The terror of the witches of modern India

When I landed in Delhi at the height of the monsoon, the excitement in the city was palpable. The Indian Space Research Organisation was planning the launch of Vikram, the country’s first rocket mission to the Moon. Media coverage was ubiquitous and each report was imbued with a gushing sense of national pride. This great nation was about to take another giant leap into the future. But in modern India, there is also a great paradox.

My trip was not about rockets but the much older human activity of dispensing justice to wrongdoers. Having travelled around Britain earlier this year for a BBC series on our criminal justice system, I wanted to see how Indians deal with those who offend against the law in the worst possible ways.

There are many similarities between the two countries, including the same English institutions, spawned from the detritus of colonial rule. There are uniformed police officers, public prosecutors, barristers, judges and courts, with much of the system continuing to operate in the English language, over 70 years after independence.