India still kills women for being "witches"

On August 7, 2015, five women in the village of Kanjia, Jharkhand State, India, were murdered because they were "witches". 

Around midnight the five women, ages 45 to 50, were dragged out of their huts and beaten to death with stones and cut with knives. Even the so-called "educated" younger villagers joined in the attacks.

The bodies of 5 Indian "witches" in the back of a truck

Many villagers were arrested (reports vary between 24 and 50 suspects). However, the Indian justice system is notorious for arresting people in order to prove that the Police are "doing something" and then letting the suspects go free and uncharged. 

Reportedly the villagers held grudges against the women for years and blamed them for bringing illness, poor crops and bad luck on the village. A child had died in the village earlier this week, and of course, this was because of the "witches". 

In another case that occurred in July of 2015, Purni Orang, age 63, was stripped naked, beheaded and chopped into pieces by villagers in Assam state, after she was accused of being a witch who brought illness to the settlement.

Among those arrested in that case were nine women. How many of them will actually end up in prison is anyone's guess. 

Between 2000 and 2012, over 2,000 people, most of them women, were murdered in India on suspicion of being witches. 

India has money for bombs, rockets
and Mars, but not for education.

Every time that something bizarre or barbaric happens in India, the authorities and the Indian press come up with the same old story and that is that these barbarities and oddities occur in "some impoverished and remote areas of the country". 

There must be a whole lot of impoverished and remote areas in India because these barbarisms are a lot more common than the Indian authorities admit to. 

India has nuclear weapons. 

India also has a "Space Program" and in December of 2014, they launched a large rocket carrying an unmanned capsule that is eventually intended to hold Indian astronauts. 

Oddly enough, in September of 2014, an Indian rocket began orbiting Mars. 

Seriously?  

This country has the money and the brains to figure out how to make nuclear bombs, how to plan for future astronauts, and how to fly a rocket to Mars, but they can't figure out how to provide the basics of a 21st century education to their own population? 

The Indian Government can't figure out how to curtail the killing of "witches"? 

God help India. Amen. 

God save us from ignorance and from barbarism. Amen.