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Sacrificed to Kali
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I’ll never forget the night I first watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
– particularly the horror and disgust as I watched Mola Ram, standing
in front of a grotesque statue of the Hindu goddess Kali, plunge his
hand into the poor sacrifice victim’s chest and pull his still-beating
heart out, before lowering the man into a pit of lava – upon which the
heart, still in Mola Ram’s hand, burst into flames.
It’s the one scene in the movie I look away from (well, that and the dinner scene).
I was both surprised and disturbed to discover that the Thuggee from
the movie were in fact a real Indian crime cult exterminated by the
British in the late 1800s, and that they apparently really did commit
human sacrifice (although the movie considerably exaggerates them, thank
God).
While the Thuggee (from which we get the word thug) have long since
been exterminated, the fact remains that human sacrifice continues in
parts of India, often to Kali – worshiped by the historical Thuggee –
despite the insistence of zealous Hindus (and SJWs) who think it’s evil
to portray a historical Hindu cult on screen.
There are bloodstains on the cracked wall behind
the terrible postcard-size image and, around the dark room, splattered
gore on the heavy wooden furniture. These dark marks bear witness to a
child sacrificed in the name of the abominable goddess.
Through the doorway, in the distance, colourfully
dressed women are bent double, toiling in the fields, their faces worn
and wrinkled from the sun, their hands cracked from digging at the dry
earth from dawn until dusk.
It’s an intolerable life in the remote village of
Barha, a squalid collection of mud-bricked farmers’ dwellings in the
heart of the impoverished province of Khurja, Uttar Pradesh. This corner
of rural India is a lawless place of superstitions and deep prejudice.
The region, known for its sugarcane, is a tortuous eight-hour drive from
Delhi and a lifetime away from the 21st century.
In Bulandshahr, the nearest town of any
description, locals whispered darkly of happenings in Barha. Their
advice was unanimous: ‘Don’t go. It is an evil place. The people there
are cursed.’
Sumitra Bushan, 43, who lived in Barha for most of
her life, certainly thought she was cursed. Her husband had long
abandoned her, leaving her with debts and a life of servitude in the
sugarcane fields. Her sons, Satbir, 27, and Sanjay, 23, were regarded as
layabouts. Life was bad but then the nightmares and terrifying visions
of Kali allegedly began, not just for Sumitra but her entire family.
She consulted a tantrik, a travelling ‘holy man’
who came to the village occasionally, dispensing advice and putrid
medicines from the rusty amulets around his neck.
His guidance to Sumitra was to slaughter a chicken
at the entrance to her home and offer the blood and remains to the
goddess. She did so but the nightmares continued and she began waking up
screaming in the heat of the night and returned to the priest. ‘For the
sake of your family,’ he told her, ‘you must sacrifice another, a boy
from your village.’
Ten days ago Sumitra and her two sons crept to
their neighbour’s home and abducted three-year-old Aakash Singh as he
slept. They dragged him into their home and the eldest son performed a
puja ceremony, reciting a mantra and waving incense. Sumitra smeared
sandalwood paste and globules of ghee over the terrified child’s body.
The two men then used a knife to slice off the child’s nose, ears and
hands before laying him, bleeding, in front of Kali’s image.
In the morning Sumitra told villagers she had
found Aakash’s body outside her house. But they attacked and beat her
sons who allegedly confessed. ‘I killed the boy so my mother could be
safe,’ Sanjay screamed. All three are now in prison, having escaped
lynch mob justice. The tantrik has yet to be found.
Police in Khurja say dozens of sacrifices have
been made over the past six months. Last month, in a village near Barha,
a woman hacked her neighbour’s three-year-old to death after a tantrik
promised unlimited riches. In another case, a couple desperate for a son
had a six-year-old kidnapped and then, as the tantrik chanted mantras,
mutilated the child. The woman completed the ritual by washing in the
child’s blood.
‘It’s because of blind superstitions and rampant
illiteracy that this woman sacrificed this boy,’ said Khurja police
officer AK Singh. ‘It’s happened before and will happen again but there
is little we can do to stop it. In most situations it’s an open and shut
case. It isn’t difficult to elicit confessions – normally the villagers
or the families of the victims do that for us. This has been going on
for centuries; these people are living in the dark ages.’
According to an unofficial tally by the local
newspaper, there have been 28 human sacrifices in western Uttar Pradesh
in the last four months. Four tantrik priests have been jailed and
scores of others forced to flee.
The killings have focused attention on Tantrism,
an amalgam of mystical practices that grew out of Hinduism. Tantrism
also has adherents among Buddhists and Muslims and, increasingly, in the
West, where it is associated with yoga or sexual techniques. It has
millions of followers across India, where it originated between the
fifth and ninth centuries. Tantrik priests are consulted on everything
from marital to bowel problems.
Many blame the turn to the occult on the
increasing economic gap between rural and urban India, in particular the
spiralling debts of cotton and tobacco farmers, linked with high costs
of hybrid seed and pesticides, that has led to record numbers of farmers
committing suicide.
According to Sanal Edamaruku, president of the
Indian Rationalist Association, human sacrifice affects most of northern
India. ‘Modern India is home to hundreds of millions who can’t read or
write, but who often seek refuge from life’s realities through astrology
or the magical arts of shamans. Unfortunately these people focus their
horrific attention on society’s weaker members, mainly women and
children who are easier to handle and kidnap.’
Tantriks caught up in the crackdown in Uttar
Pradesh say their reputation is being destroyed by an insane minority.
‘Human sacrifices have been made in this region since time immemorial,’
says Prashant, a tantrik who runs a small ‘practice’ from his concrete
shell of a home on the outskirts of Bulandshahr. ‘People come to me with
all sorts of ailments. I recommend simply pujas and very rarely animal
sacrifices.’
In her squalid home Ritu Singh rocks back and
forth, beating her chest in grief. She has been mourning since the day
her son Aakash’s body was discovered in a sewer outside Sumitra Bushan’s
home. Her husband, Rajbir, said: ‘We expect them to be jailed or fined
but they won’t spend longer than a few years in prison for what they
have done. They were my neighbours, they ate in our house. The Tantrik
who made them do this has disappeared, they will never find him.’
The deadliest heatwave to hit India for more than 100 years has
killed more than 2,500 people as temperatures soared to 50C and even the
roads melted. But even among so many deaths, the murder of Thepa Kharia
stands out.
A few weeks ago neighbours of the 55-year-old labourer found his body in a pool of blood at his home in an isolated village
280 miles west of Calcutta.
And it was only his body – his head had been hacked off by an occult
group called the Orkas, who buried it in a parched farmer’s field in a
bloody ritual meant to summon the rain and save their shrivelling crops.
A child, named Adam by police as his identity is still not known, whose torso was found in the Thames nearly 10 years ago (Image: PA)
Days later the annual monsoon finally reached the southern tip of
India. Then the rain worked its way slowly across the country, chasing
away the searing heat.
But the downpour will not wash away the stain left by Thepa’s murder.
His death has exposed a sick superstition that simmers beneath the
surface in remote parts of India and has now boiled over in the searing
heat.
Human sacrifice, for years assumed to live on only in fictional works
like horror film The Wicker Man, is in fact alive and well in the 21st
century. One case was even recorded right here in Britain as recently as
2001.
The Thames (Image: PA)
When the torso of a five-year-old boy was found floating in the River
Thames near Shakespeare’s Globe, police found that his head, arms and
legs had been cut cleanly off and what remained of his body had been
entirely drained of blood.
The main clue to his fate came when a lab report showed his intestine
contained traces of the African calabar bean, a powerful poison used by
adherents of voodoo. This creates paralysis without any anaesthetic
effect, meaning the victim would have felt every cut of the knife in a
sickening ritual.
He was named as Adam by officers in the case, who also released a
photo of a Nigerian boy they believed might be him. But his identity was
never confirmed and his killers were never caught.
Indian relatives pose for media as they weep over the body of Sanatan Bag, 5, who was found dead in an apparent child-sacrifice (Image: Getty)Human sacrifice
is far more common in countries like India where a minority of tantric
shamans still promote it to gullible communities of uneducated peasants.
Best known in the West as techniques to prolong and intensify sexual
pleasure, in remote areas tantric rituals loosely derived from the
Hindu faith can also include animal, and, in extreme cases, human
sacrifice to please the gods and guarantee good luck.
It is so widespread that in 2006 there were 28 cases of human sacrifice in just four months in the northern province of
Uttar Pradesh.
Lalita Tati
In one particularly gruesome example one couple were so desperate for a son they consulted a local shaman.
On his advice Madan and Murti Simaru kidnapped six-year-old Mona
Kumar from a neighbouring family, took him to a river bank and mutilated
his body as the priest chanted over them. Then they killed the boy and
washed themselves in his blood to complete the fertility ritual.
In May this year a “tantric sorcerer” was lynched after he beheaded
five-year-old Sanatan Bag in front of his parents on a tea plantation in
the north-eastern state of Assam. And in the south-eastern province of
Andhra Pradesh a boy of 14 was abducted by a sect searching for hidden
treasure in 2012.
They took him to an abandoned fort and slaughtered him under a new
moon, believing that this would please ancients spirits who would then
show them how to find the treasure.
Later the same year a man sacrificed his own wife in the hope of a bountiful harvest.
And in 2011 a seven-year-old girl Lalita Tati was murdered and her
liver cut out as an offering to the Hindu goddess Durga by two farmers
hoping for a better crop.
Indian police officer AK Singh, who has investigated many human sacrifices, reveals: “It’s often an open-and-shut case. It
isn’t difficult to get confessions.
Albino children take a break in a recreational hall at the Mitindo Primary School for the blind (Image: Getty)
“Normally the villagers or the families of the victims do that for
us. But there is little we can doto stop it. These people are living in
the dark ages.”
Human sacrifice also continues across the border in Bangladesh. In
2010 a brickmaker was arrested for killing one of his labourers and
pouring the blood on his field to improve the quality of his mud bricks.
On the opposite side of the planet in Mexico, human sacrifice is
usually associated with the ancient Aztec civilization, where priests
would cut out the still-beating heart of a victim at the top of a
pyramid.
But three years ago a sickening triple murder raised fears that a
similar ritual is making a comeback. Eight members of one family were
charged with kidnapping and murdering two boys aged 10 and a woman of 55
in the copper mining town of Nacozari a few miles from the US border.
The victims had been sacrificed to Santa Muerte (Saint Death), a rapidly
growing cult in Mexico which is popular with drug smugglers and cartel
hitmen. The victims’ throats and wrists had been slashed so the blood
could be collected and spread on a sacrificial altar.
Two of the bodies were buried near the family’s home, but one of the boys was buried in the dirt floor of their shack.
Andrew Chesnut, chairman of Catholic studies at Virginia Commonwealth
University, says there have been other recent reports of human
sacrifice in Mexico. He said: “With no clerical authority to stop them,
some practitioners engage in abhorrent rituals.”
But the real hotbed of human sacrifice is Africa, where poor or
disabled women and children can be hunted down and sold to witch
doctors who sacrifice them then “harvest” the body parts. In Tanzania,
hunters target albinos born with snow-white skin, blond hair, and blue
eyes.
Widely regarded as devils, they are regularly blamed for natural tragedies such as deaths and droughts.
However, their organs are used to make charms or potions that are
used in medicine meant to lift curses or to bring great riches.
The Wicker Man
In many cases the victims are carved up while they are still alive to make the potions “more potent”.
Angel Salvatory, 19, had to run for her life when a gang led by her
own father attacked her. She had spent her teenage years at the Kabanga
Protection Centre, a government safe house for albinos. Her mother
Bestida Simon said: “Her father thought she was a gift from God he could
use to get riches. He had wanted to attack her since she was three
months old.”
Across the continent in Uganda it’s not just albino children at risk.
The charity KidsRights believes hundreds of children have been murdered
in recent years by a network of witch doctors who have turned human
sacrifice into a lucrative business.
Children are chosen because their purity and innocence is supposed to
make the sacrifice all the more potent. The government has formed a
task-force to tackle the epidemic, but campaigners say the new body has
underestimated the scale of the problem and is not bringing enough
killers to justice.
KidsRights spokeswoman Lydia van der Putten said: “In many of these
cases, body parts were removed by witch doctors when the children were
still alive.
“Such sacrificial rituals, and the subsequent wearing, burying or
eating of a child’s body parts, are thought to bring business success,
personal prosperity and health.”
Polino Angela, an ex-witch-doctor who now campaigns against human
sacrifice, claims to have killed 70 people. He says he was initiated at a
ceremony in Kenya, where a boy of 13 was sacrificed. He said: “The
child was cut with a knife and from the neck down was ripped open, then
put on me.”
He even claims to have sacrificed his own 10-year-old son on his bosses’ orders.
He said: “I deceived my wife and made sure that everyone else had
gone away and I was with my child alone. Once he was placed down on the
ground I used a big knife and brought it down like a guillotine.”
With more reports from Nigeria, Liberia, South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe, there are fears human sacrifice is spreading.
It seems these dark and terrifying rituals are anything but a dying art.
When I reviewed the most chilling stories of modern-day,
human sacrifices hurt. Literatures show that chanting and sacrifices of
human being is all over the world. Some of them are: A Nepalese man has
confessed to the murder of a boy after saying a local holy man advised
him that a human sacrifice would heal his ailing son. He also burnt some
incense and recited mantras, after killing the boy. After all, he just
believed the Shaman, what is usually the highest authority in villages
to announce the source of the illnesses and bad fortune that befalls
them. The Indian couple kidnapped and sacrificed a child to have their
own child. The guru said that they should kidnap a boy and sacrifice him
on the banks of the river. In October 2011, a 7-year-old Indian girl
was dismembered by two farmers, who killed the girl and removed her
liver as an offering in a ritual sacrifice to make sure a better
harvest. In March 2010, the owners of a brickyard in Bangladesh became
concerned that bricks were losing their sought-after reddish hue, so
they decided to consult a fortune-teller. The seer suggested that the
brickfield needed a “human sacrifice.” Therefore, the owners ordered
four of their workers to kill one of their fellow labourers. The victim,
a 26-year-old man, was killed and his head was baked in an oven.
The perpetrators and their collaborators capitalize on the prevalent
irrational fear of the supernatural, and the poor and corrupt policing
and justice system, to get away with these egregious violations. Victims
of ritual sacrifice are mostly minors or vulnerable people who do not
live to seek justice or redress or who lack the resources to seek
redress if ever they survive the ordeal. The families of victims fear
spiritual or supernatural backlash and do not hold their states
accountable. And local authorities lack the political will to uphold the
rule of law and protect human rights.
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