Last year, a childless couple in a remote village some 675km east of Mumbai were arrested for allegedly killing five young boys because a religious mystic told them it would help the woman to conceive. A seven-year-old girl in a village near Nashik, northwest of Mumbai, was killed as part of a ritual to find hidden treasure.
(Maharashtra, India. excerpted from report in The Australian)
The bill to push to pass the Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and Other Inhuman, Evil Practices and Black Magic Bill is controversial. Practices to be banned by the proposed law include beating a person to exorcise ghosts or making money by claiming to work miracles. Treating a dog, snake or scorpion bite with chants instead of medicine, and seeking sexual favours by claiming to be an incarnation of a holy spirit or the client’s wife or husband in a past life would also be proscribed.
The bill has not received unanimous support. Some Hindu nationalists
Obviously it is better to eat the transubstantiation body of Christ than to kill a "real" human, but the connecton between the rituals frightens me.
fear the legislation seeks to move beyond the excesses named in its title and might be used to curb cherished religious freedoms. (They worry that the law) could be used to prevent common Hindu rites like the “havan” ritual, in which a consecrated fire is lit in the home to chase away evil spirits.
The Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, called it “a draconian law targeting faith”, denounced its proponents as “atheists” and called for supporters to lobby assembly members to oppose it and demand amendments.
Dabholkar rejects the charge that the bill is anti-religion.
“In the whole of the bill, there’s not a single word about God or religion. Nothing like that. The Indian constitution allows freedom of worship and nobody can take that away,” he said.