Witch-hunters kill five women in India

[unhappycamper]

http://www.dw.com/en/witch-hunters-kill-five-women-in-india/a-18635620

Villagers in India's eastern state of Jharkhand have killed five women, accusing them of being witches. Over two dozen people have been arrested in the case.

Witch-hunters kill five women in India
08.08.2015

Police in India's Jharkhand state said that a group of assailants dragged the five victims out of their huts and lynched them around midnight on Friday. Their village is close to the state capital of Ranchi.

"A group (of villagers) dragged the women out and beat them to death with sticks, accusing them of practicing witchcraft," Arun Kumar, Ranchi's deputy police chief, told journalists. Authorities have arrested 24 people, believed to have been involved with the women's murder.

Local police said the mob used sharp-edged weapons and sticks to beat the women, between 45 and 50-years of age. "They blamed the women for misfortune in the village and alleged it was their fault that many people here were falling ill," local police inspector Bandana Bakhla said.

Jharkhand's Chief Minister Raghubar Das condemned the killings. "In the age of knowledge, this incident is sorrowful," he said, urging members of society to "ponder over it."

[riversedge]

1. What a horrible way to die. Peace to the families

[MisterP]

2. Comaroff and Comaroff show that things like this surge from attempts to repress them, in fact

the Raj openly declared that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia"; the INC has tried to impose populist technocracy but doubling the population and damming every river somehow didn't catch them up with Europe by 1955, and a Hindu right wing steadily grew as each new promise was met with failure and the INC started having to point fingers

it's this technocratic failure--in India, Mexico, Africa, Turkey, Egypt, China--and the failure of "oil developmentalism" in Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and maybe Libya that's given us some of the more ... spectacular overseas events of the century

cartels, leveled forests, doubling populations, 9-11, other reactionary religious revivals--they're all rooted in the failure of this larger promise of development, this system of blind spots that promised heaven on earth and the evaporation of war and religion by 1942