Purangi Nag (top) and Birbal’s interrogation (right)

Three months ago, it was decided that Purangi Nag, a Munda woman who worked in the Soongachi tea estate in Jalpaiguri’s Matelli block, was a witch. Purangi’s husband had died seven years ago; her son and his wife were killed by a rogue elephant. The widow’s neighbour, Birbal, has a son who fell ill soon after these mishaps. Purangi, he declared, was a witch who had cast a spell on the neighbourhood. One night, Birbal and three of Purangi’s neighbours — all men — assaulted her, injuring her grievously and forcing her to flee with her seven-year-old grandson, Dhiren, to her brother in a neighbouring village. When she approached the local thana, she was handed over to a temporary shelter run by the North Bengal People’s Development Centre.

Recently, the NBPDC invited me to Jalpaiguri to witness Purangi’s ‘rehabilitation’. On our way to Matelli, I was told that Purangi, who lay huddled on the backseat, had been lucky. In 2002, in Killcot tea estate, five women — four of them members of a village self-help group — were tied to a tree, stripped, and beaten unconscious. Then nails were hammered into their skulls, and their bodies buried. The five, according to United Nations figures, were among the 2,556 ‘witches’ killed in India between 1987 and 2003. In 2010, an independent report stated that 2,500 women were killed in the last 14 years on the same pretext. Only a few survive the ordeal, and my traumatized companion, whose story was narrated by her grandson in a chime-like voice, was one of them.

During my stay in the Dooars, I interviewed activists, researchers, policemen, villagers and the one victim. Their accounts helped me piece together a tale that demolishes some of the ideas concerning witch-hunts. The rate of illiteracy among tribal people in North Bengal’s tea gardens, according to the Dooars Jagaran, an NGO, is as high as 60 per cent. Add to this a school-drop-out rate of approximately 30 per cent, minimal medical facilities and chronic malaria and diarrhoea, and an easy explanation of why it is difficult to wean the tribal people from their regressive customs seems at hand. But witch-hunts cannot be explained solely by factors such as superstition or greed. (I was told that there is enough evidence to indicate that middlemen collude with labour welfare officers of tea gardens to demonize women and deny them their pensions. Is it a coincidence that a large number of ‘witches’ killed are tea-garden workers nearing retirement?) Such deaths need to be explained by locating the structural flaws present within community, law, politics and culture.

After the Killcot savagery, tribal people of that particular tea estate had united to protect the killers. Shared notions of identity as well as cultural practices and superstitions combined with a deadly unawareness owing to the lack of education often transform communities into killers. Undoubtedly, such cruelty has also been encouraged by India’s inability to adopt a Central law to tackle witch-hunts. Anti-witch-hunt legislations are in place in various states, and their templates are worth scrutinizing. The Jharkhand Witchcraft Prevention Act punishes offenders with a one-year prison term. In Chhattisgarh, although the murder of ‘witches’ is a non-bailable offence, the law offers “protective prison custody” to the victim, confining her within a space meant for the accused. In Bengal, the accused are tried under the Atrocities Act. If a woman is killed after being dubbed a witch, the crime is punishable by life imprisonment. But the all-India conviction rate, according to the Free Legal Aid Committee that works with witch-hunt victims in Jharkhand, is less than two per cent. In cases such as Purangi’s, where the victim is intimated or physically assaulted, the punishment, as I was to discover later, may be nothing more than a verbal warning followed by a written assurance guaranteeing the woman’s safety. The dangerous vacuum created by laws of uncertain strength has resulted in the legitimization of an extra-judicial authority — the janguru or the village priest — which enjoys considerable clout in tribal societies.

A tepid legal framework often indicates an absence of political engagement. As if its criminal negligence in the sphere of health and education were not enough, the State often cites the tribal people’s right to cultural autonomy to condone its unwillingness to intervene and weed out malpractices like witch-hunts. Such an admission only strengthens the conviction that one of the fatal flaws of India’s democracy is the State’s inability to shed its elitist character. Consequently, marginalized sections — the tribal community of North Bengal’s tea gardens, for instance — continue to inhabit the peripheries of State welfare. Intriguingly, along with the continuance of regressive cultural practices, tribal societies in India are now also being afflicted by the weakening, and, in some cases, the complete disappearance, of some truly democratic codes of conduct pertaining to marriage, inheritance or child custody. This corruption, facilitated by contact with the ‘civilized’ world, is aided and abetted by the State to meet political goals. The Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Vikas Parishad is a strong proponent of preserving tribal practices. The Left Front government, which is desperate to ensure that the ABAVP does not support the demand for Gorkhaland, is only too happy to let matters rest, and has desisted from demanding that the outfit censor acts such as witch-hunts.

Not just the State but private enterprise too is to be blamed for the plight of women like Purangi. As a bagaria, a permanent tea-garden employee in Soongachi, Purangi earned Rs 360, plucking leaves for six days a week. Apart from the paltry pay, the violations of the provisions of the Plantation Labour Act (1951) mean that most tea estates have failed to provide their workers with the amenities that are rightfully their due.

Even activism seemed to suffer from crucial limitations. While I was thankful to the NBPDC for the opportunity and heartened by its rescue mission, I was disappointed by its inability to provide reliable data. My experience with three other NGOs during the trip was similar. Lack of funds could be a possible reason, but the absence of a statistical inventory seriously impairs research.

I had started by recounting Purangi’s journey, and I would like to conclude by describing how it ended. On our way to Soongachi, we tailed two sleek vehicles. The first carried a posse of policemen, while the subdivisional police officer and the officer-in-charge of Matelli occupied the other. It was a strange spectacle: civil and State institutions — the police, the media and an NGO — had colluded to force a reluctant community take back an innocent woman.

On reaching Soongachi, a quaking Birbal was produced in the mukhia’s office and then instructed to give a written undertaking guaranteeing Purangi’s safety. The man promised all that and more. It was arranged that Purangi would live with Birbal’s family till she got her job back. Before parting, the two were made to stand together and their photographs taken to symbolize Birbal’s (and hence the community’s) acceptance of Purangi.

By late evening, the policemen had left and I could hear the activists talking excitedly about another successful rehabilitation. But I could not forget Purangi’s face as she stood near her attacker. What I saw on it was unspeakable fear: the fear of being abandoned once again. As I walked back to the waiting vehicle, I forced myself to believe that my eyes had been tricked by the failing light.