ABSTRACT
Does the legal punishment apparatus lead to a betterment of an accused woman’s situation? Part 10 examines whether the legal apparatus offers any form of justice for women accused as witches, against a backdrop where both laws and their prescribed punishments are imagined by society to solve the problem of witch-hunting. The historically contextualised process of treating witchcraft accusations as a crime beginning with the FIR at a police station moves to following an appeals’ long and slow journey through the hierarchy of courts. Offenders received maximum penalties during the early decades of colonial rule, in the hope that harsh sentencing—such as death sentence—would serve to influence others’ behaviours. A similar rationale was applied to Chhattisgarh’s Witchcraft Atrocities Prevention Act (2005). This part tracks a crucial case and its prosecution through all three tiers of the legal system from 1995 to 2017 where it was heard by the Supreme Court. It serves the accused to keep their appeal languishing in the slow-moving courts.
