They have been bought for paltry sums, made to slog as slaves, treated like garbage and tortured endlessly. Bride trafficking in India has always been a problem but with the sex ratio disparities growing, trafficking of brides has become a glaring menace. Deebashree Mohanty tells you more
Rimpa Dhunia’s life begins at 4.30 am with feeding the cattle and lighting the choolha to prepare breakfast. After washing her mud hut and fetching water from the borewell nearby, she has to tend to her three children and ready them for school. Then she makes tea and roti for her husband and his other more important wife.
Rimpa is a paro or a molki who was married to Dhanesh, a fruit seller in November 2010. At that time, she was bought as a bride by Dhanesh for Rs10,000 which is considered a huge amount in her part of town. Her hut, on the outskirts of Guhana village in Haryana’s Mewat district, is surrounded by garbage heaps and excreta. There is no water or electricity and the hut is filled with acrid smoke coming from the cooking fire but Rimpa is unmoved. She doesn’t know that there is a world outside. And now, after so many years of torture and disrepect, she says she doesn’t care.
“That’s my life for you,” she says with composure. You ask her if she is not unhappy and pat comes the reply; “Paro ka koi mol nahin. Woh bas kachara hai. Ab aansoo bhi nahin nikalte, (purchased brides are of no worth. They are garbage. My tears have all dried up,” she says. Her belongings consist of five pairs of sarees, one blue suit with sequence work, a necklace, some silver trinkets, a pure silver payal and a Micromax mobile which she bought recently. Otherwise, everything else in the house belongs to the ‘other’ bride.
What excites Rimpa, who comes all the way from the north east, is her new mobile phone but she still revels in anonymity, insisting that she will not allow any photographer to shoot her. “My husband remarried in 2013. His new wife is a local and she has even been to a school. They had a proper ceremony and my in-laws gifted her gold kangans. All I got from them was Rs10 as shagun. My husband’s second wife has a son from the marriage but it is my responsibility to look after her child,” a distraught Rimpa tells you, asking why would one need a picture of her.
The alarming thing is that across India, there are many like her who have been purchased as brides and who are fighting for respect and love in this village and elsewhere in Haryana but their cries go unheard. In the north-western part of India, the bride business is booming. Blame it on the skewed sex ratio in States like Haryana, where there are only 830 girls for every 1,000 boys leaving the men with few options when it comes to finding a wife.
“It all stems from the stark reality that among land-owning castes in rural areas, female foeticide is rampant because people bitterly oppose laws which allow girls to inherit equally. This has led to a mass termination of female foetuses. Hence families in search of wives are increasingly turning to traffickers to buy a bride for the son of the family,” Dr Ashwini Naik, who teaches gender studies at Delhi University, explains.
She adds that the business of bride trafficking is so lucrative that locals are turning into dealers for sourcing brides for families seeking partners for their sons. “Men from Tijara village in Rajasthan, for instance, are known to be in this ‘alternate source of income’. On the face of it, they would be making a living harvesting crops or quarrying rocks but these men supplement their meagre income by travelling to Assam twice a year to bring back brides for local village families. They generally pay the bride’s family anything between Rs5,000-Rs 10,000 and they feel they have struck a good deal,” Naik who has worked closely with many such bought wives in Delhi, says.
“A field study by Dhairitri Stree Kendra revealed that out of 10,000 households they surveyed in Haryana, over 9,000 married women were bought from other States. More than 30 per cent men in Haryana between the ages of 15 and 44 are unmarried because of the skewed sex ratio. When they don’t get women locally, they obtain them from other States” Dr Satyabrata Das, a researcher who has worked extensively on shifting marriage patterns in north India and their impact on women, says. Das has written extensively about female infanticide and bride trafficking.
He asserts that although Mewat has a large Muslim population, paros (as the purchased brides are called) and their purchasers cut across communities. Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi who has worked for the uplift of trafficked children and girls, says bride trafficking is a difficult network to bust because very few brides have the courage to come out and talk about their harassment. According to Satyarthi, like marital rape, bride trafficking is also an unseen yet glaring problem which needs to be addressed urgently.
“Molki and paro are known pejoratives in Haryana, Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh where the skewed sex ratio and entrenched feudalism has resulted in this flourishing trade. The women are bought in the lure of a legal marriage from the poverty-ridden villages of Assam, West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha in particular. These girls, mostly between 11 and 18 years, find themselves in places like Mewat and Gujarigaon where the brokers sell them to men who cannot find local brides. Cut off from their homes, these hapless women are confined and forced to work as bonded labour or pushed into forced marriages and even prostitution,” he explains.
The National Crime Records Bureau data shows that more than 20,000 girl children and women between the ages of 10 and 30 were kidnapped for marriage in 2013. “The demand for ‘marriageable age’ girls is so intense that organised trafficking cartels have started operating in Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh,” a 2013 report commissioned by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), says.
Sold for Rs100; shared with 6
Such marriages for women who are bought and sold as brides is often a life of slavery and abuse. The UNODC says, thousands of these women are raped, abused, used as domestic slaves and often eventually abandoned. Naik and her colleague Neeti Dua hold private tuitions for such women on Fridays and Sundays in their homes in Gurgaon where such women come forward and discuss their problems without feeling shy. They are taught about basic human rights and the legal benefits that they should demand from their husbands.
“Pooja from Keonjhar district in Odisha was sold as a bride when she was 17 to a 38-year-old farmer from Rajasthan. At her in-laws’ place, she was asked to satisfy the sexual urges of her five brothers-in-law as well. They gangraped her and tortured her if she resisted. This went on for four years and Pooja had to go through several abortions. She was forced to work on the day of her delivery too. She managed to escape in 2011 and has been working as a maid in Model Town, Delhi,” Naik recounts, talking about one of her brightest students.
Pooja doesn’t want to lodge a complaint with the police because she doesn’t want to go through any more trauma. There are 11 women in Naik’s class who have been bought as brides and abused for years before managing to escape but neither of them were accepted back in society. “Their parents wouldn’t accept them. Once sold as a bride, the daughter was not supposed to even complain about her sasural. Most of these women resign to their fate or commit suicide. Only a few have the courage to run away,” Neeti Dua, a Social Science doctor from Jawaharlal Nehru University, states.
Serving The ‘Other’ Wife
Shazia Banu from West Bengal was sold as a bride to a 31-year-old farmer in Haryana where she served him and his family ceaselessly. But as soon as her husband decided to marry a local girl, Shazia’s world turned upside down. Her paro status came back to haunt her. She was asked to leave and live under a shed far away from her husband’s home. But every morning, Shazia had to report to the house and do all the chores, including those of the ‘other’ wife. She has been doing this since 2010.
“Finally, Shazia’s neighbour convinced her to come to Delhi and look for a job. They came here in 2012 and Shazia has never been happier. She cooks at a Government school in Noida and is paid Rs3,500 a month. She shares a rented room with a friend,” Aditi Balsevar who runs the NGO Stree Prabodhan in Sector 121 in Noida, says.
‘My son wants to sell me’
Some women, like Ayesha, have spent decades in villages far away from their original homes and have no memory where they have come from. Ayesha was only 11 when she was bought for a paltry Rs1,000 and brought to Umadgaon in Rajasthan. She worked as bonded labour for three years and later married off to the landlord’s mentally challenged 35-year-old son. Her first experience of marriage was rape and violence. But what is most painful, she says, is that her children have been schooled to hate her.
Shafiq Rahman, the founder of Enpower People who has been instrumental in rescuing paros from different parts of the country, tells you that these women are trapped for life from the moment they are sold. Employees of his organisation have had multiple death threats but that doesn’t stop Rahman.
“It’s become such common practice that everyone talks about it openly and discusses the mol’(price) of the bride without batting an eyelid. Ayesha told me that her eldest son used to blackmail her that he would sell her to a broker if she didn’t behave. The mother lived in pure grief before finding the courage to leave,” Balsevar tells you.
Sold twice when pregnant
Ghausia Khan (60), a bride trafficking survivor, is a member of the district legal aid authority, Mewat, and a worker with Empower People. She helps women in distress find lawyers and provides them with legal information, at times, monetary assistance too. But more than any of these, it is her moral support, she says, which enables victims to overcome the trauma. She has intervened in the cases of local women as well as paros trapped in involuntary marriages. Ghausia, now a torchbearer in the anti-bride trafficking campaign, was herself sold at into a horrifying marriage, much like Aarzoo Rani from Guhana village in Haryana who has been sold five times before but never could object to the inhuman exploitation.
It was part and parcel of her existence. If the husband did not have money to make ends meet, she was sold off without a second thought. “Aarzoo was sold the first time when she was 15 to a 46-year-old man in the village. She was more a maid than wife, made to do all the house chores. “When she was pregnant with her second child, she was sold off to a 28-year-old boy in the neighbouring village for Rs1,200. Hardly had she given birth to a girl that her second husband got married to a local girl and Aarzoo was pushed away yet again. She was made to slog through the day and her daughter was sent to an orphanage. She was sold for a third time to a physically handicapped man in the same village for Rs5,000. She has two children with him. After his death, she takes care of the family land and the harvest. She is happy now,” Balsevar states.
She adds that most trafficked brides are unwilling to talk fearing ostracisation by villagers. This is a challenge for NGOs who are often unable to intervene or persuade a victim to register a case of trafficking. As a result, much of their work is limited to case documentation. The authorities are similarly handicapped. “Even for suo motu action, the police require leads. Sadly, there are none,” she says dejectedly.
(To protect the identity of the victims the names have been changed)