Raw And Rudderless

Raw And Rudderless A lack of skilled officers, a host of controversies and little accountability. Has India’s premier intelligence agency touched a new low? TUSHA MITTAL reports Photo: ABP IN APRIL this year, well before the commencement of India’s recent wave of urban terror attacks, Western intelligence bureaus gave the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) information about potential strikes in several cities, including Jaipur, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Kolkata. At the time, RAW chief Ashok Chaturvedi was on leave, having reduced his work commitments ostensibly owing to bad health, though it was also no secret that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was unhappy with his performance. Passing over his organisational second-in-command PV Kumar, Chaturvedi chose Sanjeev Tripathi, currently at number four in the agency, to fill in for him during his absence. With intelligence assessment at the core of his brief, Tripathi, it is believed, either ignored the information or did not deem it important enough to act upon. In his 18 months as the head of RAW, Ashok Chaturvedi appears to have embarrassed himself and his organisation. Today, the situation at India’s external intelligence agency is at such a low that, sources say, foreign intelligence outfits are reluctant to pass it information — little, after all, happens when they do. As RAW chief, Chaturvedi enjoys a degree of autonomy unusual for intelligence bureaus the world over. In the US, for instance, the Central Intelligence Agency head has four levels of supervision; Chaturvedi has one. Earlier this year, Chaturvedi was on the verge of being sacked, a first for any RAW chief. The Prime Minister stopped short, however, after the intervention of former RAW chief GS Bajpai, who is also Tripathi’s father-in-law. This, along with Chaturvedi’s long-time friendship with Tripathi, is the reason sources ascribe to Tripathi’s disproportionate influence in the agency, and to Chaturvedi’s backing his bid to succeed him when he retires in February 2009. Not removing Chaturvedi may have been the first mistake, say insiders, and handing Tripathi the prized seat could be the second. Photo: INDIAN EXPRESS Chaturvedi and Tripathi are part of a domineering Indian Police Service (IPS) lobby within RAW. The IPS candidates, along with those on deputation from other civil and paramilitary services, have always been at loggerheads with RAW’s own cadre, the Research and Analysis Service. The hostilities are currently manifesting themselves in the fight for the number one position. Most are rooting not for Tripathi but for Kumar, who belongs to the RAW. Ever-shifting guidelines for those on deputation have worsened rivalries. The most recent change allows those on deputation to work with RAW without resigning from their parent cadre. They can rise in seniority within RAW and return whenever they feel dissatisfied with their position. This has created a lot of resentment within RAW; many see the agency’s revolving door of arrivals and departures as preventing the creation of a unified team committed to intelligence gathering. Some startling revelations show the extent to which petty personal issues are obstructing work at the agency. According to a reliable source, a RAW officer posted in Bangladesh got intelligence before last year’s Hyderabad blasts that the Harkat-ul-Jehad-al Islami (HUJI) was planning an attack on a major South Indian city. This intelligence was sent to Delhi. Shockingly, because of a grudge against the officer, his Delhi counterpart did not pass the information to his supervisors and to the Prime Minister’s Office, as is protocol. “Everybody inside knows about it, yet no disciplinary action has been taken,” the source said. But insiders say disciplinary action is not something India’s premier intelligence agency is known for. Sources told TEHELKA that after the 2002 Gujarat earthquake, a RAW officer posted in Bhuj was found to have swindled 70 percent of the relief material, but was let off with a mere demotion. “Should someone of dubious integrity be allowed to work in intelligence?” questioned a source. The dearth of qualified, motivated staff is severely impacting RAW’s ability to col-lect quality human intelligence at the grassroots level. Strangely, the deputation phenomenon has led to a crucial problem: competent candidates who clear the civil services examination don’t want to join RAW at the bottom, because they know they can join another service and enter RAW at the Class I level. This allows them to escape the agency’s mandatory requirements of learning a foreign language and spending time on India’s borders. JYOTI SINHA, former RAW officer Photo: RAKHI SINHA It is no surprise, then, that insiders say RAW’s own recruitment standards are below par. Its technical cadre has not had a single qualified BTech graduate for at least four years. There is no benchmark or specific aptitude test to qualify for the agency. Sources say that those who do not make it to the more highlyregarded services are RAW’s most likely recruits. “The glamour associated with the agency has quietly faded and fewer and fewer people want to join,” a former RAW chief told TEHELKA. Jyoti Sinha, who took premature retirement from the agency, agrees that personnel reform is urgently needed. “Unless you have a sound, consistent policy, it is impossible to develop the kind of expertise and experience you need in the field of intelligence. Frequent changes in personnel policy have led to so much uncertainty. It has eroded the quality of human resource and expertise. Not only RAWbut the government must also share the blame for this deficiency.” ASENIOR OFFICER told TEHELKA that RAWis relying too heavily on technology and failing to cultivate reliable on-the-ground sources. “The money that should be spent on cultivating sources is being spent elsewhere, and RAWhas no way of checking this,” another source added. RAW has a budget running into thousands of crores, and yet there is no external performance or financial audit. There seems to be no mechanism to check whether what RAW is delivering is worth the near-inexhaustible funds at their disposal. There are several indications to show it may not be. Sources say the lack of actionable intelligence is also because of the organisation’s dearth of members of minority communities, especially Muslims. “In my six years of service, I did not come across one Muslim employee,” says a former senior RAW officer. Some justify this by saying that intelligence agencies the world over tend to follow the right-wing mainstream makeup of a country, to safeguard against being compromised. But past scandals show this has not insulated RAW from traitors. AS DULAT, former RAW Chief Photo: K SATHEESH Ironically, when intelligence inputs do come, RAW fails to analyse them adequately. “They have state-of-the-art inter-ception equipment but the intercepts are not read properly,” says a source. The reason is astonishingly simple: the lack of adequate language skills. A senior officer who recently left RAW told TEHELKA that while he was in the organisation not one analyst on the Pakistan desk knew Urdu. “All the analysts do is correct the grammar of the briefs and pass them on to the Prime Minister,” he added, emphasising that most lack any background in the desks they are handling. There is no mandatory requirement, and assignments are mostly arbitrary, depending on vacancy. “It would be pure coincidence if someone from Tamil Nadu was handling the LTTE desk,” he said. FURTHER, SOURCES say, even most field officers do not know the language of the country they operate in. “Having enough language skills to converse with locals should be a basic requirement. But that is not the case in 90 percent of RAW’s postings,” said a former RAW officer. Sources told TEHELKA that the current RAW officer in China does not know Chinese, the person in Saudi Arabia does not know Arabic, and the person currently posted in Paris is one of the few in the organisation who actually knows Pashto. Languages like Pashto, Burmese and Singhalese are, in fact, considered inferior and officers are not even willing to learn them, a senior reliable source said. “Everybody wants to learn French or Spanish,” he added. Another basic issue at the root of RAW’s intelligence failures is the agency’s refusal to make a distinction between field operatives and analysts. In most agencies, these are two distinct jobs, allowing complete secrecy for operatives while giving analysts the chance to mingle in other circles to widen their perspective. But in RAW, the blurring of this distinction is compromising the effectiveness of both operatives and analysts. In fact, intelligence gathering is being compromised by the blurring of another key distinction: the line between the personal and the official. This comes from the chief himself. Even the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has been roped in to give weight to Chaturvedi’s personal dislikes. Only recently, it was asked to press charges against Major General VK Singh for his 2007 book, India’s External Intelligence: Secrets of Research and Analysis Wing. Curiously, these instructions came months after the book was published. Sources say Chaturvedi only ordered the action after he discovered he had found mention in the book. Highlighting RAW’s lax work culture, Singh had said in his book that a senior officer did not come to office for six to eight months, peeved that someone else had been promoted instead of him. The officer turns out to have been Chaturvedi himself. Singh has now filed 21 Right To Information (RTI) applications to show that Chaturvedi’s case against him is baseless. The CBI chargesheet accuses him of revealing the names and locations of RAW officers, information the organisation holds top secret. Astonishingly, Singh says this information is easily available in the public domain. Through RTI applications, he was able to get the names of all RAW employees from the Department of Personnel and Training. From the Ministry of External Affairs, he procured the names of all Indian embassy employees world-wide. Matching the documents, Singh says he knows the name and location of every RAW officer posted abroad. Yet RAW insists this is classified information. “RAW has created a hush-hush aura around itself so it doesn’t come under the scanner and its anomalies are never exposed,” Singh says. “Clerks are taught from the day they join to label everything top secret, even circulars for tea parties.” What is even more ironic is the wealth of information about RAW one can find online. Wikipedia gives the exact coordinates of several RAW bases, including ones in foreign countries. “Even I did not know we had a base in Kazakhistan,” Singh says. “But I found out about it on Wikipedia.” VK SINGH, retd Major General Photo: SHAILENDRA PANDEY Singh had pointed out several instances of corruption in his book. He now tells TEHELKA that all the systems he had pointed out as corrupt were initially removed but reinstated after he left. The only concrete action has been a new rule that no employee can write a book about RAW even after retirement. Sources point to another disconcerting trend — foreign postings in RAW are decided not by operational needs and merits, but by personal motivations. For instance, reliable sources tell TEHELKA that a RAW officer currently posted in the Northeast was sent there as a punishment, because it was believed he had been leaking stories about Chaturvedi to the media. More surprisingly, an operative currently in Vietnam is not even from the intelligence department. He is an administrative officer sent because the RAWchief wanted to return a favour. Similarly, the officer posted in Indonesia a few years ago was from the ministerial cadre. “Older people who have never been abroad are given a foreign posting as a reward, so that they can make some money before they retire,” a source said. THE LURE of the ‘plum’ foreign post in ‘luxury’ countries like the US or the UK has also led to a dearth of officers willing to go where it matters. There has been no RAW operative in Iraq for the last four years, says Lieutenant Colonel S Maladi, who joined RAW’s technical cadre on deputation from the army in 2000. Of his own experience, he says, “I was offered the Afghanistan cover post and I wasn’t even in the intelligence department,” adding that he soon learnt three others in the bureau had been sent notices to leave for Afghanistan, but had refused to go. Current RAWofficers defend the organisation, saying this work culture is prevalent throughout the civil services. That, perhaps, is the crux of the problem. “RAWseems to operate like any other government department and lacks the ethos of an elite intelligence unit,” said a former senior officer. Under Chaturvedi, RAW has been described as a rudderless ship, and there seems to be a sense of despair among the few proud sailors who have seen better days. “I only spent two years in the organisation and I am very fond of it,” former RAWChief AS Dulat told TEHELKA. “I hate to see all this dirt flying around, running it down,” he added. But the grime is more evident now than ever before. In the latest episode to discredit the agency, Nisha Bhatia, a director at RAW’s training institute, tried in August to commit suicide outside the Prime Minister’s office, indicting Chaturvedi and joint secretary Sunil Uke on sexual harassment charges. Bhatia told TEHELKA she was driven to this extreme step after requests for action found no response. She initially told Chaturvedi that Uke had offered her Rs 30,000, withdrawn from the secret service fund. TEHELKA has a copy of Chaturvedi’s reply: “Please call both the concerned officials and sort out the problem. I don’t wish to be disturbed on such issues,” he wrote. While Chaturvedi has termed the allegations baseless, Bhatia says she is willing to take legal action. If she goes ahead, it will not be the first time RAW is dragged to court. If appeals for more accountability and for the creation of a parliamentary oversight committee looking into RAW go unheard, it may not be the last. • From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 43, Dated Nov 01, 2008

Saffron Techies

Saffron Techies The RSS is now expanding its ideological bandwidth through special camps for software professionals, discovers SANJANA in Bengaluru Illustration: SUDEEP CHAUDHURI IT’S 8AM on a Sunday morning. At a public ground in Sahakarnagar, Bengaluru, swayamsevaks (volunteers) from the RSS file out, their shakha (meeting) concluded. Queries about something called an Information Technology (IT) milan which is to be held in the same ground in half an hour are answered enthusiastically. “They will assemble here on time. They are also part of our Sangh and discipline is very important,” says a swayamsevak who only identifies himself as Arun from Vasanthappa Block, RT Nagar, (a colony in North Bengaluru). Before he leaves, he gives me the phone numbers of four swayamsevaks living near my house who will put me in touch with the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the women’s wing of the RSS — IT milans are only for men. Arun’s suggestion notwithstanding, I was never turned away from milans. Most milan members were willing to accommodate questions about their work and activities. I was, after all, a potential member — for the Sevika Samiti, if not for the milan. IT milans are shakhas or camps organised for IT and IT-enabled service professionals, by the RSS, the right-wing Hindu fundamentalist organisation. Part of the extended Sangh Parivar, IT milans signal the RSS’ intention “to organise IT workers across the country towards contributing to the larger agenda of building a Hindu Rashtra.” A concept that has been in the making for six years, IT milans have started to appear with considerable speed in the last three years. They now exist in several cities across India with significant IT activities, including Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, Faridabad and Kolkata. In Bengaluru alone, there are 46 IT milans located in different residential areas. IT milan members work with leading companies such as Infosys, Tata Consulting Services, Cognizant Technologies, Siemens and Kyocera. In terms of the internal organisational structure of milans in Bengaluru, every milan has a mukhyashikshak (principal teacher) and a karyavaha (organiser); the milans are then organised into 16 valays (local area organisations), with a valay karyavaha (in-charge) and four khands (sections). An RSS full-timer, M Suresh Nayak, is in charge of overseeing all IT milans in Bengaluru and ensuring that the milans’ membership drive remains on full throttle. While not all milan members are swayamsevaks with years of experience and engagement with the RSS ideology, key organisational roles are assigned to only those with over 10 years of experience within the Sangh. Many, like Manoj Desai, the valay karyavaha of Amruthanagar, who oversees the functioning of two milans in his area, have been with the RSS since their childhood. Says Desai, “IT milans have been conceptualised keeping in mind busy IT professionals who cannot attend daily RSS shakhas — milans take place on Sunday mornings for an hour, usually between 8 and 9am in different areas.” Another departure from the daily RSS shakha is the relaxed dress code — milan members are not asked to wear trademark RSS khaki shorts. What happens in IT milans? Besides the routine RSS flag-hoisting and prayers, discussions are held every week on a topic chosen by the boudhik shikshak (ideological teacher) in the milan. After a brief presentation by the shikshak, discussions follow. In the milans I attended, discussions ranged from the disturbing collapse of Nepal as a Hindu rashtra to the real story behind Christian conversions and the attacks on churches, to JC Bose (an Indian scientist who is considered to be the father of wireless communication) and the need for pride in the nation’s real achievers. Discussions in milans are coloured by the Sangh ideology; the email lists as well are filled with opinion pieces by Sangh ideologues such as Tarun Vijay, V Sundaram and Shreerang Godbole. “Since they are IT professionals, there is a chance that they may not have time to focus on issues around them. Besides, it is important to grasp the real perspective on different issues. We want them to feel proud of our country and its achievements and not look at Western countries as a model,” says Nirmal Kumar, mukhyashikshak at the JP Nagar milan. When I asked a mukhyashikshak at a different milan about the unequal roles assigned to men and women within marriages and why women were asked to follow their husbands, I was directed to the Sangh Parivar official website that explained the science of the caste system and marriage laws. This is how it explains the ‘natural’ subordination of women: “Birth is not accidental. Depending upon the mood and thought level of the husband at the time of conception, souls in the range of similar thought-frequency enter into the sperm cells. That’s the moment when each of the sperm cells become alive, with one soul each. (This is like a radio system. We hear the frequency we tune to.)... Then all of them rush towards the ovum to conceive. ....But out of millions only one gets the chance!! This depends upon the female. The woman’s psychosomatic body will allow only that sperm soul to conceive which matches the impression she has of her husband on her psychosomatic makeup. That is why for good progeny the wife should be tuned to her husband, coloured by her husband, she should have adherence to her husband.” BESIDES IDEOLOGICAL indoctrination and integration into the Sangh Parivar, IT milans also provide the Sangh people and resources to channel into regular activities. A special door-to-door fundraising drive held in Bengaluru over a month in 2007 reportedly raised Rs 20 lakh for the Vanavasi Kalyan Kendra, a Sangh organisation that deals with “tribal welfare activities across India.” This year as well, a similar drive will be held to raise funds for a different Sangh organisation or activity. “We don’t just collect money, we ensure that we give donors information about the cause. That way, more people hear about the great social work that is happening across India. Unlike missionary NGOs, we don’t tell the press about the work done by the RSS. We avoid publicity and try to reach ordinary people directly,” says Debashish, a swayamsevak in the Amruthanagar milan. Debashish, who originally comes from Orissa and has been with the Sangh since his childhood, talks in detail about the mission that used to be run by Graham Staines in Orissa. “Though there are hardly 60 people in that leper camp, look at the publicity they got,” he said, coming dangerously close to contradicting the proposition that Staines was burnt alive on charges of converting thousands to Christianity. For now, IT milans in Bengaluru are working towards a Sanskrit camp that will be held in the month of November – an occasion that they hope will bring together around 2,000 people. Says Anant, another IT milan member, “We are still growing, there are a lot of people that we need to connect within IT orga - nisations in Bengaluru. The process may be slow since it is developed on personto- person contacts, but I feel we are on the right track. Just see how much we will have grown two years from now.”•

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 43, Dated Nov 01, 2008

AP: Woman who saved Muslim family ro be felicitated

Tulja Bai, who had stirred many a conscience by single-handedly fighting a mob and rescuing a Muslim family from getting burnt alive in the communal riot-hit Bhainsa town of Adilabad district earlier this month, will be rewarded for her pluck and bravery.
Sixty-five-year-old Tulja Bai, a woman of Maharashtrian descent but settled in Bhainsa for several generations, who had put her life in danger to save a Muslim family in her neighbourhood, will be felicitated by Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhar Reddy on November 1 at the official parade to mark the state formation day.
The district administration of Adilabad district as well as several prominent people, including ministers had recommended her name for an award after it came to light how she had saved the wife and three children of one Syed Osman on October 10.
District Collector Ahmad Nadeem and the District Superintendent of Police Anil Kumar had written to the state government and they have received a letter from the government saying Tulja Bai will be given a suitable award.
Tulja Bai, her son Thakur Ramesh Singh and other family members, including women had fought against the mob which had attacked the house of Syed Osman soon after the communal violence flared up in front of Panjeshah mosque during the Durga procession.
The families of Tulja Bai and Syed Osman have lived opposite to each other behind the mosque for several generations.
Osman and his brother S M Pasha, who respectfully addressed Tulja Bai as khala (aunt), said that if their family survived the attack by a mob, it was thanks to their neighbours.
After looting the property, the mob had set the house on fire with the woman and three children inside.
Recalling the Friday, October 10, Tulja Bai told this correspondent, "My family was watching the goings on from our window. The mob was rushing into our lane and attacking houses, breaking down doors and looting. When we saw smoke coming out of the house of Osman, we rushed out. When I saw a small child running out of the burning house, we realised that there were people inside."
Even as the mob threatened and abused Tulja Bai to prevent her from going inside, she and other family members rushed into the house and rescued the lives of Safia Begum, wife of Osman, and her three children.
"We took them inside our house and ensured their safety. Then we returned with water to put out the fire. Some people in the mob tried to snatch away the buckets from our hand, but we pushed them back. I told them this is the matter of our locality and these people were like our family members and nobody should stop us from helping our neighbours," she said.
Tulja Bai used the water stocked in her home to put out the fire in her Muslim neighbour's house.
"At the time no male member was at home as I was out to report the procession and the trouble," said Pasha, who works as a reporter for a Hyderabad-based daily.
"My brother had also gone out along with other family members. We had not expected any trouble as the Durga procession has become an annual affair for the last three-four years," he said.
Though the four members of the family survived, the house and the lifelong savings of the family were looted or burnt.
All the belongings kept in two rooms were turned into ashes. The TV was crushed to pieces and the iron almriah was reduced to mangled steel.
"The assailants took away Rs 1.3 lakh in cash, 19 tolas of gold and 40 tolas of silver. The clothes and other items kept for the marriage of our girls were also taken away or burnt. The furniture was broken into pieces," Pasha said.
Both Tulja Bai and Pasha said that while the Hindus and Muslims in these parts of Bhainsa were living together for centuries without any trouble, it was the people from other parts and outside who indulged in violence and attacks on houses and shops.
"I told the mob that they should do what they want to do in their own areas and not come to our area," said Tulja Bai.
"Both our families have been living together for centuries. Osman calls me khala and they are like our children," she said.
Tulja Bai was of the view that the communal trouble has become a regular occurrence in Bhainsa because of insistence of the organisers of Ganesh and Durga procession that they will sing and dance near the mosque and Muslims objecting to it. "There is no other reason for the trouble," she said.
While Tulja Bai was happy that her bravery was being recognized by the government and the people, she wanted others to follow her example.
"Before being a Hindu or a Muslim we are human beings and we should fulfill our duty as human beings. What we did is nothing great. We have just done our duty to take care of our neighbour in the times of distress," she said with a wholehearted laugh.

The Nowhere Children

The Nowhere Children Human trafficking is the third largest illicit industry after arms and drugs. Neha Dixit went undercover to meet the traffickers and the young victims sold by their own families to pimps and placement agents Photo: SALMAN USAMNI • Every Sunday, 17-year-old Rita was forced into sex with at least 50 men. • Vijay was still in the womb when his mother fixed the price he was sold at. • Seven-year-old Parul’s meals were thrown into a toilet bowl. She had no choice but to eat. • Priyanka was nine when she was shot in the thigh for eating too much. • Preeti has not been allowed outdoors since she was eight. It’s been 15 years. • Two months into their marriage, 14- year-old Puja’s husband began pimping her to his friends. EVEN THOUGH India’s poverty rate has dropped from 60 to 42 percent according to the World Bank, the number of Indians scraping by on less than Rs 60 a day is at an astronomical 467 million. That hunger has almost half the Indian population in its grip is not all that this figure implies. Among huge swathes of India’s poor, life is little more than a bare, often brutalised attempt at staying alive, a struggle in many cases hijacked by human trafficking, deemed by the United Nations the world’s third-largest illicit industry, after arms and drugs. Extreme poverty and the low premium traditionally placed on female lives sees thousands of girls, most of them more children than women, sold into unmitigated hell by family members and acquaintances. As TEHELKA witnessed at close range during a three-month investigation, the grievous trade in human lives is plied not only in the country’s brothels, but in urban domestic placement agencies and rural bride markets as well. BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: TORTURE AND DOMESTIC SERVITUDE PM Nair’s Trafficking in Women and Children in India indicates that nearly 75 percent of the victims of trafficking are tricked into it by the promise of a lucrative job. SAMIRA KHATOON AGE 8 SOLD BY HER BROTHER FOR RS 2,000 IN WEST BENGAL SLAVED FOR A DOMESTIC PLACEMENT AGENT IN NEW DELHI Photo: SALMAN USMANI Transit area A victim sits amidst her luggage in a cramped hostel room Photo: SALMAN USAMNI With the nuclear family fast becoming the norm among the urban middle-toupper classes, the demand for the live-in maid servant (euphemism: ‘domestic help’) has exponentially risen. In response, domestic placement agencies have mushroomed across the country’s metros. Posing as the mother of a three-year-old, we visited several such agencies in Delhi and saw at first hand how easily minor girls are brought from villages in West Bengal, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh to live under extreme exploitation, first at the placement agency’s ‘transit area’, and then at the employer’s house. Husband and wife Kiranjeet and Julie, known only by their first names, are traffickers from Alipore Dwar, West Bengal. In trade jargon, they are known as ‘johns’: they supply placement agencies with girls from the villages at commissions ranging from Rs 500 to Rs 10,000 per girl. TEHELKA got Kiranjeet talking about his profession. Tehelka: How do you bring the girls to Delhi? Kiranjeet: By the Mahananda train…not the Northeast Express because it comes via Guwahati and there is a lot of checking there. The Mahananda train comes to the station directly, which is why we use it. Tehelka: What do you tell the girls? Kiranjeet: I tell them there are a lot of employment opportunities in Delhi and good money also…I don’t give them too many details…The placement agent here in Delhi gives me Rs 2,500 for each girl I get… In the train, the police come on their rounds at night. If they find a number of girls being taken, they ask for money. Tehelka: They take money for bringing girls? Kiranjeet: Yes. They take Rs 200 per girl. KIRANJEET AND JULIE, Traffickers ANIL, Domestic placement agent JHARNA, Trafficker ONCE IN the city, the girls are kept in so-called hostels until the placement agent finds them an employer. The ‘hostel’, as we found on visits to many such establishments, is no more than a single room where several girls, all in the 8 to16 age group, are claustrophobically packed together in conditions unhygienic in the extreme. When we asked these girls who they were and where they were from, their unvarying answer was that they were the placement agents’ relatives — the reply they are told to give on arrival, to avoid attracting the attention of the police. The transit period involves doing the placement agent’s household work and, frequently, submitting to sexual molestation and assault. Smita, now 16, was one of four girls brought in June 2005 from their village in Jharkhand by an acquaintance of her father to a placement agency in Punjabi Bagh, New Delhi. There, while no employment came her way, she found the placement agent continually harassing her for massages. She refused. Three months later, the agent punished her with rape. “I ran away that very day, and stayed on the streets for the next two days. I had no money and I didn’t know any Hindi.” An NGO, Domestic Workers’ Forum, Chetnalaya, finally came to her aid, but her parents refused to take her back because she had been raped, leaving her nowhere to turn but the rescue home where she still lives. A case was registered last year against the placement agent; he, however, is absconding. WHEN WE went looking for a babysitter to Phoolchand Placement Agency in South Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar, six or seven girls between the ages of 10 and 14 were displayed before us like mannequins in a shop window. The placement agent told us he would charge a commission both from us and the girl, depending on whether she was untrained (a firsttimer), semi-trained (had worked before) or fully trained. The fee, accordingly, ranges from Rs 6,500 to Rs 10,000. Tehelka:I had a talk on the phone about a small girl for babysitting. Agent:Will be done. Call the girls. (A few girls enter.) Tehelka: I want this one. What is your name? Girl: Shilpi. Tehelka: How old are you? Shilpi: Twelve. Tehelka: Have you worked before? Shilpi: Yes. In Noida. For two years. Tehelka: Okay. I’ll take this one. Agent: Her mother will come in sometime. Talk to her. Tortured Priyanka’s injured forehead (above) and acid burnt hands (below) The girl’s monthly wage is fixed at Rs 3,000. The agent tells us there will be an 11-month contract and the girl will get two off-days a month. But, when we protest that we cannot allow leave, we are told she’ll work with no offs for an extra month’s salary. After a while, Shilpi’s mother, Jharna arrives. Tehelka: Is this your daughter? Jharna: Yes. Tehelka: What do you do? Jharna: I get girls from the village and supply them to placement agents in Delhi. Tehelka: Where is your village? Jharna: Between Siliguri and Kishangarh. It’s called Darkula. Tehelka:My sister also needs a small girl like her. Can you get me one? Jharna: See, there’s a problem in bringing minor girls because of the police check here. There’s no problem sending one’s own daughter. Then nobody can ask me anything. While one remains unsure whether Jharna is Shilpi’s actual mother, the interaction reveals one of the key techniques johns use when trafficking minor girls. The placement agent also insisted that Shilpi’s wages be paid by cheque into the agent’s bank account. A façade that promises security but means exactly the opposite. Latika Das from Alipore Dwaar arrived in Delhi in January 2005. Illiterate, a complete stranger to city life and without a soul she knew, it was no surprise that the 14-year-old could not manage to open a bank account. She turned to Praveen, her placement agency owner, who said she could deposit her money into his account. A year of hard labour in domestic service netted her Rs 12,000, collected in Praveen’s name. Says Latika, “When I asked him to give me my money and send me home, he refused. When I insisted, he raped me and told me that if I complained, he would get me arrested.” Fearing the legal repercussions Praveen could cause her to incur, Latika agreed to work at two different places for the next two years, during which she had no contact with her parents. Befriended by NGO Prayaas, Latika registered a case this May against Praveen, who now owes her Rs 36,000. He, however, is absconding. Speaking from a rescue home, she tells us, “I can’t go back to my parents till I get my money. How will I tell them about what I went through here?” PREETI AGE 23 SOLD BY HER UNCLE TO A PLACEMENT AGENT AT 8 NOT ALLOWED TO STEP OUT OF HER EMPLOYER’S HOUSE FOR THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS FORCED LABOUR, exploitation, fraud and sexual assault — Latika and Smita faced all these at the hands of the men who were supposed to get them work. Once work is found, however, life can descend into nightmare. Geeta, Priyanka and Parul were 12, 9 and 7 respectively when they were sent to work at the house of Manish and Ritu Gupta in Faridabad, Haryana, in January 2006. Priyanka and Parul would wash the clothes and manage the household cleaning (which included scrubbing the washrooms barehanded with acid), and Geeta would do the kitchen work. By the girls’ account, punishment in the Gupta household for slip-ups at work was nothing if not sadistic. Being locked into a wet bathroom on winter nights was perhaps the mildest. Beatings with dumbbells and cricket bats were common; the children would be gagged so their screams would not be heard. “When we did not finish our work on time,” says Parul, “Madam (Ritu Gupta) would throw our food into the commode from where we picked it up to eat.” During the two years the children worked for the Guptas, they neither got any money nor were they allowed to visit their homes. Says Geeta, “I was desperate to call my parents, and I once became adamant about it. She (Ritu Gupta) snatched the paper on which I had the number, put chillies in my eyes and tied me naked to the kitchen door. She did not give me food for the next five or six days.” Geeta says Manish Gupta attempted to rape her several times. He also shot Priyanka in the thigh with an airgun, apparently because he thought she ate too much. “They did not even call a doctor after that,” Priyanka says. Manish Gupta is an architect; his wife is what is commonly referred to as an ‘educated’ woman. The three girls were rescued in December 2007, when a neighbour informed a local NGO, Shakti Vahini. Manish Gupta and his wife managed bail the same day; they evaded TEHELKA’S attempts to contact them. The three children they brutalised wait in a rescue home in Sonipat in Haryana for their case to close so they can return home. Says Priyanka, “More than these people, I am angry at my brother who brought me from Chhattisgarh and dumped me here.” Gita’s response is impassioned. The Bengali girl speaks in the Haryanavi accent she has acquired during her stay in the rescue home. “I want to kill them both, I want them to suffer exactly what they did to us.” Parul, the youngest and the most traumatised, has only one reply to all questions: “I want to go home to my parents and my brother, then I will tell you everything.” Gita, Priyanka and Parul did at least find a way out of the hell they had been left in. Not Preeti, 23, who has worked at the house of KC Dutt — a resident of the Railway Colony off the capital’s Lodhi Road — since she was eight. Brought from West Bengal by her uncle and sold to a placement agency, Preeti has not left the Dutts’ house once in the 15 years she has been here. Her years in the house have not only silenced her, but have left her with a pervasive inability to trust anyone she meets. This includes her sister, who found her here after years of searching. When we visited the Dutts, they refused to let her out. The only contact she was allowed with us was through a small window. All the while, as we tried to coax her to talk, not once did she lift her head to look us in the eye. All she said was “I don’t want to go back,” the same response her sister says she gave two years ago when told her father had died of the trauma of not being able to locate her for 13 years. She has always been spotted in the same clothes with injury marks all over her face and body. How she got them, she never tells. TERROR OF the employer and the placement agent and of the social and financial consequences of returning home keep hundreds of thousands of girls and women silent about the torture and humiliation they daily suffer. The National Commission for Women (NCW) receives at least eight cases every day from across the country of the murder of housemaids, says NCW member Manju Snehlata Hembrom. “When the girls become pregnant after they are raped, the employers kill them and claim they committed suicide,” she says. Sister Leona, co-ordinator, Domestic Workers Forum, Chetnalaya, points out the chief hurdle in tracking the abuse of domestic servants. “There is absolutely no record of the number of girls that are brought from the villages to these agencies, nor is there any record of the number of agencies in the country.” Even the registration certificates that the placement agents show employers, under the Indian Partnership Act, are false because the practice is altogether illegal. The Domestic Labour Bill has been sent to Parliament and, according to Hembrom, will take at least eight months to pass. Till it becomes law, it will remain next to impossible to assess the magnitude of this kind of trafficking or to formulate a domestic workers’ database, not just for policy makers and social workers but for parents trying to track children they once sent out to earn and who are now lost forever. THE SEX TRADE: NO EXITS ON GB ROAD A report by the United Nations Centre for Development and Population Activities indicates that approximately 200 girls and women in India enter sex work every day. More than 160 are coerced into it. ABDUL, Pimp, GB Road SONIA, Madam RANI, former sex worker For ages, the commercial sex trade has been the chief destination for trafficked girls. According to a report by the Ministry for Women and Child Development, India has nearly 2.5 million prostitutes in nearly 300,000 brothels in 1,100 red-light areas across the country. RITA KAMBDE was kidnapped from her home in Latur, Maharashtra, in 1997 and sold for Rs 3,000 to a brothel on GB Road, Delhi’s red-light locality. She was then 17. When she refused to sleep with customers, she was thrown into a tiny room where, she says, there were at least a 100 other girls. Locked up for 20 days, they were neither given food nor even allowed to leave to defecate. Periodically, the brothel bahadurs — the term used for the husbands of the madams, the women heading the brothel — would pick off a girl to rape before the rest to terrorise them. At other times, Rita says, chilli powder would be applied to the girls’ vaginas to torture them into consent. When Rita finally agreed, she was made to sleep with 20 to 30 customers a day and with 50 customers on Sundays. When she mustered the courage to say she wanted out, the brothel madam told her to repay the sum she was bought for. Says Rita, “How could I have paid her anything? I was never given any money, just food and clothes.” Nine years later, Rita contracted tuberculosis and managed to escape when she was taken to hospital for treatment. She now works as a children’s helpline co-ordinator. Her case has been in court for two years. She has AIDS and just two or three years to live. Posing as a research scholar, the TEHELKA reporter visited GB Road and met Abdul, a pimp. Tehelka: Since when have you been here? Abdul: 1956. Tehelka: You must know a lot about the area. How much were girls sold for then? Abdul: At that time, for anywhere between Rs 20,000 to 50,000. Tehelka: What about now? Abdul: Now it’s much higher. Tehelka: Who brings these girls here? Abdul: Parents, brothers… Tehelka: And the police must also ask for a commission? Abdul: Is it possible without their commission? Tehelka: They must know that parents bring the girls? Abdul: Yes. In fact, the police themselves facilitate a sale every 10 to 15 days. Situated across from New Delhi Railway Station, the brothels of GB Road occupy the upper floors of Asia’s largest spare parts RITA KAMBDE AGE 29 SOLD INTO A BROTHEL FOR RS 3,000 FORCED TO SLEEP WITH 50 CUSTOMERS IN A SINGLE DAY SARIKA AGE 24 PIMPED BY HER HUSBAND AT THE AGE OF 12 ABANDONED IN THE YEAR 2000, MENTALLY UNSTABLE NOW market. A maze of narrow, dark passageways and staircases, filled with paan stains and cigarette smoke and guarded by bahadurs at every exit, lead to the brothels. It is a labyrinth impossible to navigate for anyone attempting to escape. We first go to brothel no. 64, which we are told is the best in the area. When we step into the display room, we find faircomplexioned minor girls from Nepal and the Northeast, dressed in Western outfits and accompanied by middleaged, well-to-do men drooling over them as they await a ‘room’. These socalled rooms are little more than wall cupboards, not even three feet deep, their shelves replaced by a single plank. Makeshift arrangements to accommodate the maximum customers at any given time, each ‘room’ has a mattress but no fan, ventilation or light. Rarely cleaned, these cramped quarters are, naturally, the automatic breeding ground for infection. The popularity of brothel 64 indicates that a large number of minor girls are available here, especially virgins. Since sections of our culture still subscribe to the myth that intercourse with a virgin cures sexual dysfunction, the demand for virgins is high, the younger the better. The looks and complexion of the girls also play a great part in deciding the rates they are sold at. AS WE leave, we meet Rani, nearing 40, a prisoner of the trade for over three decades. Rani was eight when she was kidnapped from a village in Siliguri, West Bengal, and sold to a brothel in Delhi. Twenty-five years later, her abused body was no longer attractive to customers; her dark complexion also impeded her graduating to the status of madam, a trajectory sex workers commonly follow. One day, she says, she came down with an unspecified illness; it took the brothel owners no time to throw her out. In the 25 years she had lived in the brothel, Rani had never once been paid. “I was completely stranded,” she says. “I didn’t have a single penny.” She saw hope only in her village; she managed somehow to put the money together for the return. “My mother wept the moment she saw me. She was so happy I had come home. But when my father saw me, he kicked me out on the spot. He said I would bring him a bad name if people found out where I’d been all these years. I was forced to return. Sometimes, I wonder if he’d have done the same if I’d come back with money. Was it my fault I was kidnapped?” When she returned, Rani was fortunate in being able to find a job with Shakti Vahini, an NGO that helps rescue trafficked victims. The money she earns provides her enough to raise her two daughters. That is not the usual fate of most of the flesh industry’s castoffs, many of whom end their days begging in the dark staircases that lead to the brothels. IN 2007, 15-year-old Puja Singh’s father married her to Pratap, 20, in Begu Sarai, Bihar. After the wedding, her husband brought her to a village near Bahadurgarh in Haryana and, two months later, began inviting his friends in to sleep with her. When Puja resisted, he told her she was his property, for her father had sold her to him for Rs 3,000. Shocked, Puja plotted her escape and was able to run away. She lives now in Nari Sadan, a rescue home in Rohtak, Haryana. Determined not to go home, she has no idea what she is to do now. Tears and anger burst from her as she speaks. “My father sold me, my husband turned me into a prostitute, I am not even educated, you tell me what to do.” Back at GB Road, at brothel no. 70, we meet Sonia, the ‘deputy madam’, who confirms the view that the most common sources of girls for the brothels are their own relatives. Tehelka: Where do the girls come from? Sonia: See, earlier the pimps would get them but now the mothers themselves bring them here. Girls from Calcutta, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh…After selling them, they come back every two or three months to collect their share of their daughter’s earnings. Tehelka: The pimps used to get the girls? Sonia: Yes. Pimps made a lot of money earlier. But now their method has changed. They pretend to fall in love with the girls, promise them marriage and convince them to elope. Then they sell them here. When traffickers come here, they come disguised as customers and ask to take them out. Once they do so, they sell them at some other brothel. Tehelka: How many times is a girl sold? Sonia: Don’t ask. There this girl in brothel no. 71 who married her pimp. He promised to take her out, but he now forces her to sleep with customers and lives on that money. Tehelka: Do the police know? Sonia:What will the police do? They get their commission every month. When we speak to Bala Sharma, SHO of the Kamla Market police station under which GB Road falls, all she tells us is, “To the best of my knowledge, there are no minor girls in the area and no girls have been sold here since I took charge.” Rescue does not always guarantee release, for traffickers and brothel owners keep close tabs on the girls. Says Bharti Sharma, chairperson, Nirmal Chhaya, a rescue home for girls in Tihar Jail, “Traffickers often disguise themselves as relatives of the rescued girls. That is why we don’t allow the girls to go with anyone but their parents. We ask for pictures and other details before we hand the girls over.” But even these precautionary measures are not always adequate to the purpose. Jaswanti, who runs the Rohtak rescue home, Nari Sadan, tells of how a couple once came with photographs, birth certificate and other such documents and claimed that one of the girls at the home was their daughter. They said the girl, then 16, had been trafficked when she was five; now that she had been rescued, they wanted to take her home, they said. All formalities completed, the girl was allowed to leave. Two days later, Jaswanti got to know that the parents were in a nearby locality, forcibly marrying their new-found daughter to a 50- year-old man. “I rushed to the place with the police and rescued her,” says Jaswanti. SAAT PHERE: SEVEN CIRCLES OF HELL Despite the Pre-Natal Diagnostics Test Act, which has banned foetal sex determination since 1994, nine lakh unborn girl children are aborted in India each year, as per official statistics. SITA AGE 16 SOLD INTO MARRIAGE FOR RS 36,000 BY A RESCUE OFFICIAL ABANDONED BY HER HUSBAND ONE MONTH LATER Caught Rana Suraj Mal (centre) who sold Savita into marriage PHOTO: TRILOCHAN S. KALRA The desperation for a son has left states like Haryana and Punjab with some of the worst sex ratios in the country: 861 women per 1,000 men for Haryana and 876 women per 1,000 men in Punjab. Depleted of their women, states like these resort to procuring girls sold as sexual brides from villages in Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar, Assam and West Bengal. Life was never easy for Sita, a 16-year-old from Punjab’s Murinda village. The combined incomes of her father, a truck driver, and her mother, a domestic help, were insufficient to support their family of five. Sita followed her mother into domestic service for a few months when she was 14, but it was still not enough and she was soon handed over to a ‘dera’ in Fatiabad. A police raid shortly thereafter got her out, but left her in the custody of the Nari Niketan, Karnal, a dismally corrupt institution that did not always take the trouble to provide its inmates food and water. Sita fled in less than a year. At a bus stop in Panipat, another Haryana small town, she fell into the clutches of Jasbir, a motorcycle mechanic, who raped her, then promised her marriage and finally left her last year at the town’s Bal Bhawan Ashram. In April, Amarjeet, the Ashram co-ordinator, not only raped her but also got a false birth certificate made in her name, changing her year of birth from 1993 to 1990, to show her as being of the age of consent. He later sold her into marriage with 25-year-old Sanjay Verma, a glass factory worker in Gurgaon, Haryana, for Rs 36,000. Kept as a household drudge, Sita was driven out by Sanjay’s extended family and sent packing in a month. Now in the care of the BBD Balashram, an NGO-run rescue home in Karnal, Sita is a shattered human being, wrecked even before she left her teens. Says Balashram founder PR Nath, “In one week alone, she tried to hang herself twice, attacked other girls with a kitchen knife and tried to set the ashram on fire. There is no counsellor locally we can take her to.” A case has been filed against Sanjay, Amarjeet and Jasbir, but that will take its own lengthy course. Sita is currently in hospital, recuperating with no psychological help at hand. When we asked her if she wanted to go back to her parents, she could only reply, “If I go back now, my father will kill me.” This is the inflexible code that binds the lives of innumerable girls in shelter homes across the country — once a social taboo is broken, there is no going back, no matter that it is no fault of the girl at all. A trafficker told us that when girls from the brothels go back to their villages, they are called ‘Delhi-returned’ and are considered impure. As with Rani, parents succumb to societal pressure and reject them. THE STORY of 14-year-old Jyoti, from Durgapur in West Bengal, is a little different. One of a family of five daughters, Jyoti did not find getting sold into marriage to 40-year-old BD Singh a surprise — her father was no more, her mother could find no work and the JYOTI AGE 14 SOLD BY HER MOTHER FOR RS 15,000 MARRIED TO A 40-YEAR OLD MAN TO PRODUCE A MALE HEIR Photo: TRILOCHAN S. KALRA marriage brought the family Rs 15,000. What followed, however, was a shock. Married in Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh last October — “just before Durga Puja,” Jyoti says — the girl soon discovered her newly-wed husband was not only already married, but also had four daughters from his first wife. “She used to beat me and make me do all the housework. She would say she’d see to it I’d never give birth to a boy.” That, she finally understood, was why Singh, a brick kiln worker, had married her: the quest for a male heir. In March, Jyoti ran away; the police caught up with her and lodged her in the Karnal Nari Niketan, which was then plagued with a contagious skin disease. The ordeal ended when she was transferred to another rescue home. “I don’t want to see my mother’s face,” Jyoti now says. “Don’t send me home. I want to become a teacher and take care of myself.” Twelve-year-old Savita from Koochbihar in Assam has perhaps not got off so relatively lightly. With both her father and brother mentally retarded, her mother sent her away three months ago with Rana Suraj Mal, a man from her village who worked as a tailor in Bahadurgarh, Haryana. Says Mal’s neighbour Asha, “Savita would come running to us, crying. He would rape her, make her do all the work at home.” Suraj Mal has been arrested and has confessed to selling Savita into marriage for a sum he did not disclose. Savita, however, is missing; the search for her is still on. Says Sunil Singh, co-ordinator, Rahi Foundation, a Lucknow-based NGO that works for women’s empowerment, “These girls get no social acceptability all their lives. Treated as commodities, they are reduced to sexual brides, exploited in the most heinous manner.” Most times, the girls do not even understand the language their husbands speak. Despised by the community they are forced to live in, they have nowhere to turn, for the magnitude of their tragedy is well-hidden behind the sacrosanct matrimonial guise. ADVANCE BOOKING: SELLING THE UNBORN SAVITRI, Buyer KAMLESH, Seller It is not girls alone who are trafficked; the Indian hunger for a male child will do deals in boys as well. This is the story of 35-year-old Kamlesh, from Asandh, Haryana. On July 28 this year, Kamlesh sold her fifth child, Vijay, the day he was born. Three months before that, her husband had raped their daughter and thrown her onto the railway tracks near their home, after her slitting her throat numerous times. He is in jail now; Kamlesh says she has told the police to hang him. “I am thinking of giving away my other children too,” she says. Kamlesh: The only money I get is on the days when I get work as a daily wage labourer. The rest of the time, I have to beg my neighbours for food. My children are dying of hunger. That is why I sold my son. Tehelka: How much did they pay you? Kamlesh: Rs 3,000. Posing as adoption agency officials, we met Savitri and Ramdev, the couple from Madhubani, Bihar, who bought Vikas. What they told us was astounding. Tehelka: How did you come to know about Vijay? Ramdev: Inderdev, my elder brother, negotiated it all. He fixed it up a year ago. Tehelka: As in, when Kamlesh was still pregnant? Ramdev: Yes. Inderdev told us she wanted to sell the child. Tehelka: Did you give her anything when she was pregnant? Ramdev: No money, just some groceries. Tehelka: She told us she spent the money you paid her on treatment for her daughter. Ramdev: Yes. We paid her Rs 5,000- 6,000. We talked with her when she was pregnant and it was decided that if she had a boy, I would take him. When this boy was born, a lot of people came to take him. From places like Ambala and Panipat. They were offering sums as high as Rs 30,000 for him. Then we told her she should give him to us, since she had promised us beforehand. Tehelka: So she gave him to you because you had booked him when she was pregnant? Ramdev: Yes. Otherwise that man from Ambala would surely have taken this boy away. OUTLASTING TRAUMA: WHITHER REHABILITATION? Photo: SALMAN USMANI According to a recent report by the National Human Rights Commission, an average of 22,480 women and 44,476 children are reported missing in India each year. Of these, a yearly average of 5,452 women and 11,008 children are never traced. Another report, Action Research on Trafficking in Women and Children in India, 2002-2003, indicates that many of the missing are not really missing but are instead trafficked. IF THEIR parents do not farm them out, extreme poverty and large families often compel girls to leave home on their own and come to the cities, looking for work. To take the case of West Bengal, the maximum number of trafficking victims from the state are girls from the tea gardens. A hundred tea gardens have closed down over the last five years, leaving at least 17,000 tea garden workers jobless; Bengal employs three-fourths of those in the tea industry. Says Vasudev Banerjee, chairman, Tea Board of India, “Most of the plantation workers had migrated from Chota Nagpur to Bengal, over a hundred years ago. They have no land in Bengal and no skills apart from plucking leaves. With the closure, they are left with no options and nowhere to go.” Moreover, according to official figures, at least 54 percent of the tea plantation workers are women. With the West Bengal government’s monthly Rs 750 stipend to the laid-off being nowhere near adequate, these women migrate looking for jobs and many end up as victims of human trafficking. Digambar, a co-ordinator with Nedan, an NGO that works on human trafficking in the Northeast, adds a different spin to the predicament. Describing the state of affairs in Assam, he says, “Due to the ethnic violence between the Bodos and the tribals, hundreds of people took shelter in refugee camps. Many still live there and, with no access to their traditional livelihoods, are more than willing to send their children to work. These children fall prey to trafficking.” Girls from Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh’s deeply impoverished tribal areas are also easy targets. Says Manju Hembrom, “For years, the tribals have been caught in the web of the money lenders, and when they can’t repay their debts, parents send daughters to the cities to earn money, not realising they may never come back.” Similar stories from among farmers in Maharashtra’s suicide country, Vidharbha, have also been reported over the last few years. DELHI-BASED SOCIAL activist Rishikant, 32, has rescued more than a thousand girls over the last ten years. A sex worker once told him his phone number was scribbled on an AIDS awareness poster on GB Road, from where he gets the most calls for rescue. “I never switch off my phone,” he says. “I can’t morally afford to.” In the course of the week, Rishikant receives dozens of text messages, faxes and post cards, each a stark vignette of desperation, violence and sorrow. When rescued, the girls often do not even know the name of the place they belong to. “I once brought in an eight-year-old who had no idea of where her home was,” Rishi says. “I tracked down her village by the dialect of a song she would often sing. But I have now slowed down the process of rescuing because over the years I have realised I only end up saving them from one hell and putting them into other.” Rishikant is referring to the rescue homes that are the only places girls from the brothels can go to. Nirmal Chhaya’s Bharti Sharma admits that the girls brought to the homes — almost all of them illiterate and many of them teenagers or younger — do not receive any counselling or medical attention, despite the relentless trauma they have been through. With their psyches shattered, no skills to fall back on and their parents refusing to let them back home, many girls end up locked into the rescue homes’ section for the mentally disturbed, whether they qualify for being there or not. Even though the Ministry of Women and Child Development launched the Ujjawala Scheme in December 2007 for the rehabilitation of trafficking victims, it has found takers in only a few states and even fewer NGOs have got permission to pitch in. It is this indifference, bland and merciless, that, Rishikant says, has made him vow to never shake hands with any bureaucrat or minister. (Names of victims have been changed to conceal identities) From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 43, Dated Nov 01, 2008

The Road To Azamgarh

Photos by Nirala Tripathi

FIRST PERSON

The Road To Azamgarh

Every road has a story to tell, waiting to be heard by the traveller. The road to Azamgarh from Varanasi, just touching Munshi Premchand's village 'Lamhi,' has a story that is crying to be heard in our tryst with terror.

Saikat Datta

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Azamgarh, branded as "aatankgarh" by imaginative television reporters, could very well have been as nondescript a town as any other that dots India's Hindi heartland. Small, congested, teeming with millions of people with inadequate access to healthcare, education and other social indicators, it is a place that could do with a bit of good governance.

Take a left turn on the Varanasi-Azamgarh highway, and a new world emerges. This is Saraimeer block, a land that has seen a massive exodus of its inhabitants since the late 1970s to the Middle East. Most people came back after successful tours of duty in the labour markets of the Gulf, rebuilding their lives back home and using the wealth to build better houses, better shops, ensuring that Western Union money transfer counters share a place next to the more humble nationalised banks.

Abu Basher's father and brothers

But, Saraimeer, since the 1980s also developed a tough reputation, much touted in the media as the home for the Mumbai underworld's "shooters", the men who would carry out the contract killings that made Dawood and Abu Salem media favourites. And that is a fact. Today, Saraimeer is still the home to many who would have family and economic ties to men who have left these shores in search for greater notoriety, and have never looked back. A cousin of Abu Salem recounts the story of how he needed a top actress to come to Azamgarh and grace a mushaira function. "I called Bhai (Salem) up and he told me to talk to one actress, now married to the son of a major Bollywood star. She was traveling in Switzerland, so she begged us to excuse her. We asked another actress, who came to Varanasi but quickly left, as riots broke out in Azamgarh the same day".

Perhaps, crime and Mumbai's underworld became an industry that the denizens of Saraimeer took to simply because they knew someone employed there, at some point in their lives.

But to get the real story of Azamgarh, a visit to the town is imperative. People traveling further east, to Gorakhpur to its North, or Chandauli and Sonbhadra to its South, and further into Bihar, will have to cross Azamgarh at some point of their journey. The neighbouring district of Mau has already developed a tough reputation for lawlessness: When a reporter of a national daily stationed in Kanpur brandishes his revolver, you get the message. These are parts that recognise power that flows out from the barrel of a gun -- a country-made pistol or an AK-47, depending on your social standing.

Bahmol, another block in this district, has already become synonymous with the best gunsmiths in the state. It caters to large orders for guns and other hardware that an election somewhere close or far might require in the coming days. Its clientele emerging from further east, the badlands of Bihar and eastern UP. Little wonder then that Superintendents of police here rarely survive nine months. In the past 61 years since independence, 64 Superintendents drawn from the Indian Police Service have spent a hasty few months in the district before heading out to other districts.

But Azamgarh has a far more gentle side to it that seems to be under siege from various quarters, including a militant faction of the BJP that sweeps in from Gorakhpur, spewing hate and terror in its wake. The Shibli National Academy and degree college, which has produced generations of scholars and graduates is home to Dr Baber Ashfaque, a "second generation faculty" at the College's department of defence and strategic studies.
Dr Ashfaque, like his father came back to the subject that he loved best and could hold forth on for hours.

Terrorism, is a word that has now been interpreted and re-interpreted in every nook and corner of Azamgarh. But it is an issue that Ashfaque has been struggling with for years. "Why must we brand terrorism as 'Islamic terrorism'? To what purpose? Why can't we just look at people who spread terror as terrorists and use the same yardstick to view them instead of branding them into convenient stereotypes that have been created by a certain political discourse?" he asks. His colleague Zahed in the department of computer studies makes a similar argument, pointing out that Azamgarh;s children, now being branded as members of the shadowy Indian Mujahideen, are only interested in education.

To make a case for his argument, Zahed takes you to the house of Zeeshan, one of the many arrested in Delhi after the Jamianagar encounter. Zeeshan, a boy pursuing an MBA from IIPM Delhi, had an excellent academic track record and was known for a good attendance record. His father, sitting in a low-lit living room, shares details of the enormous loans he has taken to put his son through management school. His dreams are the dreams of any middle class father, trying his best to ensure a future for his child that is better than his own past. The loans, taken from a variety of nationalized banks have neatly worked out EMIs that would take a lion's share of the father's salary. "Would such a boy, good at academics, do something to endanger all that we have built? Look at his attendance record at college and tell me if he ever had the time to travel to all the places that the police now claim he has been to," he wails.

Naturally, most conversations turn to the growing presence of the BJP MP from the neighbouring parts, Yogi Adityanath, who promises to make UP into another "Gujarat." For the motorcycle-borne youth who pilot the Yogi's frequent cavalcade, the Gujarat being referred to is Gujarat of 2002 when the state's law and order machinery clearly failed to prevent the massacre of hundreds of innocents. "Gujarat yahan banainge, Azamagarh se shuruaaat karenge," they shout with glee, making no bones of their intent. Where is the law? most people ask, when Yogi's cavalcade decides to march right through the town, instead of using the by-pass, which has traditionally been the route taken by political parties.

For the youth of Azamgarh, facing chronic poverty and malnutrition, this is a life that has been scripted post Babri Masjid demolition. The money that has come in from the Gulf has not gone towards building of more schools but more madrassas, many of which are not registered or recognised. What is taught there is anybody's guess. It just becomes another element in a cocktail that could only breed violence.

So does the violence, therefore, turn into the Indian Mujahideen? The professors of Shibli National Degree College counter it by asking about Kanpur, where truckloads of improvised explosive devices was found in the house of a known Bajrang Dal activist when the roof of the house blew up. "Is that not terror? Is that not the same as the Indian Mujahideen?" asks a professor who has been closely tracking the issue for years.

Dr Shahid Badr Falahi, a hakim of some repute, with a gentle demeanor and radical ideas, has spent his life battling the law. He was the last president of the Student Islamic Movement of India, just before a central government ban kicked into place. "I was jailed and tortured for months and all those people who were not arrested but named in the same chargesheet are today being depicted as the Indian Mujahideen," says Falahi.

His makeshift clinic is the only access to medical care that his village can boast of. Falahi took the legal route, now fighting the ban on SIMI in the Supreme Court. Ask him about SIMI's stand on Islam and its constitution which aims to build a "Islamic system" in India and he is silent. "These are issues that need to be discussed at length," insists Falahi. His answers to questions are selectively straight but make no mistake. His is an active mind that is constantly seeking answers as he spends time administering traditional medicine in small white paper pouches.

Dr Shahid Badr Falahi

Falahi's one-time colleague, Safdar Nagori was arrested earlier this year by the police and is considered as a "violent" faction of the erstwhile SIMI. "But Nagori was never a hard core member. He doesn't even know Urdu to understand the finer aspects of Islam, and in fact, had a love marriage," counters Falahi. How could such a man take to violence in such a short span of time? Falahi asks. The other "dreaded mastermind" of the Indian Mujahideen, Tauqeer Subhan Qureshi from Mumbai was the editor of the SIMI's English mouthpiece. "I appointed him as the editor of our English magazine and he was very good." Ask Falahi about the features in the magazine praising the Taliban's Mullah Omar and the Al Qaeda's Osama Bin Laden and he resumes a silence that is impenetrable. "This is not the time to talk about such issues," he offers.

That is Azamgarh. Caught between many versions of terror, silences, protests, crippling poverty -- and its many academic contradictions. Where governance has retreated to a few sarkari bungalows and the people have been left to fend for themselves. From the middle of the town, several roads head off in different directions, carrying tales for its travellers, taking them to a different destiny. Which one will the next generation of Azamgarh take? That is a story that needs to be explored if the Indian Mujahideen and the Bajrang Dal have to be understood.