hindrance to eradicating the practice of witch-hunting from society. “It is astonishing that 27 per cent of educated men and women believe in the existence of witchcraft. This proves that the general perception about prevalence of superstitious beliefs only among illiterates is not true.”

Curiously, the respondents said religion does not influence their superstitious beliefs.

Over the last 10 years, as many as 205 people in Assam have been branded witches and killed. As many as 174 of these incidents were in Kokrajhar district.

Tapas Kumar Pramanik, the Dhubri district co-ordinator of Nehru Yuva Kendra, said eliminating deep-rooted superstitious beliefs was a difficult, but not impossible, task. “Superstition can be eliminated through a long-term project to create awareness among people. It can be done with support from the All Bodo Students’ Union and NGOs.”

Pramanik, who is also in charge of the Kokrajhar Nehru Yuva Kendra, said he readily agreed to sponsor the survey when Kokrajhar Government College approached him with the proposal.

The awareness programme and survey was organised with the co-operation of local unit of the All Bodo Students’ Union and NGOs in Sidli and Kachugaon. Villagers are known to set up kangaroo courts and sentence ojhas (mendicants) to death whenever a bout of misfortune strikes people who may have consulted them.

“Not a single person has been convicted of witch killing in a court in the last five years due to lack of evidence,” senior police officer Kuladhar Saikia told the news agency Reuters recently.

Another police officer said some alleged ojha killings were pre-planned murders committed by people with their eyes on land owned by the victims. Officials are considering imposing hefty fines on villages where such killings take place.