Nothing is worse than what human beings can imagine or make themselves believe. A tantrik and an ojha in Bihar persuaded two brick-kiln owners that they would need to sacrifice a child — a goat would also do — in order to make their kiln burn properly again. So the tantrik and the ojha treated some of the children of the village to sweets, chose a five-year-old boy from among them, kidnapped him and locked him up for a few days. Then, on a full-moon night, they shaved his head before ritually gouging out his eyes and cutting off his nose, ears, tongue and fingers. He was then thrown into the sacrificial fire, and his body dumped in the local river after the puja was done. The two kiln-owners watched and assisted these rites, and paid the tantrik Rs 3,000. When the villagers led the boy’s father to the tantrik, the latter promised to return the child for Rs 200 and a hen, although the boy had already been killed. The owners of the kiln have fled and the villagers have beaten up the two holy men before handing them over to the police.

Such rites involving children are not rare in the backward or tribal areas of Bihar, Jharkhand and Orissa, performed to appease Kali or some tribal deity, or to make arid land yield a good harvest. Last year, the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty locally awarded to a tribal worshipper of Kali in the Santhal Parganas for beheading a child. The judge ruled that superstition does not justify a planned and deliberate killing. In this latest case in Bihar, it is no coincidence that the sacrificed boy belonged to a low caste, and his village was in the heart of Bihar’s most illiterate and backward district. Extreme poverty, practically non-existent healthcare, and tensions over the owning of land foster a benighted environment in which mistrust, superstition and crime could take on brutal forms — not only witchcraft and child sacrifice, but also the sexual exploitation of women (reinforced by caste oppression). But apart from these specific social and economic factors, child sacrifice also involves a darker problem of faith. Therefore, Jewish and Christian theologians and philosophers have had great difficulty with the terrifying story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis. The Yorkshire Ripper had also believed that he was commanded by god to kill “fallen” women. So, the Union minister of state for human resource development, Mr Sanjay Paswan, also from Bihar, should think properly before declaring, as he did recently, that tantriks and witch-doctors are agents of “social welfare” who practise forms of knowledge which should be made part of university curricula.