NEW DELHI – During the three decades he has worked to free thousands of children laboring in dank mines and factories throughout India, Kailash Satyarthi has been shoved, kicked, threatened with deadly weapons and beaten numerous times.
His family hoped that he would cut back on child-trafficking raids when he turned 60, but just last month he directed the rescue of 23 children from a tiny basement factory in New Delhi. On Friday, the longtime advocate was sitting behind a desk at his small office in the capital when he learned from a journalist’s telephone call that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Satyarthi, the first Indian-born recipient of the honor, will share the award with Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani who became an education activist after the Taliban shot her on her way to school.
Satyarthi said it was a “great honor” and a “happy moment” for India, as well as for the children he had long worked to save. In a brief interview, he called for the “globalization of human compassion.”
“I am quite hopeful that this will help in giving greater visibility to the cause of children who are the most neglected and most deprived, and that this will also inspire the individuals, activists, governments, business houses and [corporations] to work hand-in-hand to fight it out,” he said. “The recognition of this issue will help in mobilizing bigger support for the cause.”
News of the award set off a raucous celebration at Satyarthi’s Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood Movement) office and a ripple of national pride throughout India.
The joy was tempered by critics who said they resented the Nobel Prize committee lumping India’s honoree with Pakistan’s, as if the adversarial nations were parties in an arranged marriage. Yousafzai later said that she and Satyarthi had spoken by phone and agreed that they would invite their respective prime ministers to the awards ceremony in Oslo.
Experts predicted that Satyarthi’s long-shot honor — he was chosen over favorites including Pope Francis — would probably focus attention not on geopolitical affairs but India’s still-endemic problem of child labor.
In India, children are not allowed to work in industrial jobs or other hazardous fields, but an estimated 50 million still toil in industries that make fireworks, carpets, bangles and bricks. A law banning all labor for children under 14 is still languishing in Parliament. Denizens of India’s rising middle class have been known to hire underage nannies or domestic servants.
“Indians have accepted these practices over the years, but we hope that this prize will prick their conscience, too,” said Swami Agnivesh, chairman of the Bonded Labor Liberation Front and an early mentor of Satyarthi’s.
Satyarthi is an iconoclast, fighting against widespread social tolerance for child labor in India, where many argue that the children would die of hunger if they did not have jobs. He insisted that the children he rescued attend school even as other charities were giving after-school classes for laborers, in a tacit approval of the system.
“His philosophy is that every child should be in school notwithstanding his economic background. He has rejected the theory that poverty drives child labor,” said Bupinder Zutshi, who co-authored the book “Globalization, Development and Child Rights” with Satyarthi in 2006.
Growing up in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, Satyarthi has said that he became aware of India’s socially stratified society at age 6, when he noticed a cobbler’s son working every day as he was on his way to school. He asked the cobbler why the son wasn’t in class, and the man told him that he and his son had been born solely to work, Satyarthi recalled in a 2004 interview with The Washington Post.
“The seed was sown that very day,” Satyarthi said.
Satyarthi was born a Brahmin, the highest caste in India’s hierarchical system. In a society in which family names often designate caste, he gave up his true name early on, according to his daughter, Asmita, 29, a business student. He adopted the more neutral Kailash Satyarthi instead, and gave her only one name.
He gave up an engineering career for activism in his 20s and founded Bachpan Bachao Andolan in 1983. He rose to prominence in the 1990s, when he would swoop down on far-flung villages in eastern India — known as the country’s carpet-making belt – for surprise raids on dimly lit basements where children squatted on the floor, working on looms. The children lived with the loom owners and worked for hours for small payments that were sent home to their parents. The rescues, while high-profile and hyped by the local media, were not always successful. Sometimes the poverty-stricken parents preferred their children to be working than in school.
During the 1990s, Satyarthi was instrumental in convincing many European countries to boycott Indian carpets made with child labor. He developed a self-certification label for South Asian carpets headed for export that said they were made without of child labor. In 1994, the certification trademark was called Rugmark; it is now GoodWeave International.
Satyarthi he has received numerous international honors over the years, including the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. Yet in India he has received far fewer laurels. He was also accused by many nationalists and others of working against Indian interests, especially in the essential export industry, and of showing the country in a poor light.
“It’s a big moment for us,” said his wife, Sumedha Kailash, 59, who runs a rehabilitation center for rescued children in Jaipur. The couple’s son, Bhuwan Ribhu, 35, a lawyer, also works for the nonprofit center. Its narrow halls are often crowded with anguished parents clutching photos of their missing children. But on Friday, they were filled with jubilant supporters passing out sweets.
Beaten, burned and treated like animals Meena and a minor boy are now the star witnesses in the murder case.
Subhajit Sengupta,
New Delhi: It was a slow week and the Diwali weekend had just got over. Festivity was still in the air. A few of my friends wanted me to join them for an early morning ride through the pristine Lutyen’s Delhi.
Being mid week and in a profession that demands 24 hours a day, I ended up not going with them to usher in the winter. Little did I know I would be up and early in the locality working to expose the grim of its dirty underbelly.
A 35-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant, sold by a placement agency to Dhananjay Singh, the powerful MP from Jaunpur in Eastern UP, had been allegedly murdered by the 29-year-old doctor wife of the BSP strongman at the official residence of the respected Member of Parliament.
Dhananjay paid around Rs 1 lakh to a middle man named Dev to procure Rakhi in February and that was the last time she saw the world outside 175, South Avenue. Nine months later her body was sent to the Ram Manohar Lohia hospital mortuary. Both 175 and 126 South Avenue, Chanakyapuri, are the official residences of the BSP MP from Jaunpur. Flat No. 175 was primarily occupied by his wife Dr Jagriti Singh who is ironically a senior resident in the same RML hospital.
Since the MP had filed for divorce last June, he would rarely stay back in this flat, though he would come often to meet his 4-year-old son.
Apart from Rakhi there were two other domestic helps. A 17-year-old boy and Meena, who was in her early thirties. Beaten, burned and treated like animals these two are now the star witnesses in the murder case.
For they bear testimony, not only to the torture that was meted out to them, but also to the brutal murder of Rakhi. Dhananjay Singh too was aware of this inhuman torture but did nothing to save them.
Details of the FIR
According to the FIR within months of joining, Rakhi got a sense of what awaited her. On April 1 Jagriti beat up Rakhi with a broom for not making the food as per her taste. Not content with it, she also chopped off her hair to satisfy her rage.
The minor says, “Jagriti used to beat us on the smallest of the issues; she never felt any sympathy for us. Not even when blood would drip from Rakhi’s body. She would ask me to wash the blood spots, while she carried on hitting her. Once she hit me with antlers when the motor of the aquarium stopped working while I was filling water in it.”
The FIR goes on to read: “Once she hit Rakhi so hard that the stick broke, then Jagriti used the sharp edges of the broken stick to hit Rakhi. Whenever MP Saab (Dhananjay) would come home we would complain to him. But he would change topic and say ‘why do you make mistakes? Other servants too have worked here’. He too had hit us with his shoes a couple of times.”
Rakhi used to look after their 4-year-old son. And whenever the child would cry she would be beaten up.
But here comes the most sordid bit. The final assault that continued for days from November 1 when Rakhi woke up around 4 am instead of the scheduled 3:50 am. She hit Rakhi with sticks and kicked her hard. Jagriti then called the MP a little later in the day and told him Rakhi will have to pay for her mistakes and she will kill her. Next day an injured Rakhi was a little slow at her work and this infuriated Jagriti.
She kept beating her for hours and made her sleep out in the open on a night when the Delhi winter was showing its first glimpses. Later in the night the senior resident dentist of RML hit her with a stick again and refused to give her any food.
On November 4, she asked the minor domestic help to wake up Rakhi around 4:30 am. But she did not wake up. Later at around 8:30 am he went to check on her again. This time her body had gone cold, her gaze fixed. And that was the end of Rakhi.
Role of the MP
When the dentist wife realized that she has killed the maid, she called her husband who was in Jaunpur at that time. Dhananjay flew back to take control of the situation. He got the blood stains washed and sent the other maid to a relative’s place.
The MP threatened the minor with dire consequences if he said a word to anyone. Mukesh Meena, Joint CP, New Delhi Range said, “He tampered with the DVR of the CCTV camera which were fixed inside the house and did not inform the police about the murder till rather late.”
While she was dead by 8:30 am, the police were only informed by 8 pm. For this the powerful MP too was arrested and charged under Destruction of Evidence and Juvenile Justice Act.
Story of the other domestic helps
There are 20 CCTV cameras fixed inside 175, South Avenue. Even the toilet used by the help had cameras installed. The condition of the third help too is rather serious.
Meena told the magistrate in her statement that Jagriti broke her hip bone and burned her buttocks with hot iron. She was made to eat like an animal, with her hands and legs on the ground. She would be forced to use her mouth to pick up food from the plate.
After Rakhi died, Meena was kept hidden at another place. Jagriti even spat on the food that was eaten by the helps. The juvenile in his statement claimed that once she suspected him of breaking a glass tumbler and as a punishment burnt his stomach with hot iron. She also used wooden replica of antelope horns to beat them up.
This went on for months. The helps were told that if they ever stepped outside they would be shot dead by the security guards standing outside the house. One day the minor boy was beaten up for speaking to the guard.
The case as of now
Both the husband and the wife are in police custody now. The probe has revealed that Rakhi (deceased) and Meena (seriously injured) were not paid a single paisa. Whenever they demanded money, the two were beaten up.
A onetime payment of around Rs 1 lakh was made to the agent who got Rakhi to them. The teenage domestic help was paid only Rs 5000 on two occasions in the past 12 months. Initial autopsy report says that Rakhi had wounds all over her body and her death was as a consequence of those wounds. The detailed post mortem report and the forensic reports of the DVR of the CCTV footage is expected by Monday.
SBS Tyagi, Deputy Commissioner of Police, New Delhi, says that they are looking at the option of slapping Posca (Prevention of Children Against Sexual Offences Act) and investigating the human trafficking angle as well. The trafficking aspect gathers steam because of the growing number of such cases that are coming to light. In the last one month Delhi has seen 3 major cases of abuse of the domestic helps.
Maid abuse and Delhi
On September 30 Vandana Dhir, a senior executive of a reputed multinational firm, was arrested for assaulting her domestic help, beating her and branding her with a hot girdle. The maid, who hails from Jharkhand, alleged that she was also forced to drink her urine and was kept by Dhir in her Vasant Kunj house in a semi-naked condition. She was rescued by a joint team of NGO Shakti Vahini and Delhi Police from Dhir’s residence.
On October 29 police had rescued a minor maid from Netaji Nagar area of South Delhi. The employer used to beat the girl and locked her when she went abroad. The girl managed to escape from the roof and made a PCR call. The employer is an air hostess with a government airline and was not in the country when the maid was rescued. She was arrested upon her return and charged under sections of Juvenile Justice Act, Child Labour Act and Section 342 of IPC.
What next?
There is an urgent need to stop the rampant human trafficking and fly by night maid providing agencies. In cases after cases the trail turns cold as by the time police reach the agency, they have shut shops and moved on. The Delhi High Court too had stepped in after a PIL and had asked the government to regularize these agencies.
The High Court was informed on November 6, that 1,754 placement agencies have been registered under the Delhi Shops and Establishments Act. “The Delhi Private Placement Agencies (Regulation) Bill has been drafted after incorporating suggestions of various stakeholder,” the division bench of Chief Justice NV Ramana and Justice Manmohan was told.
But even here there is a clear delay. The High Court had held way back in March 2012 that the bill should be enacted within two to three months but nothing has been done to date. There were TWO sessions and about 25 odd sittings of the Delhi Assembly since then but the bill was never tabled.
The last word
NGOs like Shakti Vahini and Bachpan Bachao Andolan who have rescued 1000s of people from being trafficked say that it is not just the poverty in a few backward states that are forcing them to work in such inhuman conditions. It is also the demand for cheap labor in the urban household which is fueling the cunning of a number of these placement agencies.
But the last three cases have actually thrown all the stereotypes of gender, education and urbaneness out of the window. The perpetrators here ,of the mindless violence, are educated, suave, sophisticated women.
As India debates how to halt a rising tide of violence against women, two filmmakers are tackling the subject head on with a Bollywood movie called “Kill the Rapist?” The film was inspired by the fatal gang-rape of a student in the capital New Delhi late last year, which triggered widespread outrage and national soul-searching over the treatment of women in India
By Jonathan DeHart
Over the past year India has been grappling with the nation’s rape epidemic. The brutal gang-rape of a 23-year-old medical student aboard a bus in New Delhi last December has served as a lightning rod for this topic. The victim later died of her injuries.
Everyone from her parents to protesters across the nation weighed in on the importance of bringing about justice and, significantly, a greater long-term change. The nation was shaken by the savage crime and rallied around the trial of the four convicted rapists who were sentenced to hang.
This was a start. Yet, instances of violence against women are still being routinely reported in India. In July, six men were sentenced to life in prison for gang raping a Swiss tourist in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Just a month later in August it was reported that a 22-year-old photojournalist in Mumbai was gang-raped by five men, who also tied and beat up her male companion. This begs the question: Is Indian society, at large, ready for a change when it comes to the treatment of its women?
Two filmmakers are taking a different approach to this thorny issue. Rather than picket in front of a New Delhi courthouse, they aim to draw attention to their nation’s problem with rape on the Bollywood big screen with Kill the Rapist? The controversial thriller, slated for release in December and marking the one-year anniversary of the infamous Delhi gang-rape, aims to make “every rapist shiver with fear before even thinking of rape,” says its official Facebook page, which has more than 41,000 “likes” at the time of writing.
Indian protestors rally in front of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Lucknow, after the death of a gangrape victim in the capital New Delhi, December 29, 2012
Some have criticized Bollywood for its objective treatment of women in its scantily-clad dance numbers. In the 1960s and 1970s the plots in Indian films often centered on male suitors pursuing women until they relented. Kill the Rapist? aims to take Indian theater goers on a more sobering journey. The film’s producer, Siddhartha Jain of iRock Films, said, “Through this film we want to amplify the debate on the issue and show that there is no one solution.” Hence: the question-mark at the end of the film’s title.
In this photograph taken on Dec. 21, 2012, Indian activists stage a demonstration in Bangalore, as they condemn the gang rape in New Delhi. [AFP]
Funded by two private female investors, Jain plans to establish an anti-rape foundation with proceeds from the movie. The cast largely comprises fresh faces and the film’s total budget is under $1 million. After more than 400 men auditioned for the part of the rapist, the role went to Sunny Hinduja. The woman is played by the award-winning Anjali Patil.
“These are passion investors, who instantly wrote out checks after listening to the story,” Jain said. Addressing the “aggressive title,” Jain added, “Our country is beyond subtlety. There is a cathartic aspect to the title—we would not have called it Nari Ka Inteqaam (A Woman’s Revenge).”
Kill the Rapist? tells the story of a young woman in New Delhi whose home is broken into by a would-be rapist who she overpowers and traps. The 90-minute thriller follows an “independent, career-driven, single” woman in New Delhi who confronts a serial rapist stalking her. Although police fail to help her, even after the man attempts to rape her, she ends up capturing him. The rest of the movie deals with the moral quandary over what she and her two female roommates should do with him.
As India continues to struggle with rampant violent acts against women, the revenge fantasy film “Kill the Rapist?” aims at making “every rapist shiver with fear before even thinking of rape.”
“Ideally she would go to the police and the law would take its course. But that doesn’t happen here,” Jain said. “So how can she stop him coming after her again if she frees him? So she does something really fantastic that is legal for her. I think at some point, if the law can’t protect you, you have to protect yourself.”
Other directors are also taking up the subject, including Shahid Kazmi, who directed Damini (Lightning) – The Victim, and Milan Bhowmik, a Bengali director who created a film titled Nirbhoya based on the New Delhi attack.
While longer term change may be slow in a nation of more than one billion people, the short-term goal is simple. Chhel said, “If, after seeing the film, a man decides not to rape a woman, I will have succeeded.”
A 14-year-old rape victim was allegedly forced to strip at a police station to prove she was sexually assaulted.
It is alleged that when the teen arrived at the station in the Kushinagar district of Uttar Pradesh, she was asked to remove her clothes in front of a male police officer.
According to the Times of India, the teen said she was ordered to do so to convince him that her allegations of rape were genuine and not false.
The incident happened on Saturday when the teenager attended the police station with her parents to report that she had been raped by a local resident.
When the victim’s father failed to pay a 50,000 rupee fee demanded by police on duty, officers refused to process her report.
The girl was then told to strip, it is claimed.
Following the family’s complaint this week, the alleged rapist has reportedly been arrested.
The police officer accused of forcing the girl to strip is said to now be under investigation.
Rape and sexual assault remain a serious problem in the region.
According to India’s National Crime Records Bureau, one woman is believed to be raped every 20 minutes in the country.
Sentence to death: Two of the men – Mukesh Singh, left and Vinay Sharma right – facing death by hanging for attacking a 23-year-old student in Delhi
In December, protests erupted across India after a young woman was brutally gang raped on a bus in New Delhi.
She died from internal injuries two weeks later.
Four men were sentenced to death by hanging for gang raping and torturing the 23-year-old victim earlier this month.
Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Mukesh Singh are appealing against their death sentences.
Fury: Protesters demanded swift justice in the case and wide-ranging reforms to sex crime laws
Women look out the windows of a building on Garstin Bastion Road, the red-light district in New Delhi. Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg
By Andrew MacAskill & Bibhudatta Pradhan
Like many Indian girls, Suchitra was taught her future profession by her mother. In her village, there was only one path. Even before she’d reached puberty, Suchitra had learned different sexual positions and other ways to please a customer.
At age 14, a man she had never seen before showed up one day at the family’s house near Bharatpur in northern India. At her mother’s urging, Suchitra got into his car. Six hours later they reached their destination. It was a brothel in New Delhi’s red-light district. She had been sent into sexual servitude.
“I always knew that this would be my life,” said Suchitra, sitting in her wardrobe-sized room and wearing a low-cut green top and jeans, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. “I can never forget what I’ve done but it is the only way for my family to earn a living.”
Suchitra, now 20, is from one of hundreds of villages in India where centuries-old tradition dictates that most girls enter into a life of prostitution. Rising wealth hasn’t reduced the trafficking of girls for sex in the world’s second-most populous nation: The number of child prostitutes is growing and the average recruitment age has dropped to between nine and 12 years old, according to the Delhi-based National Human Rights Commission.
“We are witnessing an unprecedented growth in prostitution,” said K.K. Mukherjee, a sociologist who has studied sex workers for more than three decades and has written government reports on the subject. “It is being driven by rising levels of income but also by a change in sexual attitudes and the increasing migration of women to cities.”
A prostitute stands at the entrance of her room as her customer sits on the bed in a village red light district in Rajasthan, India.
Trafficking Girls
Districts such as Bharatpur, where half of the women are illiterate, are breeding grounds for the country’s $4 billion sex trafficking industry. India has 3 million sex workers, of whom 1.2 million are below the age of 18, according to a government estimate, and the South Asian nation traffics more women for sex than any other country.
The growth of underage prostitution in a country whose gross domestic product has risen on average about 8 percent annually in the past decade is testimony to the treatment of women and the power of caste in the world’s biggest democracy. India, which carries out almost 40 percent of the world’s female sterilizations, where a woman is raped on average every 21 minutes and where a third of all women are illiterate, is failing to change views that undercut the status of women.
Whole families from some castes at the bottom rungs of India’s social hierarchy rely on income from their daughters’ sex work, with fathers and brothers often acting as pimps. The girls often have their virginity auctioned to the highest bidder once they reach puberty.
Ignoring Rape
Suchitra, who is of the Bedia caste, shows how the caste-based system determines access to occupations and social status. Rooted in religion, the millennia-old structure marginalizes certain groups, imprisoning women in a cycle of isolation and abuse. Many female members of the Bedia community, which numbers about 20,000, say they are treated like outcasts. They can’t marry if they have worked as a prostitute, are refused service in shops, are called “whores” and are greeted with disinterest by police when one of them is raped.
“Caste remains a defining feature for most Indians,” said Satish Misra, a political analyst at the Observer Research Foundation, a policy group based in New Delhi. “These attitudes bring an enormous cost in terms of a lack of social mobility and lost economic opportunities.”
Cheap Perfume
A single bare bulb exudes dim light in Suchitra’s room, just enough to see the black water stains on the peeling, faded pastel-green walls. Used condoms lie on the floor. The stench of urine, sweat and cheap perfume hangs in the air. Rats gnaw at piles of garbage in the corridors outside.
Suchitra, who would only give her first name for fear of arrest by the police, said she has sex with as many as a dozen men a day for as little as 100 rupees ($1.60) a time. A concrete slab that takes up most of her room serves as a bed, where she sleeps and does her work. Customers have threatened her with knives, guns and beer bottles, she said.
Government officials and activists working to break the born-into-prostitution custom say that high levels of illiteracy and caste-based prejudice make it difficult for the women to earn a living any other way.
“It is going to be very difficult to stop,” said Niraj Pawan, the top government official in Bharatpur, who is struggling to curb the practice among the Bedia community. “How do you convince these illiterate girls, with no skills, facing enormous family pressure to be a prostitute to take a job where they will earn a tenth of their current pay?”
A young prostitute covers her face in a village red light district in Rajasthan, India.
More Income
Bedia women say they can earn between 1,000 and 2,000 rupees a day working as prostitutes. That compares with the average daily income in India of 188 rupees.
The Bedias trace their roots to a 16th century battle in Rajasthan known as the Siege of Chittorgarh in which the Mughal forces defeated the Hindu Rajputs. The losers fled into the forests where they led a nomadic life on the fringes of the law. As told by members of the Bedia community, their women were driven into prostitution by the ensuing economic deprivation.
Many of the girls who are raised as prostitutes are injected with the hormone oxytocin to make their breasts grow faster, Pawan said. Unlike in the rest of India, where there is a traditional preference for boys that has led to a skewed sex ratio, Pawan said the Bedia community prefers girl babies because they are a potential source of income.
Kidnapping Children
It was because she gave birth to a boy that Swati Kumari, a 25-year-old member of the Bedia caste in Bharatpur, said she endured months of abuse by her husband and parents-in-law. She fled to her parents’ house after she repeatedly had her hair pulled, was punched in the face and had objects thrown at her. She said her son also faced physical abuse from her husband and his family.
“I don’t want to tell you all the things that they did to me,” said Kumari, sitting on a charpoy, or rope bed, in the courtyard of the home of her parents, who filed a complaint with the police over their daughter’s abuse. “They told me that to make up for the loss of earnings I had to go work as a prostitute instead. When I refused, the torture got worse.” Kumari declined to provide contact information for her husband and in-laws.
To bolster their income, the Bedia, Nat and Kanjar communities are involved in trafficking rings that kidnap children from other communities, who are then raised in their villages, the United Nations said in a 2013 report. Some of the girls are sent to Mumbai and Middle Eastern countries to work in dance bars and escort services, the report said.
Forged Passports
Sex trafficking rings prey on the poor and illiterate among India’s almost 600 million female population. The traffickers often operate with impunity due to poor police enforcement, compliant officials and ingrained traditions of caste, said Siddharth Kara, a fellow with the Carr Center Program on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Harvard University in Cambridge,Massachusetts.
“Law enforcement officials are often complicit,” said Kara. “They either take bribes or look the other way or just don’t see it as something they need to be concerned about.”
Two policemen were among six people arrested for operating an extortion and prostitution ring in Delhi, the police announced last month. A police team investigating a sex racket last year in the south-western city of Kochi revealed that about a dozen girls had been taken out of the country on forged passports to the Persian Gulf with the aid of local airport officials, the UN said in its report.
Prostitutes wait for customers in a village red light district in Rajasthan.
Police Role
“Official complicity in trafficking was a serious problem that remained largely unaddressed by the government,” the U.S. State Department said in the India section of its 2013 human trafficking report. “Some corrupt law enforcement officers facilitated the movement of sex trafficking victims, protected suspected traffickers and brothel keepers from enforcement of the law, took bribes from sex trafficking establishments and sexual services from victims, and tipped-off sex and labor traffickers to impede rescue efforts.”
The police regularly carry out raids to rescue women and girls trafficked into prostitution, said Alok Kumar, a deputy commissioner of Delhi Police who is responsible for the area that covers the capital’s red light district. Kumar said he wasn’t aware of the involvement of any policemen in assisting sex trafficking rings.
Krishna Tirath, the minister for women and child development, did not respond to emails, phone calls and visits to her office seeking comment. A secretary in the office of Nita Chowdhury, the top civil servant in the department, said she didn’t have time to meet.
Rape Increase
In India it is illegal to live off the earnings of a prostitute, run a brothel or solicit for sex in public places. It isn’t illegal, though, to take money for sex.
Parliament passed a bill in March that mandated tougher sentences in rape cases and broadened the definition of trafficking, after thousands of people took to the streets in December to protest the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old Delhi student. A New Delhi court on Sept. 13 sentenced four men to death for the crime.
There has been a 16 percent jump in the number of reported rapes nationally in India in the five years ending in 2012, and a 902 percent jump since 1971, according to police records. The increase may be the result of growing confidence in reporting assaults, police said.
The changes to the penal code aimed at bolstering women’s safety include allowing rape that results in the death of the victim to be treated as a capital offense. Lawmakers also mandatedlife imprisonment for police officers found to have aided in trafficking.
Purple Lipstick
The town of Bharatpur, located about 160 kilometers south of Delhi and the place where Suchitra was schooled in prostitution, is one of the main homes of the Bedia. The community has also spread out into the surrounding villages, located among rolling green fields.
At first glance Panchi Ka Nagla looks like many other villages in rural India, with its mud-brick homes, tea stalls and foraging goats. The women and teenage girls wearing bright purple lipstick and revealing tops suggest something different.
They loiter by the road running past the village, waiting for customers. Once the price has been negotiated, they head off to one of the houses or into the bushes with the customer. Children playing nearby watch the scene play out over and over. The village men lounge on cots on thatch porches, prodding their daughters and sisters to hook more customers.
Signage warning of the penalties for trafficking minor girls hangs from a building on Garstin Bastion Road, the red-light district in New Delhi.
Virginity Auction
“Of course it makes us sad that we have to force our women into this line of work, but how else can we earn this sort of money?” said Pratap, 30, who uses a single name and lives off the earnings of his sister, Manju, who was soliciting customers nearby. “It is easy for them. They don’t have to work hard for it.”
Manju’s virginity was auctioned for 25,000 rupees 11 years ago to a hotel manager from the northern city of Agra shortly after she had her first period at age 13. A ceremony called nathni utarna, which literally means “taking off the nose ring,” was held to signify that she was ready to enter the sex trade.
Keeping the money from the auction sale is considered inauspicious, so a lavish party was held. Guests from nearby Bedia villages were invited and Manju was adorned with new jewelry and clothes, she said. The festivities culminated in a feast at which alcohol was served and a goat was slaughtered.
Marriage Ban
“The first time I was so scared, I cried a lot,” said Manju, spitting a mouthful of paan, a betel leaf concoction, onto the floor of her mud shack. A small woman with dark eyes exaggerated by the use of thick mascara, Manju said she has sex with about six men a day and doesn’t know who the fathers of her three children are.
The rules of Manju’s caste dictate that she will never be allowed to marry because she has worked as a prostitute. Women married to Bedia men usually come from outside the community and are exempt from working as prostitutes. A Bedia girl can only begin sex work once she’s had her period and Bedia men are prohibited from having sex with prostitutes from their community, villagers said.
“Of course it is very difficult to understand why you want your own daughter or wife to sleep with other men,” said sociologist Mukherjee. “In a patriarchal society like India women are just considered a commodity to exploit and to earn you money.”
‘Good Business’
Stiffer financial penalties for running a brothel and successfully prosecuting sex traffickers would reduce the number of women drawn into prostitution, said Kara. The current penalty for operating a brothel is between one and three years in jail and a fine of as much as 2,000 rupees.
“Even if all the owners of brothels in which sex slaves were exploited were convicted each and every year, sex trafficking would still be a high-profit, minimal-risk venture,” Kara said. “It is a very good business model” for the brothel owners, he said.
Ultimately, the key to extracting women from a world of sexual slavery is schooling, said Soumya Pratheek, who works for Apne Aap, a Delhi-based group that campaigns against sex trafficking in India. Some 73 percent of children aged 11 in schools in the state of Rajasthan are unable to subtract and 79 percent can’t recognize numbers between 10 and 99, according to the 2012 Annual Status of Education Report.
“The most important tool that we have is education,” said Pratheek. “Girls must go to school. They need to know that their body is theirs. It is not something that other people can trade in.”
Role Model
In Bharatpur, Kumari, who took refuge in her parents’ home, said she is the first woman from the local Bedia community to finish college. After graduating with a degree in Hindi, Sanskrit and political science this summer, she said she wants to work as a teacher. Because she is from a low caste she won’t be given a job at a private school and so will seek employment at a government school, she said.
“I want to be a role model in my community and show people that there is a way out,” Kumari said. “I understand the pull of this tradition is very strong. But if women can get a good education and earn more money then maybe one day they won’t be forced to work as prostitutes.”
Like Suchitra, other Bedia girls also end up working on Garstin Bastion Road, the red-light district in New Delhi. The area, just a few minutes’ walk from the city’s main train station, is home to shops selling water pumps, paint, tiles and toilet seats, as well as 92 brothels and about 4,000 prostitutes, according to data cited in the UN report.
Too Late
Hundreds of women stand on balconies behind black metal grills overlooking the mile-long road, beckoning to passersby to come inside. Customers walk through dark stairwells to reach the brothels. Signs on the walls carry a warning: “Beware of the pickpockets and pimps.”
The entrance to the brothel where Suchitra works opens onto a room with wooden benches, where the women sit talking and brushing their hair in between soliciting customers. Men fasten their trousers as they emerge from adjoining chambers.
Suchitra, who was talking about the dangers of her job, suddenly broke off the interview to join a group of her colleagues trying to solicit a customer who had entered the brothel. She arrived too late and the man headed off with another woman.
“This is my life, I can never do anything else,” she said. “I just pray that one day other girls like me will be able to do something different.”
![In this photograph taken on Dec. 21, 2012, Indian activists stage a demonstration in Bangalore, as they condemn the gang rape in New Delhi. [AFP]](https://i0.wp.com/www.rawstory.com/rs/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/In-this-photograph-taken-on-Dec.-21-2012-Indian-activists-stage-a-demonstration-in-Bangalore-as-they-condemn-the-gang-rape-in-New-Delhi.-AFP.jpg)
Traffick Alerts 