CHAIBASA - Bihar Bireng, a petite, very dark woman of the Ho tribe of eastern India, is about 40 and she is a survivor.
She has been declared a witch by her younger brother next door; the neighbours on the other side have echoed the charge. With less courage or less luck she would by now have died a ghastly death.
She is one of central India's millions of aboriginal people. Unlike Hindus, the Ho bury their dead. They believe in spirits. And they believe that if someone dies of an illness he or she has probably been killed by a witch.
Bireng's village, Buta, is in south Bihar, which has just become the separate and largely tribal state of Jharkand. The village is beautiful and peaceful, dotted with mature trees and surrounded by paddy fields.
But the serenity is deceptive. The Ho are being dragged into the modern world, and one of the ways in which they manifest their angst is by an epidemic of "witch" killings.
Nobody knows how many women in this region have been slashed, stoned, crushed or beaten to death as witches in the past few years, because the killing is carried out by the community as a whole and there is fierce pressure to keep the crimes secret.
But Sister Anu of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in the town of Chaibasa, who works closely with the tribal women, believes the number is large.
"In 1995," she says, "there were 24 such killings reported in this district. But most of them are not reported because anyone who reports it risks being killed."
Most of the killings follow a similar pattern. Anu explains: "When something calamitous happens in a village, the local priest, the ojha, goes into a trance and asks which spirit caused it and then which person the spirit was acting through." That person is named as the daian, the witch.
"Usually the victim is a widow or a handicapped person or someone whose land is coveted by someone else."
The reason for the upsurge of such cases, Anu believes, is the arrival of new illnesses which the tribal doctors are helpless to treat - prompting the need for scapegoats; and pressure on land. Traditionally, the Ho subsisted in the forest; now the forest is largely gone, they cultivate paddy, but there are not enough fields to go round.
Once a woman has been named a witch, a meeting is convened under a large tree and the person is publicly accused. She may be stripped naked and paraded, as happened in two recent cases, or forced to eat excrement, or even killed on the spot. Or she may be condemned and killed later.
"The villagers believe they are going to do a great thing. They get drunk, then they do to the person whatever they can think of. The killing is very, very brutal. The victim may be cut into pieces, beaten or crushed."
Bireng has the profile of a typical victim: her husband died in 1984, leaving her the owner of a fine house and yard and several paddy fields.
"After he died," she says, "people in the village started coming into my house and taking things - food, baskets, anything they fancied. I said, 'please ask.' They said, 'you've killed your husband, now you're trying to rule over us.'
"My younger brother next door accused me of being a daian and split our joint home so he could live separately. The neighbour on the other side joined in the accusations."
That might have been the beginning of the end for Bireng. "But luckily," says Anu, "she's a woman who talks," and she brought her problem to Anu and the support group to which Anu belongs.
Before Bireng could be denounced and possibly murdered, Anu and her colleagues called the antagonists together and persuaded Bireng's enemies to drop the issue. If anyone rakes it up again, they must pay a bond.
"Now we're still not talking," says Bireng, "but we're not fighting, either." There is both tension and grief in her small, wiry frame. But she has hung on to her land, and her life.
- INDEPENDENT
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