Saveeta Eharwar (14) went missing from her home in Gurgaon and was last seen with a neighbour. It’s been two months since she disappeared but her mother is hanging on to dying hope. In Seemapuri east, 12-year-old Rinki disappeared from the ISBT bus station the minute she landed in Delhi. Rinki was spotted with strangers in Ajmer a week later. Today, both the girls are gone. Deebashree Mohanty brings you the horrifying details of these two cases wherein the mothers almost reached their daughters but not quite
September 16, 2014:
“Agar aapke ghar nahin pahunchi to kahan gayee,” Umeeda Eharwar (48) asked the landlady where she used to send her daughter Saveeta for tuitions. But the woman told her that Saveeta did not come at all that day. Umeeda then rushed to her one-room rented accommodation in Indra Colony, plot 80, Gurgaon, only to find that Saveeta had been missing since 8 am. She had gone out with her neighbour “Aunty Devyanti” and never returned.
Today, Nov 9, 2014
“Sab log kehte hain ki woh kabhie wapas nahin aayegi (Everybody tells me that my daughter will never come back to me). Sab kehte hain ki woh bhaag gayee aur Haridwarmein masti kar rahi hogi (everyone says she has run away with someone and is having a good time in Haridwar). But I am convinced that my daughter has been abducted and sold into the flesh trade. She must be forced to serving her clients every night and I cannot do anything to help her out. She must be going through hell,” a distraught Umeeda, who has been running from pillar to post to trace her missing daughter for two months, says.
She has not had a proper meal since Saveeta went missing on September 16 and her health is failing her but the mother has taken it upon herself to find her teenaged daughter and bring her back home. She is willing to go to topmost authorities and beg them for their involvement in this case.
“How can I relax when I know that my daughter was snatched away from me and pushed into a murky trade and the culprits are roaming scotfree. They are enjoying life after selling off my daughter to someone. No one is doing enough to search for my poor girl. And, they say she is a characterless girl who ran away with someone” an angry Umeeda says. What makes her condition more pitiable is that people blame her for her daughter’s disappearance.
“Neighbours say I used to beat her up and did not give her enough to eat. My husband passed away due to a serious ailment six years ago. Since then, I have been taking care of my daughters and am doing my best to give them a decent living,” she says, breaking down often.
She lists logical reasons why her dubious neighbour Devyanti and her husband would be involved in the kidnapping of her daughter. She suspects there are more spokes in the flesh trade cartel living in the locality and they have a ‘dealer’ as well.
“Devyanti first refused to acknowledge that she was with Saveeta the day she went missing. When we cornered her at the Sushant lok Police station, she confessed to having taken my daughter for a short walk to dispose of garbage. later, she said she had taken her in an auto to Sadar Bazaar and then dropped Saveeta off at Wazirabad. For whatIJ Devyanti did not even know my family well. Why was she indulging in my daughter,” Umeeda asks.
Her second argument is that some other women from the area had informed the mother that they had seen Saveeta wearing a different set of clothes when she was spotted with Devyanti in the auto rickshaw. So, why did Saveeta change before going out with DevyantiIJ By now, Umeeda had already searched for her daughter in the streets of Wazirabad and Sadar Bazaar but all in vain.
“On September 17, the police set Devyanti free for lack of evidence. In the evening, we tried to convince Devyanti to tell us about my daughter’s whereabouts. The only thing she said was that she had taken Saveeta to Mahipalpur to stay at relative’s (sister-in-law) place for the night. WhyIJ It’s still a mystery with Devyanti refusing to talk to any of us,” the desperate mother tells you.
By the time they reached Mahipalpur, Saveeta was gone, probably shipped to another city or port. Devyanti’s relative told Umeeda that Saveeta had come there that night with Devyanti but she refused to let them stay. She had no clue where they went thereafter.
Umeeda has, meanwhile, not let up on her frantic search in the Wazirabad-Sadar Bazaar-Mahipalpur stretch but her daughter is nowhere to be found. “Is it too lateIJ Is she gone for good,” she asks in heartbreaking helplessness. She is sure Devyanti is behind her daughter’s disappearance but is unable to pin her down due to police inaction.
“According to NCRB, 38,172 crimes have been committed against children nationwide in 2012. Out of these, Haryana accounts for 2.66%. Further, data indicates that 535 kidnappings in Haryana alone. No one really knows where these children have gone. It is a cause of deep concern. The Arupa Mission Research Foundation (AMRF), a registered NGO, is following up on Saveeta’s case. Joining the AMRF in their efforts are the residents of Blossoms 2, Sector 51, Gurgaon, where Saveeta’s mother works as a domestic help. The case is now with the Crime Branch,” Sonali Patnaik, director of AMRF, says.
Patnaik has kept the case somewhat alive through hectic social media campaigns and word of mouth and hopes Saveeta is found before it is too late.
Crime Branch sub-inspector Jasram says “the police is doing everything it can to get information about the missing girl. We are following up on many leads and also have been questioning neighbours about Devyanti and her husband,” he adds.
Trafficking and kidnapping are the top crimes against children as per a SEVA survey. A CRY study also says that, on an average, 18 children go missing in the Capital daily and no one has any trace of them. Is this becoming a serious issueIJ And what is the way to curb such heinous crimesIJ
“Nowadays, it is becoming a bigger problem because there are ‘helpers’ and ‘key players’ living among others in posh societies. They don’t come across as ‘suppliers’ and it is very difficult to charge them without proof. To confuse the police, these suppliers take a long and winding route. In Saveeta’s case, for instance, the mother spent two days searching for her daughter in Sadar, Wazirabad and Mahipalpur. This much time was enough to send the girl anywhere,” Ganesh Upadhyay, who has since retired from Crime Branch, says. He adds that identification of suppliers takes the maximum time and a thorough trail search makes it worse.
“Time is a crucial factor here. If the suppliers and dealers are scared that the police are on the right track, they try to kill the victim because the victim may lead the cops to their hideouts. Very seldom have we seen girls returning safely. The only way they return is when they get rescued in a police raid,” Upadhyay reveals.
Umeeda, however, is unrelenting in her search and hope. She cooks for all her daughters, including Saveeta, and waits for her to return every night. “A property dealer had barged into my house the other day and he threatened me with dire consequences if I troubled Devyanti and her husband anymore. He said I will never get my daughter back. I think he is a dealer of girls but who will listen to meIJ,” Umeeda asks.
While she waits for her daughter to return for dinner, another mother has been spending her nights at the ISBT bus station hoping that her 14-year-old daughter Rinki will come back to her from where she got kidnapped on September 29, 2014. Ratna Baijal, a construction worker in Delhi, was bringing her daughter back from her grandparents’ house in Gurupara, western UP, when the incident happened. No sooner did the bus reach the destination that some co-travellers started misbehaving with her.
“It was 11:30 pm when we arrived at the bus station. Some passengers who were heavily drunk started misbehaving with me. My attention got diverted for a while. When I looked back, my daughter was gone,” Baijal recalls.
“The bus driver told me that he had spotted Rinki with two burly looking men and they had boarded the bus to Model Town 2. He also said that Rinki was barely able to walk and gave me the bus number. I went to the nearby police station and lodged a missing girl FIR. I gave them the bus number and pleaded with them to search for her,” she says.
After a couple of hours, the sub inspector informed her that the bus had been traced and the men tracked down to Nithari village in Noida. “The Police had questioned those men about my daughter. They said that Rinki was inquiring about the bus to Model Town II and they had helped her board it. She got down one stop before Gujrawala town,” Baijal, who then went looking for her daughter at Gujrawala town in North Delhi, tells you.
“My daughter was staying with her grandparents in UP because I couldn’t afford her schooling here. That was her first trip to Delhi. Why would she even know Model Town let alone board a bus going thereIJ She doesn’t know anyone in this city forget Gujrawala,” the 42-year-old mother says, breaking down.
The search at Gujrawala was unfruitful and Baijal returned to those men for more information. She asked around in Nithari and was told by a guard that on September 30 at 8 am he had seen Rinki being escorted out of the building by two men. They sat in an Indigo car with a licence numberplate of Rajasthan and drove away. “The CCTV footage from a nearby petrol pump shows pictures of my daughter with three men. She was lying in the backseat. The car belonged to somebody called Thakur in Ajmer. That afternoon, the police sent a team to Ajmer but it was too late. By then, Rinki had gone and those men couldn’t be traced either. The search team got back Rinki’s clothes from a bungalow. I have no idea where my daughter has been sent to or even if she is alive. I wish I had never got her to this city,” Baijal states.
According to Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi, the problem of missing children is a huge one, largely ignored and the metros are most vulnerable. “We have the laws in place against perpetrators of such crime. What is needed is prompt action by the police in registering an FIR and sending search teams. It is heartening to see that common people are also doing their best to help locate these missing children. If we become more alert and compassionate, such incidences will lessen. A child who has gone missing can belong to any strata of society but finding her/him and restoring him to the family is everybody’s business. I am glad to see the social media playing a healthy role in identifying and locating missing children.” Satyarthi says.
The AMRF is addressing a lot of issues in its fight against crimes involving children. “There are a lot of related problems — absence of data on crime against children, lack of reporting by parents, limited trust in the police, limited follow-up action, lack of awareness on measures for child protection, skewed sex ratio (Haryana- 879 female for each 1000 male, which is below national average of 940, Census 2011) and many other factors which need careful deliberation. There is a dire need for police-citizen (especially the poor) trust building platform where a lot of issues can be discussed and awareness created,” Patnaik says.