Bernama’s correspondent in India, Shakir Husain shares his take from the Indian capital of New Delhi.
NEW DELHI: Hair-raising incidents have been reported in recent days in parts of northern India.
A 60-year-old Dalit woman was lynched by upper caste men in a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Agra district as the mob suspected her to be a ‘witch’ who had to come to cut off women’s hair.
“She kept pleading for mercy and even identified herself but the men kept on hitting her. They called her a witch and said that she had come to chop off the braids of women,” the killed woman’s son said.
There have been dozens of reported cases of women in Delhi, Punjab, Rajasthan and Haryana saying their hair was mysteriously chopped off while they were unconscious.
The police are investigating some of these bizarre cases, which have been attributed to paranoia, mass hysteria, rumours, mischief and black magic. In superstition-prone regions of India, rumours go viral faster than wildfire.
Various explanations have been offered to explain the latest panic caused by human or supernatural hair-shearers. The circumstances in which the women lost their braids, pony tails and hair locks are different. Some claimed their hair was chopped off whey they were asleep, while others experienced the horror as they worked in the kitchen or answered the door.
“From all available evidence it seems that the women are cutting their own hair, either consciously or in an altered sensorium, likely to seek attention,” Sudhir Khandelwal, a former head of the Department of Psychiatry at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the country’s best known medical facility, was quoted as saying in a newspaper report.
“I was making tea in the kitchen when suddenly something knocked me unconscious. When I regained consciousness, I found that my hair had been chopped off,” a woman named Machla Devi from an Uttar Pradesh village said.
In Delhi, one hair-chopping case involving a teenage girl turned out to be a prank by young family members. “We sent a police team to verify the facts.
The investigators, in their interaction with the girl’s relatives and neighbours, learnt that it was the girl’s 10-year-old brother and 12-year-old nephew who did it,” senior police official Romil Baaniya told a newspaper.
Nevertheless, the mysterious chopping of hair is being considered more than an old wives’ tale. It became a matter of serious panic in some places and formal police complaints were made.
Stolen hair of women and children is used for black magic practices in some rural communities. These superstitious and gullible people use a person’s hair on a doll, which they bury underground.
As per this vengeful belief, as the doll rots so does the person from whom the hair has been acquired. Quacks, charlatans, faith healers, tricksters, fortune-tellers, sadhus, godmen, gurus and even politicians often exploit these weaknesses of belief.
Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan’s 2014 popular movie ‘PK’ pokes fun at false beliefs in society. Unusual beliefs are not just restricted to individuals.
It’s worth recalling a major case that moved the masses. In 1995, millions of Indians found themselves gripped by one-day ‘miracle’ of the elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesha’s idols ‘drinking’ milk.
The unusual phenomenon was first reported in a New Delhi temple but quickly spread to other places. Newspapers and television channels dispatched teams of journalists to cover the frenzy and many media reports cited numerous witnesses who
saw the ‘wonder’ of idols sipping the milk the devotees offered them.
There were also those who said the idols didn’t show any thirst for their milk offering but probably their voices were drowned in the hype that gripped the nation then.
The ‘miracle’ was not limited to India, but reported by members of Indian communities in places such as Canada, the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. Of course a number of questions were raised by scientists and rationalists whether it was a mass media event, a hallucination or simply a hoax started by those who preyed on people’s credulousness. — Bernama