The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Wednesday 4 December 2013

RIGHTS ISSUES AND WOMEN EMPOWERMENT IN INDIA – WITCH-HUNTING (DAYAN)

 Witch-hunting (Dayans of India)

Witch-hunting, the erstwhile tool of medieval and early modern period of history is still existent in many places of India. The recorded cases talk of over thousands of women victims murdered in this decade only – in India of 21st Century.

And we don’t need any ‘ifs and buts of a rational thinking process’, to say that the cases not reported would certainly be multiple of it, given the kind of ‘prevalence belts’ this witch-hunting or ‘punishing the Dayan’ exists in. Dayan is the Indian term for witches.

Witch-hunting cases are commonly reported from states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal but we do come across victimization of women in the name of ‘witchcraft’ from other states, be it Uttar Pradesh or Kerala, representing two geographical extremes of India, or many other states in between or across, to support the claim.


Google is a wonderful tool. Do a simple Web-search with tags like ‘Dayan + India’ or ‘witch-hunting + India’ and you will come across pages and pages of results on victimization of women in the name of witch-hunting. And mind you, you can come across cases that happened just yesterday or the last week.

Victimization of women under the garb of punishing witchcraft is basically an easily available tool to the patriarchal mindset of the rural and semi-urban areas of many states in India. Though it is more virulent in the socioeconomically poorer segments of the social formations, well-to-do families are found it practicing as well.

The purpose is more or less similar in almost of the cases of witch-hunting as it is found on investigation – settling score, usurping property in the name of the victim, getting rid of a wife a man no longer wants to be with, efforts to discard a daughter-in-law a family wants to throw out – there are varied reasons – but all target women, causing them mental and physical torture.  

And most of these women do not report. They cannot report. Being hounded by the family and the immediate society, they are not allowed to approach the police even if they are fortunate enough to have the police officials ready to act on such complaints of socially mandated crimes.

Their fate is more or less similar thus. Yes, the background only exacerbates the problem. Many have to suffer and live the life of outcasts. Many are forced to make compromises. Many die living such lives. Many are killed outrightly.

Yes, there is a law again, to contain and eliminate this socially mandated crime but it is failing again. The social humiliation and the subsequent personal assassination in the name of sanitizing a society from a Dayan’s presence continue. 

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/