A 2015 report, “The Contemporary Practice of Witch Hunting,” by Legal Development Partners, an Indian legal non-profit organization, noted that victims of witch hunts face horrific punishments. The report stated that they may be “forcibly stripped of their clothes”, “paraded naked in public places, have their hair cut or shaved, their faces blackened, their noses cut off, their teeth pulled out, and their teeth dug out.” whipping, gang rape, forced consumption of human excrement, cow dung” or “hanging, hacking, lynching or burial alive”.
Ms. Rabha traveled from village to village in Assam, speaking out against the practice and declaring that there was no such thing as a dhani, or witch. She had long been skeptical of folk superstition and witch doctors, who cast spells on young women to ward off what they believed to be evil spirits. As a young mother, Ms. Laba was told by a local doctor that her mentally ill son would soon die. He didn’t. This false prediction in the 1980s planted the seeds for her advocacy work, which she began in earnest around 2000.
That year, she stood up at a meeting in the Assam village of Lakhipur to support five women accused of being witches; the next day, she didn’t flinch when hundreds of villagers surrounded her house.
Usha Rabha recalled her first rescue mission with Ms. Rabha in 2006, when a mob armed with sticks surrounded them in a neighboring state. “I’m scared,” she said. But Ms Laba said Birubala was “not worried at all”. She said that when police came to rescue the two women, Birubala “berated the police and said ‘I’m not going to stop until I finish what I’m doing.'”
In Assam in the 2000s, Birubala Rabha formed an alliance with Kuladhar Saikia, the state’s former police chief. “She would come to me, meet with me and discuss the issues,” Saikia recalled in an interview, adding, “She told me she was standing up against social injustice.”
