Witches of Kanjia Maharatola, Jharkhand
On the night of August 7, 2015, and in the morning that followed, five women were tortured to death. Branded as witches, they were dragged out of their homes in the dead of the night, stripped and beaten, assembled before the tree and hacked with an axe which is used to chop wood.
It was a little after midnight of August 7, 2015 and Kanjia Marhatola village was in deep slumber. The tamarind tree in the middle of the village in Jharkhand’s Ranchi district swayed gently in the night breeze. Matiyas Khalko was woken up not by a knock but loud banging on his door, so furious that it threatened to bring down the creaky door any moment. Matiyas, his two teenage daughters, and wife Jesinth were sleeping inside. Sensing trouble, he did not open the door. Minutes later, the door yielded and the villagers barged in. They separated Jesinth from her daughters and her husband. “Take me wherever you want but why are you beating me?” Matiyas heard Jesinth’s voice pleading with her attackers for one last time. A few moments later, someone in the crowd hit her with an axe and she slumped. They dragged her by the hair till they reached the tamarind tree. She was the last of five women who were hacked to death that night, says Matiyas. There were four bodies already lying there. They killed Eitwariya first, then the mother-daughter duo of Kalki and Titri. The fourth to be hacked down was Madni Khalko, whose house was at the other end of the village. And then they turned on Jesinth. The attackers packed the victims’ bodies in sacks and discarded them outside the village boundary. If the tamarind tree could speak, this is what it would narrate: on the night of August 7, 2015, and in the morning that followed, five women were tortured to death. Branded as witches, they were dragged out of their homes in the dead of the night, stripped and beaten, assembled before the tree and hacked with an axe which is used to chop wood.