ASSAM: BIRUBALA RABHA ECSTATIC AS PRESIDENT KOVIND GIVES HIS NOD TO WITCH HUNTING

16 July 2018:

Activist Birubala Rabha feels that the Assam Witch Hunting (Prohibition, Prevention and Protection) Act, 2015, would go a long way in curbing the incidents of witch-hunting in Assam. It will soon be a law as President Ram Nath Kovind has given his assent to the Act.

Rabha said they had been seeking a stringent law for long as it could fight the menace of witch-hunting.

“I am delighted that President Ram Nath Kovind has given his assent to the Act. Over the past many years, Assam has seen a whole lot of people being killed on the suspicion that they were witches. I have no doubt that people will not now dare take law into their hands,” Rabha told INSIDENE.

Assam’s Director General of Police, Kuladhar Saikia, said it was felt by different stakeholders that the existing legal solutions needed further teeth to weed out the menace of superstitious beliefs. He said the police had been fighting for long against witch-hunting under his pet “Project Prahari”.

“Project Prahari was my initiative and I conceived it when I was working as a DIG in Kokrajhar. To this day, we are working in over 100 tribal villages under this project,” he said.

Despite the advancement of science and technology, witch-hunting claims scores of lives, particularly in Assam’s tea estates and tribal villages every year. Despite the efforts of the state government and several NGOs, the killings could not be stopped.

The Assam Witch Hunting (Prohibition, Prevention and Protection) Act will treat the cases of witch-hunting as a cognisable, non-bailable and non-compoundable offence. It says no person shall identify, call, stigmatise, defame, accuse any other person as witch by words, signs, indications, conduct, action or any other manner or instigate, aid or abet such an act or commit witch-hunting.