Gone Girl

IT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO GET ACCURATE information from Mamit. He lies on a cot outside his hut at Soniana village of Rajasthan’s Bhilwara district, about 250 km from the state capital Jaipur. His wife, Indira Devi, is equally vague. The couple cannot say with certainty how old Mamit’s sisters Hina and Sanju would be right now. After much deliberation, they claim they were about eight and five, respectively, in 2011. It is when Mamit’s father sold them off. For Hina, Indira says, a sum of ₹3.5 lakh was paid while Sanju was sold for ₹2.5 lakh. The family is from the Kanjar community, a nomadic tribe that lives in Rajasthan and a few other states like Madhya Pradesh. It is one of the communities that were part of the “de-notified tribes”, a term used by the British for communities they considered prone to committing crimes. The community has a long history of forcing girls into prostitution.

Mamit claimed that his father had taken a loan he could not repay. Subsequently, he was forced to mortgage his two daughters to agents. He claimed that, afterwards, his sisters could never return. After a recent incident involving the sale of girls in the district came to the fore and made headlines, there has been a lot of focus on the issue. It led the National Human Rights Commission and National Commission for Women (NCW) to take cognisance of the incident, after which notices were issued to the Rajasthan government. This led two families, including Mamit’s, to file a fresh complaint about the alleged sale of the girls of their families on November 3. The other complaint was filed in the neighbouring village of Saran ka Kheda, where a woman, Bharosana Devi, sought justice for her daughter Lali, alias Usha, who she said was given away about 15 years ago under similar circumstances as the two other girls.

After the complaint, Lali and Hina were traced and summoned to the main police station in Mandalgarh tehsil under which the two villages fall. Upon investigation, Lali’s current age turned out to be 34. She is married now and has three children whom she had brought along. Hina is not married and her age is 26 now. On November 4, both of them were produced in front of the judicial magistrate. Both reportedly said that they were happy with their current lives and did not want to return. In fact, Lali is believed to have said that the only reason her mother wanted her back was to get a chance to sell her off again. This is what senior police officers in the district believe as well. Hina has told the police that the family had never bothered to check on her in all these years. Her parents had died a few years after the two sisters were given away. In both cases, it turned out that they were given away to their own aunts (fathers’ sisters). Hina’s sister Sanju was also contacted. She said she couldn’t come because there was a marriage in her (current) family, but she also refused to return to her original family.

After recording their statements, they were sent back to their families.

“Both of them are adults and said they were happy with whom they were with. They did not want to go back,” said Adarsh Sidhu, Bhilwara’s superintendent of police. Hina has reportedly told the police that she had never seen her sister-in-law (Indira) before. “It is most likely that Indira is Mamit’s third or fourth wife and that is why Hina does not know her,” said a police source. The transfer of a woman from one man to another is a norm in the community.

While Mamit filed his complaint with the police, his brother, Jitender, filed a separate complaint about his sisters in front of the district collector. “If the two brothers were serious, why didn’t they file the complaint together?” asked a senior police officer.

The truth is that girl trafficking has remained a major problem in the community, among other crimes. “There was a time when, if you were travelling on the road outside, someone from this [Kanjar] community would have jumped on your vehicle, broken the glass, and just robbed you of all possessions,” said Swagat Pandya, the station house officer of the Pander police station, under whose jurisdiction one of the Kanjar settlements falls. In Bhilwara district alone, there are 54 villages inhabited by the community. Even today, most of the matters are settled by the Panch Patels, or the leaders of the community. They cannot be defied at all. Any non-compliance invokes heavy fines and social boycotts. It is considered taboo to take issues of the community outside.

In 2017-18, in a congregation of the community, it was decided that its girls would not be forced into prostitution. But activists point out that it still happens. And, as in the case of Lali, Hina and Sanju, it was pretty much facilitated by the family.

In a paper submitted to the NCW this month, Raman Bhatu, an activist from the community, specifies how the community leaders work in collaboration with agents to push girls into the sex trade. In many instances, he says, people are forced to borrow money from these heads. As most in the community are illiterate, on stamp paper, the agent/Panch puts an interest of 5-10 per cent on the loan and then mortgages his property and daughters. The money is supposed to be returned in a span of six to 12 months. As the families are unable to pay, the girls are taken away. Many of them end up in brothels in Mumbai and elsewhere.

IN NEIGHBOURING Bundi district, for example, in three villages where the Kanjar community predominantly lives, its leaders have issued a diktat that no woman be married. A 15-year-old girl from here was recently rescued from a brothel in Mumbai. In May, the girl’s parents filed a report stating their daughter had gone missing during a visit to a temple. In September, the Bundi police received a call from the Pune police. A girl, they said, had escaped from a local brothel. It turned out to be the same girl. When she was questioned, she reluctantly told the police that her own father had sold her off two years ago to a man called Shivraj from the state’s Sawai Madhopur district for ₹15 lakh. From there, she was sent to the brothel in Pune.

“At first, she would not say anything against her parents. It is only after days of counselling that she revealed the truth,” said Jai Yadav, Bundi’s superintendent of police. Later, both her parents and Shivraj were arrested. The girl revealed that in the brothel she was beaten up daily until she agreed to sleep with clients. In September, she met a man who had come to the brothel. The man, she told the police, advised her to run away. It was then that she escaped and made it to the nearest police station.

Usually, girls do not think much about prostitution. They accept it as their fate. “Since they have in all likelihood seen their mother and sisters do this, they consider this destiny,” said Yadav.

In the last few years, authorities have realised that it is not a mere law enforcement issue but also a social issue that cannot go away without community participation. In Bundi, under Yadav, the police have begun active intervention in many cases. In some cases, if a woman from the community fell in love with someone and the community heads would not allow it, the police got them married. In others, police officers even offered to perform kanyadaan, a Hindu ritual usually done by the bride’s father.

“We couldn’t even report a fellow Kanjar to the police even if we knew that he had been out the previous night robbing,” said Gyanchand Kanjar, former sarpanch of Falasia in Bhilwara, next to Pander. For him, personally, change began to occur, he says, after he came in touch with Gayatri Pariwar, a spiritual organisation based in Haridwar, Uttarakhand. In 1990, he set up a wedding music band of his own, which was the first in the area. This, he says, gave him exposure to other communities. “I saw how they lived and how they earned their livelihood and what the dignity of the womenfolk meant to them,” he said. Many men in the community were also involved in digging wells in other villages. It helped them observe other communities. Gradually, things began to change.

Gyanchand’s son Vimal, 30, has studied till Class 12 and now helps his father in his band business. He is married to a veterinary assistant. He has two sons, the eldest one goes to school. A few years ago, with his support, Gyanchand’s niece, Seema Devi, became the sarpanch of the Falasia Gram Sabha. When she came to Pander village after her marriage in 2006, she had only studied till Class 5. She completed her education till Class 12 after marriage, even after bearing children.

Seema now wants the girls in the area to go to school and not drop out. The problem is that there is only one government middle school where most children study till Class 8. “The enrolment of girls has increased in the last few years but there is a lot more to be done,” says one of the teachers, Brahm Prakash. After Class 8, the children have to go to the senior school in Pander town, about 6-7 km away. “This leads to dropouts because parents cannot afford to leave work and accompany their children, especially girls, to school,” said Seema. In the middle school, currently, there is an enrolment of 406 children, of which 199 are girls. “The girls are more interested in studies than boys,” said Asha Kanwar, who teaches Hindi at the school. Many kids go to nearby private schools as well. The village is now hoping that the government will upgrade the school so that children find it convenient to continue their studies.

But a lot is left desired. On November 7, Priyank Kanoongo, the chairman of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights visited a few schools in Bhilwara. Upon scrutiny, it turned out that 46 girls enrolled in these schools have been missing. Kanoongo went to some of their families as well but as per reports, he could not get a satisfactory answer.

At Soniana, outside the hut which was once home to Hina and Sanju, 32-year-old Ranglal, a member of the Kanjar community, points at the pressure some of them are under after the recent cases of selling girls surfaced. He alleges that a few community leaders have been asking some of them in helping to douse the fire. Ranglal is not willing to do that. He remembers how two decades ago, three of his five sisters were taken away in a matter of a few months by agents after his father failed to repay the loan. “In front of my eyes, they took my youngest sister who kept on shouting that her father had sold her for ₹1.50 [actually ₹1.5 lakh],” he said. Ranglal claimed that when he grew up, he was able to free his sisters and marry them off. But he knows how many among his community, involved in such sales, including community leaders, have made a fortune. “People who 20 years ago had a little land, have factories today and own fancy SUVs,” he said. “Where did that money come from?”

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