Rationalists blame religious preachers, blind faith for instances of black magic

Ahmedabad, Oct 16 In the first week of October, a father and uncle murdered a 14-year-old girl, fearing the influence of an evil spirit on her in the Gir-Somnath district.

In October 2021, a mother of three children was beaten to death after a black magician (Bhuva) termed her a witch in Devbhumi Dwarka district.

In November 2021, a woman was strangulated by her husband and father-in-law in Kawant Taluka of Chotaudepur district after branding her as a witch.

These are not isolated cases, such incidents keep on occurring in the rural and urban areas, even after the increase in the literacy rate. However, most people are barely literate, still far away from understanding science. They are surrounded by Bhuva, religious people, who instead of taking a person to the right path, mislead them with false information and show shortcuts to achieve their goal, is the experience of a rationalist, Rohit Shah.

He was organising a lot of awareness programmes along with another person, Chetan Chauhan, so that people do not get influenced by black magic, superstition. However, his experience was that the hard work of the programmes gets washed away with just one movie that spreads misbelief, shows some sadhu's wrong preaching.

To create awareness among the people, he has written many books in Gujarati like "Mujko Yaro Maaf Karo", "Ro - Hitupdesh", and "AA AB lot Chale". Unfortunately with the decreasing reading habit such books have few readers, so creating awareness is difficult.

According to rationalist-activist Piyush Jadugar society can only get rid of such superstitions if science is promoted. According to the Constitution's article 51 (A) (h), it is the duty of the state to promote and develop a scientific temper, humanism, and the spirit of inquiry and reform, which is being done on a very small scale.

Jadugar says that people like him are just five percent of the population, creating awareness, 90 percent blindly follow what others do, they hardly apply their mind. Five percent are literate but not educated, they too prefer to follow the rest 90 percent.

Both the rationalists believe the solution is in spreading awareness by educating people for which social media is the best tool. The government should prepare short video clips, memes and circulate them on social media.

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