Yet another botched exorcism, this time in India

News reaches me that in Lakhimpur, a town in northern India close to the border with Nepal, a five-year-old girl was hacked to death and her corpse disposed of like garbage. She'd been beheaded during what appears to have been an "amateur" exorcism.

The Press Trust of India quotes the local Superintendent of Police, Piyush Mordia, on July 28:

Vandana, a resident of Mudia Hemsingh village, was hacked to death by Ram Niwas and his uncle Mewa Lal, who later dumped the beheaded body in the fields, from where it was recovered this morning. Both the accused had been arrested," Superintendent of Police Piyush Mordia told reporters. The SP also said that Ram Niwas was under depression as his wife was failing to conceive and his brother Ram Sahay was ill. "Ram Niwas's uncle Mewa Lal, who practised exorcism, advised him to sacrifice a girl, which the latter claimed can remove his hardship," the SP said adding that Ram Niwas and Mewa Lal picked Vandana from her house on Monday night.

He "advised him to sacrifice a girl". It's hard to know where such abhorrent ideas emanate from. I'd hesitate before outrightly condemning the men involved, because obviously they were following what they believed to be sound religious advice. At the same time, they must surely have sensed that the murder of a child is terribly wrong in any circumstances.

All too often humankind has allowed its culture to be shaped by poisonous beliefs and superstitions such as this. There are no easy answers as to how to prevent a recurrence. Education? India has one of the finest education systems in the world. Kaushik Basu, Professor of Economics at Cornell University, notes that:

India's production of professionals is phenomenal. With over 300 universities and 15,600 colleges spewing out 2.5 million graduates each year, in terms of the volume of production India trails behind only the US and recently China.

I can only conclude that the culture or society in that part of India is at fault. At some time in its past something went wrong: women (or in this case girl children) were scapegoated for the ills of society. That this has endured up to the present day is both sad and despicable.

Let us by all means be on our guard for the presence of demons. That they exist and that they exercise a baleful influence in many countries should be beyond question. That they are present in a five-year-old child, who must be brutally murdered in order that the demons be expelled?

Dangerous rubbish.