{"id":63336,"date":"2024-05-31T19:24:18","date_gmt":"2024-05-31T19:24:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/05\/31\/birubala-rabha-who-fought-against-witch-hunting-in-india-dies-at-75\/"},"modified":"2024-05-31T19:24:18","modified_gmt":"2024-05-31T19:24:18","slug":"birubala-rabha-who-fought-against-witch-hunting-in-india-dies-at-75","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/05\/31\/birubala-rabha-who-fought-against-witch-hunting-in-india-dies-at-75\/","title":{"rendered":"Birubala Rabha, Who Fought Against Witch Hunting in India, Dies at 75"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Birubala<\/div>


\n<\/p>\n

\n

The victims of witch hunts face gruesome punishments, according to \u201cContemporary Practices of Witch Hunting,\u201d<\/a> a 2015 report by the Indian legal nonprofit Partners for Law in Development. They can be subjected to \u201cforcible stripping,\u201d the report said, \u201cbeing paraded naked in public, cutting or tonsuring of the hair, blackening of the face, cutting off of the nose, pulling of the teeth to \u2018defang\u2019, gouging out the eye, whipping, gang rape, forcible consumption of human excreta, cow dung\u201d or \u201ckilling by hanging, hacking, lynching or burying alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Rabha traveled from village to village in Assam to speak out against the practice and declared that there was no such thing as \u201cdaini,\u201d or witches. She had long been suspicious of folk superstitions and of medicine men who chanted incantations over young women to drive out what they believed were evil spirits. As a young mother, Ms. Rabha was told by a local medicine man that her mentally ill son would soon die; he didn\u2019t. That false prediction, in the 1980s, was the seed for her advocacy work, which she began in earnest around 2000.<\/p>\n

That year, she stood up in a meeting in the village of Lakhipur, also in Assam, to support five women accused of being witches; she didn\u2019t back down when hundreds of villagers surrounded her house the next day.<\/p>\n

Usha Rabha recalled her first rescue mission with Ms. Rabha, in 2006, when a stick-bearing mob encircled them in a neighboring state. \u201cI was terrified,\u201d she said. But Birubala was \u201ccompletely unfazed,\u201d Ms. Rabha said. When the police came to rescue the two women, she said, Birubala \u201creprimanded the cops, saying, \u2018I will not stop until I finish the work that I do.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In Assam, in the 2000s, Birubala Rabha became allied with the state\u2019s former police director general, Kuladhar Saikia. \u201cShe would come to me, meet me and discuss these issues,\u201d Mr. Saikia recalled in an interview, adding, \u201cShe told me she was standing up against social injustice.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The victims of witch hunts face gruesome punishments, according to \u201cContemporary Practices of Witch Hunting,\u201d a 2015 report by the Indian legal nonprofit Partners for Law in Development. They can be subjected to \u201cforcible stripping,\u201d the report said, \u201cbeing paraded naked in public, cutting or tonsuring of the hair, blackening of the face, cutting off […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63337,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/05\/29\/multimedia\/29rabha1-vhgl\/29rabha1-vhgl-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[60730,16,40061,8718,273,60731,31785],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63336"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63336"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63338,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63336\/revisions\/63338"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}