In a recent affidavit submitted to the Kerala High Court, the Left-led state government stated that it would not proceed with enacting a bill to ban black magic, sorcery, and other inhuman practices. The bill, first drafted in 2022 based on recommendations from the State Law Reforms Commission, appears to have been shelved following a Cabinet decision. I do not know the precise factors that led to this choice. The newspaper reportage states that the Kerala government did not think a separate law was required to fight crimes related to superstition belief. One can speculate that it was a matter of political strategy or that it followed from opposition within religious constituencies. But whatever the motivations, the withdrawal of the bill opens up an important space for reflection on what it means to legislate belief, and what kinds of transformation are possible or impossible through the law.
Legislation and Superstition: An Ongoing Battle
In 2016, I had written about the Maharashtra Anti-Superstition Act and the legacy of Dr Narendra Dabholkar, the rationalist and reformer who had worked tirelessly to combat the exploitative practices carried out in the name of faith. Through the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti, Dabholkar had organised demonstrations, conducted awareness campaigns on mental illness, exposed fraudulent godmen, and framed superstition as a threat to public health and dignity. After his assassination in 2013, the Maharashtra government acted swiftly. The ordinance was approved the day after his death, and eventually passed into law as the ‘Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice, other Inhuman and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act’, criminalising a range of practices considered harmful, deceptive, or inhuman. This became a catalyst for other state efforts to battle superstition and black magic; Karnataka passed a comparable bill in 2017, which was notified in 2020, and most recently, the Gujarat government passed the ‘Gujarat Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and Other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act’ in 2024.
It is worth recalling that India already has on its books the Drug and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act of 1954, which was passed with the aim of curbing misleading claims about miracle cures and regulating the advertisement of substances claiming to treat a list of 54 diseases or conditions through supposedly magical or scientific means, outside of accepted medical practice.
The law is outdated and rarely enforced, and has had little effect in curbing the flourishing of pseudoscientific treatments or public claims of divine healing powers. The persistence of such practices despite the existence of this Act underscores a key point… the presence of a law does not in itself produce social transformation, particularly when the law is untethered from public engagement, education, and structural reform.
Boundaries of Belief and The Limits of Law
At the time of Dabholkar’s assassination, I had found myself moved by the urgency of the movement, but also uneasy with the sweeping nature of the definitions of the Maharashtra Anti-Superstition Act. The Act invoked categories such as evil, sinister, and inhuman, and rested on a vision of science as neutral, universal, and secular.
While the law aimed to curb violence and deception, it also flattened the domain of belief, and did not fully consider the social and psychological functions of ritual, or the diversity of meaning that such practices hold for those who turn to them. The anti-superstition movement had little to say about the limits of scientific rationality, or about how secularism itself operates as a historically and culturally situated idea.
In defending reason, it did not always pause to ask what kind of science it was upholding, or whose reason it represented.
Kerala’s decision, although not accompanied by a detailed explanation, may indicate a moment of hesitation. It may reflect a quiet recognition that another law, however well intended, cannot easily resolve the tensions between science and belief, or distinguish clearly between healing and harm. The criminal law seeks to draw clear lines, but belief does not always conform to such boundaries.
A ritual practice may be experienced as oppressive or coercive by some, while offering meaning and comfort to others. To legislate across this spectrum without attending to the specificities of context risks reproducing the very violence it seeks to eliminate. What is needed is a deeper engagement with how people seek care, how suffering is named, and what forms of healing are available.
This may require collaboration rather than confrontation, and an approach that listens before it intervenes. It must include a critique of both exploitative religion and of an unmarked science that assumes it has no history, no ideology, no limits.
None of this is to minimise the reality of harm. Across the country, there have been incidents of women accused of witchcraft and subjected to public humiliation or worse, children beaten during so-called exorcisms, individuals with mental illness denied care and subjected to violent ritual interventions. These are serious forms of injury, often sustained by those already marginalised by caste, gender, poverty, or disability. The state cannot be indifferent to such suffering. But the response cannot begin and end with the punitive.
Harm must be understood not only in terms of individual acts, but in relation to the broader conditions that make certain practices viable. These include the erosion of public healthcare, the lack of access to psychiatric services, and the enduring exclusions of caste and class that make state institutions inaccessible or untrustworthy.
In 2016, I had argued that the rationalist movement’s reliance on science as a secular ideal left little room for understanding belief on its own terms. In 2025, I find that I still hold that position. I do not know what calculations led the Kerala government to hold back the bill. But its refusal, even if temporary or tactical, opens up the possibility of thinking again on this question. Not how to criminalise superstition, but how to ask what people need when they are suffering, and whether the law, on its own, is equipped to answer.
Sources:
Siddiqui, S. (2016). Religion & Psychoanalysis in India: Critical Clinical Practice. Routledge
The Federal. (2025, June 27). Kerala: Withdrawal of anti-superstition bill draws flak from rationalist groups.
The Hindu. (2025, June 25). Kerala backs off from enacting black magic law, cites policy decision in High Court.
Sabah Siddiqui
Dr. Sabah Siddiqui is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences, Krea University, India. She is the author of Religion and Psychoanalysis in India (Routledge, 2016). Sabah has co-curated special issues for Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2024) and the Annual Review of Critical Psychology(2018). Her research engages critical psychology, psychoanalysis, and the politics of mental health, with a focus on gender, culture, and care.