Lucknow, Nov 19 (IANS): In a bizarre incident, a woman district magistrate in Uttar Pradesh has accused one of her attendants - a woman homeguard - of staging some kind of witchcraft with the intent of causing harm to her and asked a priest to carry out rituals to "ward off the evil".
The incident came to light after Bahraich District Magistrate Pinky Jowel ordered suspension of homeguard Mithilesh Saini, for carrying out sorcery in her bedroom, where she found a few mustard seeds scattered.
Besides getting a formal charge-sheet issued to the home-guard with those accusations, Jowel went to the extent of getting a Hindu priest to perform a "yagya" in the bedroom to ward off the suspected evil effects of the alleged witchcraft.
Ram Darshan Misra, the priest who performed the 'yagya' told IANS over telephone from Bahraich: "I did perform a 'puja' cum 'yagya' to ensure that the district magistrate remained safe from all evil effects of whatever witchcraft was carried out in her official residence."
Jowel was not available for comment.
The incident has also exposed the blatant misuse of home-guards, who in this case were not only made to do the daily chores but even ordered to sweep the floors in the bungalow as also clean the toilet.
"Not only me, but the half a dozen other homeguards posted in the DM's residence were forced to carry out all the odd jobs including washing of the child's toilet," Saini told reporters in Bahraich, 130 km from Lucknow.
Flatly denying that she had carried out any kind of sorcery in the house, she said: "I and my other homeguard colleagues have been working in her house like slaves - be it sweeping or swabbing of the floors, cleaning of toilets, giving her a body massage and other menial work."
"The charge against me is baseless and false as I did nothing, but just because she found a few mustard seeds on her bed, she blasted me and accused me of carrying out witchcraft with those seeds, when fact remains that I neither believe in witchcraft nor have any clue about anything of that sort," Saini asserted.