Trade In Minor Girls : Married -Off To 15 Men Over 8 Years !

 BY R.K.MISRA

 Gujarat has been hitting headlines for all the wrong reasons with religious regularity in recent times. Even as the establishment is busy investigating a slew of recruitment exam paper leaks, digital fiscal frauds, the fake who breached India’s formidable security and the high profile  businessman con-star , comes news of another  scam that  may well take the sheen of governance in the union home minister’s home state.

A   tale of three girls of a southern state who are radicalized and forced into a terror network may have inadvertently become a subject of political weaponization for electoral benefits countrywide but what has come to light here is  much more sinister. Only that it has no  communal angle so is not of much use as a political ploy.

The disappearance of a 13 year old girl from Ahmedabad district early last month and her tracking down from a village in neighbouring Gandhinagar district lifted the veil of a thriving inter-state racket wherein  minor girls from impoverished families were targeted, abducted, raped and auctioned into a vicious cycle of marriage and re-marriage through continuing sale. A seven member team including a married couple and their 15 year old son besides a 70 year old and another married woman are in the dock.

A published report traces the modus operandi and also brings out the gruesome  nature of the perpetrators of this heinous crime wherein  the minor is subjected to multiple rapes by the ringleader in the presence of his own wife and 15 year old son to break her down. Besides rape, torture also forms an intrinsic part of the ‘treatment’ meted out to the minor. Investigators speak of at least ten  cases and suspect very many more as their net widens to pull in many more on the rim. The racket which has spread its tentacles into neighbouring Maharashtra and Rajasthan has been flourishing unhindered in Gujarat for almost a decade as the case of one of the minors sold into marriage to 15 men over eight years brings out. A veritable market auction was being carried out at some place on the Rajasthan side of the Gujarat-Rajasthan border with agents from across the country involved in the bidding process. The price ranged anywhere from Rs 2 to 4 lakhs.

In 2015, the Maharashtra cops had busted a similar human trafficking racket wherein women and minors  from the neighbouring state were being sold as brides in  Bakrana village near Ahmedabad which had a very skewered sex ratio. Seven people were arrested after a 22 year old survivor escaped from Gujarat and told the cops in Mumbai. Here too poor family girls were targeted and in some cases , the parents were also paid sums ranging from Rs 25,000 to Rs 30,000 though the girls were sold for anywhere from Rs 1 to 5 lakhs depending on the purchasing power of the grooms.

According to senior journalist D.P. Bhattacharya who had extensively reported on  the demographic changes taking place in the coastal district of Kutch in the decade ending 2012 hundreds of bangla-speaking muslim women had been trafficked from Bengal and Bangladesh to Kutch where they were sold as brides to meet the unmarrieds hunt for wives propelled by a skewered sex ratio.” In those days the traffickers would charge anywhere from Rs 40 to Rs 50,000 per deal was what  many of those privy to the transaction confided”, he said. Since the women carried valid Indian documents, there was little that the authorities could do. Additionally, in bulk of the cases in Kutch, the traded women/girls settled down into grateful matrimony.

However the Ahmedabad racket under police investigation differs from the Kutch case as it has dark criminal antecedents. The married minors were kept track of by the criminal masterminds and at an appropriate time after they had won the confidence  of the family, they were forced to decamp with cash and valuables, in effect, turning them into accomplices in crime. The investigating teams are still to trace the bulk of the minors, though the kingpin has admitted that many of these trafficked minors were forced into marriage twice in the course of an year.

Earlier this month, a published report, quoting data published in Crime in India-2020 stating that 41,261 women had gone missing between 2016-20 in Gujarat , had created a furore with the Gujarat Police clarifying in a tweet that 39497 women  had since then returned and the said information was also part of the said report. However by its own admission 2,124 still remain missing over the period in question and the figures for 2021 and 2022 are yet to come into public domain. Ironically, the present investigations into  this case has also brought to the fore how laxity bordering on callous indifference ,on the part of the  earlier police investigations  had allowed this racket to flourish wherein a girl is married off to 15 men over eight years !.

http://epaper.lokmat.com/articlepage.php?articleid=LOKTIME_NPLT_20230530_6_5

http://odishapostepaper.com/edition/4518/orissapost/page/9