GANG RAPES IN KANDHAMAL

The shame of Kandhamal

The untold story of gender violence in Orissa

JOHN DAYAL

On a recent visit to Orissa, I interviewed a 13 year old girl who had been gang raped on Dussehara evening in a forest in Kandhamal, not far from her home in a  small township. She was returning with her companions from a  “mela” or fete organized to celebrate the victory of good, exemplified by the Lord Rama, over evil, represented in lore by the effigy of abductor King Ravana.  Torn and naked, barring coat someone had given to hide her body, she made it to the town, and eventually to her extended family. After a long struggle and encounter with a foul mouthed woman police inspector and a callous official of the Orissa government’s Women’s Commission, the family managed to get a First Information Report lodged with the Police. The case is still not in court.

Another girl, also about 13 or 14 years old, was not so lucky. Coming home from another fete, she was captured by a gang of young men, stripped and gang raped. They then tied her to a tree, and  in a frenzy, killed her.

And now, a fact finding team, organized by the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights and others, which went to Kandhamal early in January, has discovered the rape of a third girl. All of them were either Dalits or Tribal. And two of them were Christian.

Away from the mass movement in New Delhi and other big towns, both spontaneous and organized,  of the gang rape and murder of “Brave-heart Daughter of India” as media and politicians called her, there has been a   stunning silence on rapes of Dalit and Tribal women across the country, often enough by members of the police an security forces, and the absolute impunity that goes with it. Orissa has specially been an area of darkness. Some accounts have put the number of rapes in Kandhamal region as high as 30, with civil rights groups speaking of upto 100 cases in Sundargarh, for instance.

This is time to have a look at the full picture in Orissa which has a long history of rapes and its political consequences. Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik's 13-year long regime has witnessed a series of such gory incidents.  Civil rights groups quote official data which says that three women are raped every day in the state.

Local activists say this winter has seen many spine chilling rape incidents. A dancing girl was raped by three persons in the state capital while another girl was molested and pushed out of a running auto-rickshaw in the city. This was followed by a most pathetic incident where a minor girl was forcibly lifted and gang-raped in Rayagada. The orphan girl who was staying with her grand-mother attempted self-immolation.

Crimes against women under three heads - namely rape, molestation and “eve teasing” - during the years 2009, 2010 and 2011 have increased in the state. "There has been a 20% rise in rape cases in the state during 2012. The increase in molestation and eve teasing cases have also recorded roughly the same percentage," a senior official in the state Home department has admitted.  The tribal dominated Keonjhar district tops the list of crimes against women. While 75 rape cases were registered in this mineral rich district in 2011, the figure increased to 101 in 2012. Besides, 235 molestation and 20 eve-teaching cases were also reported in Keonjhar the same year. Mayurbhanj registered the highest number of 295 molestation cases in 2012, figuring slightly below the neighbouring district in rape cases (82).

Christians have been particular targets. In the 2007-2008 attacks, women and girls were targeted for sexual violence, humiliation, brutal physical assaults and threats. “There are several other reports of sexual assault and molestation and it is highly likely that many other such cases have gone unreported due to the shame attached,” warned the study ‘Genocide in Kandhamal: Ethnic Cleansing of Christians by Hindu Rightwing Forces in Orissa’ by the Human Rights Law Network. According to the report of Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work, five women reported that they and / or their female family members had been subjected to sexual assaults, and that 16 women said that young girls in their area had been raped while 12 women reported that women had been raped in their villages.  Though witness testimonies indicate that sexual violence was rampant during the attacks, there are very few reported cases, and an even smaller number that have been registered and are pending in the courts for prosecution. 

Patently, civil society – which includes the Church in the State and in India, must wake up to this grim reality before we seek to rouse the Judiciary and the political system.

We must not be partners in the conspiracy of silence.

Change the gender discourse in India

A silent Church is a dead one

Why has it not spoken out on the Delhi gang rape?

John Dayal

The Church in India, and in particular the Catholic Church, have made themselves all but invisible in the current national debate on gender violence, ceding space to authoritarian voices that confuse revenge for justice, and shift focus from a change in mindsets and civilized values.
Perhaps an opportunity has been lost once again to intervene in and change the national discourse on issues of grave concern to the country, its democracy and its people.
As in the discussion on national corruption that hogged media attention and parliamentary time through much of 2012, the Church was uniquely placed to make a difference.
Among religious and social groups in India, the Catholic Church probably stands alone in articulating a gender policy for itself and the community after several years of a crushing internal discussion in which its more than 100,000 women took an active part.
It remains a moot question why the Church leadership chose to maintain a deafening silence over the brutal gang rape and murder of a young medical student.
I hope it was not because of a want of information, of which there was plenty in the carpet bombing by the electronic media, or a lack of sensitivity, which would weigh heavy on its conscience for a long time to come.
One possible explanation could be that it was afraid it would be seen as confronting the state, a bitter lesson it learned after it was “punished” for challenging the government in the controversial Koodankulum nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu.
After siding with the common people whose lives and livelihoods would have been severely impaired, the local bishop suffered a curtailment of his permits to receive foreign funding for diocesan development activities.
Such “lessons” leave a deep mark on the collective psyche of the institutional Church.
No bishops with their silver crosses on their bosoms, no nuns in habits – barring a few exceptions – and no priests in cassocks were therefore seen in the massive crowds that laid siege to the national capital and its governance institutions.
For almost two weeks in December 2012 and the first week of January 2013, thousands of outraged protesters called for justice for the 23-year-old victim, gang raped by six men in a moving bus one fateful evening in New Delhi.
Jyoti Singh Pandey's male companion, who sought to defend her, was also beaten then both were dumped on a roadside.  The severity of her wounds spoke of the brutality of the sexual attack on her and moved the people into a frenzy.
Even doctors who attended her at one of Delhi’s premier government hospitals said they had in their careers never seen wounds such as these. Jyoti was later transferred to a hospital in Singapore, where she died of her injuries.
She was cremated in secrecy in New Delhi to prevent further confrontation between police and the people, mostly young men and women.
The assailants have been arrested and their trial has begun, in a fast-track court created specially under the orders of the Supreme Court of India. Judgment is expected within weeks. The police have sought the death penalty for the rapacious killers.
The trial, judgment and punishment however are not likely to quench the national demand for comprehensive laws to ensure the security of women in metropolitan cities and the 400,000 villages of the country.
The debate has been extended to include violence against women of the tribals and the Dalits, the former untouchables, and religious minorities such as the Muslims whose women are victims of targeted sexual violence in times of strife or even of confrontation with industry, rich landlords and violent religious and upper caste bigots in battles over land, forest rights and ethnic space.
The Catholic community has itself been a victim of gender violence, with religious nuns being victims of gang rape in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa in the last 20 years.
Wives, sisters and daughters of evangelical and Pentecostal pastors have also been subjected to targeted violence in an emerging trend in Madhya Pradesh and some other states in recent years.
These horrendous incidents quite correctly come under the national spotlight, but the gender debate itself remains subterranean other than when some political group or other takes up a position in parliament whenever there is talk of giving women some sort of a statutory representation in legislative institutions, or in the matter of equal opportunity in employment.
The vicious debates in parliament on the Reservations for Women Bill show perhaps even better than statistics that patriarchal India has still not come to terms with how to nurture and respect women, a little less than 50 percent of the population.
That they are not an exact half of the population, as nature designed them to be, is because of the hazards they run from the moment of conception all the way till they marry – pre-natal deaths in sex-determined abortions, infant mortality, girl child bias, and dowry deaths apart from selective malnourishment and labor.
The data on the “invisible lives” of Indian women remains terrible as it is for their sisters in some countries of Africa and South Asia. Three out of five women in South Asia and an estimated 50 percent of all women in Africa and in the Arab region are still illiterate. Close to 245 million Indian women lack the basic capability to read.
In India, the child sex ratio dropped from 945 females per 1000 males in 1991 to 927 females per 1000 males in 2001; up to 50 million girls and women are ‘missing’ from India’s population because of termination of the female foetus or high mortality of the girl child. Female foeticide in India increased by 49.2 percent between 1999-2000.
The share of women in non-agricultural wage employment is only 17 percent. Participation of women in the workforce is only 13.9 percent in the urban sector and 29.9 percent in the rural sector.
Women’s wage rates are, on average, only 75 percent of men’s wage rates and constitute only 25 percent of the family income. In no Indian state do women and men earn equal wages in agriculture.
Women occupy only 9 percent of parliamentary seats – less than 4 percent of seats in High Courts and in the Supreme Court less than 3 percent of administrators and managers are women.
The data on crimes against women is absolutely nauseating. Every 3.5 minutes, a crime is committed against women in India. In terms of daily statistics, 45 women were raped, 121 women were sexually harassed and 31 women and girls were trafficked in the last 24 hours.
As many as 40 women and girls are kidnapped every day, and 21 women are murdered every day over dowry issues. Domestic violence constitutes 33.3 percent of all crimes against women.
And finally, 110,424 housewives committed suicide between 1997-2001 and accounted for 52 percent of the total female suicide victims.
This is data from UNICEF, the National Crime Research Bureau and other official sources. In instances of sexual violence including rape, close relatives and acquaintances were the main assailants, and societal silence the main response.
The data should shock the nation, and specially the governance system – the ministries of the government, the bureaucrats who implement the decisions and the politicians, in parliament or state legislatures, who make the decisions. And it should shock the Church and the leaders of other religions.
The indices show that since 1950 when the constitution came into being giving every citizen, man and woman, equality under the law and the system, the effort has been at best half-hearted.
Just taking foeticide, education and wages as test cases, it is evident that a male-centric semi-feudal and semi-rural social structure has not yet reconciled the contemporary demands of equal treatment of the son and the daughter, for that is what every male and female is in the family structure.
It is all interconnected. One would feel that the decision for midday meals would help improve the health standards of all children, including girls. Not so.
To begin with, most of the girls are not in school anyway, and others as surrogate mothers to their young siblings at home often smuggle the food back for them.
This is of course true only when the midday meal scheme works, and there are serious doubts if it works as well in forest areas and in Dalit “bastis” or hamlets in the hinterland.
The issues of equal wages for equal work, better maternity health care and maternal nutrition are issues the government has not fully resolved, and may, in fact, not be able to resolve for a couple more decades going by the rate of progress at present.
But it is in the matter of sexual violence that one notices disturbing trends in governance and society.
A report compiled by the National Election Watch and the Association for Democratic Reforms has revealed that about 260 candidates facing charges such as rape, assault and outraging the modesty of a woman contested assembly elections on tickets of various parties in the last five years.
The Congress was leading the 'shame-list' with 26 such candidates followed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), who had 24.
This does put a question mark on the intent of the political parties. Civil society has in recent years taken the initiative in persuading the government to draft a comprehensive law against communal and targeted violence, which focuses on gender violence and the traumatizing of women of all ages in times of ethnic or religious conflict.
Women’s associations have also been working on reforms of laws – some of which date back to the 19th century – concerning sexual violence, including changes in the definition of rape.
The country has also seen mounting anger against feudal rural society, popularly known as “khaps,” that run kangaroo courts to punish couples who defy caste norms, or young women who marry men they love.
Many such khaps are known to have forced rape survivors to marry their rapists. In fact sometimes police and magistrates, especially in states such as Madhya Pradesh, also recommend that rapists marry their victims.
It is such a feudal and anti-woman mindset that civil society activists are trying to change. Many social groups have joined them, especially youth from universities and the workforce. It is time to strengthen this civil society movement.
The Church, especially the Catholic hierarchy, religious and laity, have been in fact invited to join in this struggle at changing society and culture, introducing value-based education in schools and colleges, and working with rural and urban communities to ensure that India is safe and nurturing for its women citizens.
The Catholic Church cannot afford to keep aloof from the tectonic movement for a modern democratic India.
John Dayal is the general secretary of the All India Christian Council and a member of the Indian government’s National Integration Council

Ode to Sr Valsa John

Uphold the living as we remember martyr Valsa, a victim of Coalgate

JOHN DAYAL

The “Coalgate” scam is not just about financial corruption in the auctions of mining blocks by central and state governments. If dug deep enough, the scandal will also expose human victims – the many Tribals and marginalised farmers who lost their land to the mining companies, the women who were exploited, the children who lost an opportunity in life as their parents were forced to relocate, and human rights activists who suffered jail or, worse, death at the hands of hired goons because they had asked a question too many, challenged a management too often.

Catholic nun Valsa John, of the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary, was one such. And as church functionaries and Rights groups observed the anniversary of her brutal murder in the Dumka region of Jharkhand a year ago, the focus was not just on the continuing mystery of who killed her. She had died a lonely death, hacked by sharp sword and axe like weapons by a group of men, as she slept in a small hut deep inside the village. The killers fled into the night, leaving behind a terrified village, which has been numbed, into silence.

An important aspect of the tributes paid to her was to bring to the public realm the circumstances in which rights defenders and a broad section of Christian activists, specially religious catholic Nuns, priests sand others work in areas of Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Andhra, and to a lesser extent in the forest and mining areas of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra.

The murder, of course, remains the main issue. Although half a dozen local people, many of them from the same village, have been arrested, it is not clear why the investigating agencies have not explored the possibility of a larger conspiracy involving not just the actual killers but the people who run the mining company.  It is now becoming increasingly clear that the mining contract was possibly not above board even though the main “owner” of the block was a publics sector agency, the Punjab State electricity Board which needs a very large volume of coal to keep its thermal power plants operational to feed the increasing demands of Chandigarh and the growing industrial cities of the state.  Instead of doing the actual mining itself, the Punjab Company went into a partnership with a little known company from West Bengal to do the actual mining. A study of the actual operations makes it clear that he second company in turn wet leases the heavy earth moving machinery complete with operators. This could have been done by PSEB itself instead of giving a fat fee to the intermediate company.  An adjunct of this outsourcing has been the proliferation of several other middle men and contractors who milk the PSEB for profits without any sense of responsibility to the welfare of the local people.

It was to end the exploitation of the local people, and to ensure that they got their due in rehabilitation and reparation including education for the children that Sr. Valsa, a Kerala born activist who has pent all her working mission life with the Santhals, forced the company to sign a memorandum of understanding with the villagers. She was on a return visit to the village to assess how faithfully the MoU had been implemented when she was done to death.

Valsa is not s rare phenomenon in the church, especially in the Catholic faith.  With almost 150,000 men and women religious, including diocesan priests, the Catholic community has several thousand of its activists working in almost every state and certainly in all areas where there is large-scale human displacement or exploitation, be it in the forest areas of central or south India or in the coastal belt where fishermen and boatmen an their families have been targeted, displaced or threatened by industry or massive public projects. Among such major projects are such hazardous ones as the nuclear power plant art Koodmakulam in Tamil Nadu.

This article is not in praise of the individual priest brother, Nun or lay activist, and therefore I will name no names though there are dozens of them now acknowledged by their peers as pioneering defender who have collectively birthed the civil society that we see active in India. But there is need to record and celebrate the impact of the collective effort, as also there is need to question church and society if they have been given the recognition and support they need to be able to fulfill their calling in an appropriate and optimum manner.

Civil society and the Catholic community have, for the most, remained either ignorant or aloof about such activists. The Catholic middle class, like their counterparts in the protestant church and in the lager national community, seem not to be aware of the trials and tribulation of the Tribals, the Dalits and the marginalised farmers. They read the newspapers, but do not digest the enormity of the crime of human displacement, of mass hunger and child deaths.

Even religious communities, barring perhaps some of the more radicalized ones such as the Jesuits, also do not understand the importance of the work their own members are doing.

The result is that often enough, the Priest or Nun is isolated and forced to work all alone with the rest of his or her companions in the community looking at him with amusement or with bewilderment. Worse, some communities see their activist members as threads to the equilibrium whose actions, seeming anti government, anti authority, will bring the wrath of the political and administrative forces on their institutions, making their normal working charism under threat.

It is time for the communities, religious and secular, to come out of this almost paranoiac fear complex that they will be targeted if they speak for the common man.

That is their God given calling, and if they make the chief minister, chief secretary state party president or the superintendent of police angry, so be it. The loss of an Foreign Contribution Regulation Act may threaten all church originated development work on first sight, but surely there is activism and village level work in mobilization and serving the common poor which does not bank on foreign grants or even Indian government funds.

Above all, religious communities and the Lay must celebrate and honour the Nuns and priests who go out and put their necks on the block. Each one of us who call themselves Christian’s and Catholics should have been ready to take that risk. We have not outsourced sacrifice to the religious, but in as much as they are the cutting edge of the social action of the church, they have to be celebrated. They must be upheld when they are alive and working. No merely eulogized when murdered.

Media blood-thirst and the silence of the church

Media Blood-thirst and the silence of the Church

John Dayal

In one of the more traumatic recent weeks in India, the media, electronic and print, exposed their bigotry and their blood thirst in ample measure. The issues were the tragic death in Ireland of an Indian dentist, Savita of Karnataka State, of septicemia following a miscarriage, and the execution by hanging of Ajmal Qasab, a 25 year old Pakistani citizen who was part of a terrorist commando group that killed over 160 persons in Mumbai four years ago. Both issues were also marked by a deafening silence from the official church in the country.

A response in the first case could have pre-empted a very focused attack on the Catholic social teachings, and the second would have brought the Church in consonance with the very vast civil society that opposed the ghoulish ranting in the media.

There is no doubt but that these are very polarizing issues in India where hyper nationalism and identity have become critically important in the face of a economic slowdown at home, and a perceived isolation abroad. It does not help that President Obama in his re-election rhetoric repeatedly called for an end to outsourcing services to India, whose economy has become increasingly dependent on remittances from the labour in the Gulf region, the engineers in northern America and Europe, and the “call centers” in metropolitan cities, and even in some small towns.

But the church, apart from affirming its continuing faith in its own doctrine and social teachings, also has to show that it is a part of that component of rational civil society which keeps the lunatics, the extremists and the fringe elements at bay, and effectively prevents them from usurping public space in the media and the political discourse.  Above all, it would show that the church has the courage to go against the grain, to oppose what it perceives to be wrong.

In the case of Savita’s tragic death in a Galloway hospital, India’s pro-choice lobby made common cause with its western sister groups demanding that India intervene to force Ireland to change its “Catholic” laws on abortion which had led to the medical “murder”. The media, specially television, led a hysteric propaganda tsunami pillorying the church. It did not help that the few Catholics invited to participate in the studio debates assumed positions of wounded faith and emerged as ogres of a monstrous religion.

The hanging of the Pakistani terrorist was “celebrated” in India, even in some official circles, as a victory of our judicial system, as a “closure” for the victims, and in the crude language of the Home Minister of the state of Maharashtra,  “justice” for the victims. Sections of the media even have us believe it was a victory over Pakistan.

The community must be clear on the church’s social teachings on the death penalty and abortion. 

In a position paper in 2007 during the World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Paris, the Vatican said that the death penalty "is not only a refusal of the right to life, but it also is an affront to human dignity." Governments have an obligation to protect their citizens, "today it truly is difficult to justify" using capital punishment difficult when other means of protection, such as life in prison, are possible.  It carries numerous risks, including the danger of punishing innocent people, contributes to a "culture of violence" and shows "a contempt for the Gospel teaching on forgiveness."

The statement on the Irish issue touching on sanctioning abortion when the life of the mother is in danger came too late, and diluted under the umbrella of the National United Christian Forum, which includes mainline Protestant denominations as well as the Catholic Bishops Conference. A statement at the beginning of the controversy would have put the church in a warmer light. But it was a good and tempered statement and clearly set out the social teachings of the church in which primacy is for a respect of life as a gift from God, which is not for man to tamper with, just to pander to some exigency of the day. As important, the statement cautioned against bowing to peer pressure, social trends or lobbies with a vested interest.

The silence in recent decades on issues of human dignity, development and gender has rapidly marginalised the mainline Church, specially the Catholic Church. Jesuit scholars have been pioneers in documenting displacement and the ecological havoc from big dams and nuclear plants. The “commissions” of the CBCI dealing with Justice, peace and development have attended workshops and tried to educate bishops and protests. Similarly, the Indian Catholic Church has been among the first in organized religion to come out with an official Gender Policy, and an Education code.  Not only are both these revolutionary documents not contributed to the national discourse, they are not even fully known within the church. It needs hardly worth repeating that the average parish priest and the Layperson do not have a clue of the church’s position on these issues.

Was the church frightened it would be pilloried as being anti national if it spoke its mind on the issue of capital punishment in general and the hanging of Qasab in particular, that it would be misunderstood, or that there would some kind of violent reaction against it, specially in hinterland areas where it is already a victim of violent persecution? If this were so, it is high time the church came out of its fear complex, and showed the maturity of standing in the face of obscene and extremist nationalism. This will earn it the respect of the better elements in the country. The church needs realize that while it ought not be as arrogant as to presume it is the repository of all that is moral, its interventions are important in shaping the national social, political and development discourse as it stands up for all that is true and honorable and nurturing for the common people of the country whose voice is carried but feebly in forums that matter.

Human trafficking gangs evolve some new and sickening tricks

Human Trafficking – three short stories and a brief interview

JOHN DAYAL

The horror of contemporary Human Trafficking in India

JOHN DAYAL

On issues of human tricking, specially where the victims are women and the girl child, it does not take very many words to bring out the stark horror of the situation as it exists in India at present.

First, three horror stories told me recently by national and international activists working in India on this subject. Each one is true, I am assured.

STORY 1 – Nagpur, Maharashtra:

A baby girl was found abandoned near a garbage heap. She was picked up by some people and brought to a woman, apparently a widow, and in need of money.  She was promised a handsome monthly allowance and asked to take care of the baby as if it were her own daughter, with enough to pay for her food, education and clothing.  In fifteen years, the little girl grew with the woman, believing her to be the mother. The widow too developed a strong bond with the girl. The girl was a student of class X when a man came to the woman, told her that her “duties” with regard to the child were over, handed her some money and took the girl away. The story came to light when anti-trafficking activists subsequently rescued the girl.

STORY 2 – Mumbai, Maharashtra:

After a rescue mission, a minor girl was being counseled by the group, which had done the rescue. The woman objected when the counselors addressed her as a female, insisting that “she” was a man. Non-plussed at first, the counselor persisted, asking why the woman did not want to be addressed as one. The person narrated his/her story. “I was a youth living in a Mumbai suburb, commuting daily to work in the city. One day, in the local train, a fellow passenger gave me something to eat. I took it and lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was in a luxurious hospital suite, but in great pain. I discovered I had been castrated, and now had a vagina.” Apparently a cosmetic surgeon had done the complicated surgery to create an artificial vagina. The victim was kept in the hospital for several weeks while the wounds healed. He was given hormone injections and began to develop breasts and other female characteristics. After a couple of months of stay in the hospital, he was discharged – now looking like a woman. He was subsequently passed onto a Mumbai brothel owner where he was forced to entertain clients like other inmates, and did so till he was rescued. The Child Welfare Committee before whom this youth, legally still a minor, was produced got extensive tests done which confirmed that “she” was a male. This remains the most bizarre case of human trafficking the rescue group has ever come across.

STORY 3 – also from Maharashtra

Minor girls rescued from brothels are usually put in the custody of government homes. The custody of the girls in the government homes meant for minors ends the day, the girl turn 18. On that day, the girl is set free from the “protection” of the shelter homes. Often the girls don’t have a home to go to and are clueless about how to proceed once they are released. Often traffickers are in touch with the clerical staff of the government homes and know exactly when a particular girl is going to be turn 18 and will be released from the shelter home. On the appointed day, the trafficker’s agent is waiting outside the gates of the shelter home in a car ready to pick up the homeless and clueless girl. The girl is picked up in a car, brought to a brothel readied to receive her and soon she is reintroduced into trafficking, now as an adult.

Ruchira Gupta, an internationally acclaimed and Delhi-based activist working on issues of human trafficking and the sex “business” says of the 20 million enslaved people in the world, about a million are trafficked into prostitution, cheap labour, organ trade, domestic servitude, child marriage, child soldiers and bonded labour every year. Seventy per cent of these are women and children. In India, the last official figure is from the Central Bureau of Investigation is from 2009, says more than 3 million women and girls were trapped in prostitution, of which 1.4 million were girls. About two hundred thousand were being trafficked additionally every year.

The following are excerpts from an interview Indian Currents had with her recently.

Question:  is trafficking just a quotient of poverty. Are parents involved?

Trafficking is a demand driven Industry. It is formed of the buyer (end user), the business (pimp, recruiter, transporter etc.) and the Bought (prostituted child, bonded slave). Because there is a demand for using and abusing little girls and women, traffickers simply go into poor and isolated villages, in “low caste” Dalit and Tribal communities, and prey upon the destitution and vulnerability of such poor people by offering a job in the big city or the false promise of marriage. In the big cities brothel managers force mothers who enter their late twenties to replace themselves with their daughters as they are unable to attract customers.

Question: With development, is it increasing or is there a palpable decrease:

It is increasing because the demand to buy human beings for cheap labour or exploitative sex is increasing, and the trafficking rings as well as the sex industry are getting more increased. On top of that foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation have entrenched the sex industry further by hiring pimps and brothel managers as peer educators to distribute condoms, creating a false notion of "ethical" demand that it is all right to but sex if one uses a condom. They even funded a programme where the social marketing campaign said, " It does not matter which sex worker you chose, chose the right condom."

The rise in the use of pornography is also fuelling the demand as twelve year old boys surfing the net are suddenly invited by a cartoon character to play a game with her and lo and behold a few clicks later he watches a woman being penetrated from every part of her body, crying and saying give me more. He begins to believe that sex is connected with violence ad domination and wants that kind of sex!

Question: Have rescue agencies and NGOs, or for that matter police, made a dent?

In terms of actual human beings, NGOs have made a dent in preventing the trafficking of people in some of the pockets they work, but very little has been done to make a dent in the trafficking industry. Hardly any traffickers and certainly know end users, who are basically slave owners are ever arrested, prosecuted or convicted. “Crime in India” statistics show that more women are arrested under the Indian law than men!

Question:  Can this be prevented at all?

Yes, it is very preventable. If we see trafficking as a demand and supply problem, Demand being formed of people who have choices with impunity - the buyers and the business and supply being formed of people with lack and choices - marginalized girls and women, isolated and poor low caste people, etc. If the government tackles demand and supply simultaneously- tackle demand by holding legally accountable people who enslave others, buy them and sell to deter their choice and at the same time invest more in marginalized girls and women and caste communities vulnerable to trafficking to increase their choices, trafficking can be dismantled.

Sweden, Norway, Iceland have all changed their laws to make the purchase of sex illegal, not the selling of sex. They have shifted the blame from the victim to the perpetrator and they have managed to reduce trafficking in their country.

The problem can be tackled very easily if we value our girls ad women more and hold those who abuse them accountable. Right now neither the police nor the government wants to do anything about it.

Recently, an anti-trafficking activist from the low-cast Nat community, Md Kalam, who had been providing information against traffickers to my NGO, Apne Aap was falsely arrested by a corrupt police official Shivdeep Lande. The police officer has not been punished and anti-trafficking activists working for my NGO in Bihar are absolutely terrorised. Kalam is out on bail but now traffickers know that the police are on their side, so keep attacking our staff with impunity!

Ruchira Gupta NGO website is www.apneaap.org .