This archive report was first published on 21 July 2019.
On July 20, 2019, a tragic incident occurred in central India's tribal heartland, where four members of a family, including two women, were killed by fellow villagers over allegations of witchcraft.
The victims, all in their 60s, were attacked by around a dozen stick-wielding villagers outside their home in the Siskari village, located in Gumla district, Jharkhand state.
According to Shashi Ranjan, deputy commissioner of Gumla district, the incident was linked to local occult practitioners who blamed the family for negative developments in the village.
Gumla is a densely forested tribal-dominated region, approximately 100 kilometers from the regional capital Ranchi.
Additional forces were deployed to the village to maintain peace, but no one had been arrested as investigations continued.
Experts say that belief in witchcraft and the occult remains widespread in impoverished rural communities across India, especially in isolated tribal communities.
Between 2000 and 2012, more than 2,000 people, many of them women, were killed in India on suspicion of witchcraft, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.
