A villager suspected of indulging in sorcery was lynched in a remote Adivasi-inhabited Kalabasi hamlet of Narayanpur tea estate in South Assam’s Lakhipur sub-division by
fellow villagers.
The police said the body of the lynched villager, Jawaharlal Mura, was buried near the village temple by the mob of people after the murder on Thursday afternoon. A team of policemen rushed to the village early on Friday morning to exhume the body and arrested 11of the villagers, including three women.
The slain villager was suspected by fellow villagers of have ‘letting loose a bad spirit’ in the village causing serious illness to many of the villagers. The police said that a mob of villagers dragged Mura from his house at around noon on Thursday and tied him to a tree beside the temple in the village.
This was after Sukumar Mura, a villager claimed that the ‘devi maa’ (goddess) had appeared in his dream, and told him that the people were falling sick because of the ‘evil’ presence of Jawaharlal Mura in the village.
He was lynched and buried by villagers who then resorted to dancing and worship of the goddess throughout the night. On Friday morning, when the police party arrived, the villagers tried to stop them from digging up the body. The police had to resort to lathicharge to disperse the mob, and finally arrested 11 of them All of them have been slapped with murder charge.
Witch hunting which often occurs in remote tribal and Adivasi dominated villages. A large number of people in Kalabasti hamlet recently have been affected by malaria and diarrhea which commonly occur around this time of the year.
But because of lack of literacy, villagers often believe that the disease is spreading because of some ‘evil spirit’.
Image for representation only
