Climbing over walls that confine

Almost every day for the past few years, the muddy winding roads to a farmhouse in Sajanpura village, enclosed within 12-feet-high brick walls, would resound with sounds of a DJ and the band of the baaraat (the groom’s side coming in procession to take the bride). This farmhouse is where the NGO, Gayatri Sarv Samaj Foundation, was running from. But residents recall that the music and the mirth were almost always accompanied by an unhappy bride.

On April 6, the dhol (drum) stopped echoing through the village when 17-year-old Neelam, with the help of 40-year-old Sahiba (names changed to protect identity), scaled these walls and ran all day until she reached a stranger who helped her to the closest police station in Rajasthan’s Bassi tehsil, where Sajanpura is located.

This was followed by a raid and four arrests. Neelam has now been escorted back to her hometown in Uttar Pradesh, where she is staying at a shelter home. Sahiba is at an ashram in Rajasthan, awaiting her journey home to West Bengal.

When she reached the station, Neelam, who hails from a Scheduled Caste (SC) community, told the police that she was kidnapped and then sold to a man for marriage.

After mistreating her, the man took her back to the NGO, where she was “threatened with death”. Panicked, she fled.

Sahiba was trafficked from West Bengal’s Howrah and sold to the NGO by a person she calls Vijay, an acquaintance. Trembling as she tells her story, she says that after she was “bought”, she was deemed “unmarriageable” by the organisation heads because of her“height and skin colour”. They then tortured her for a year because “they had paid for me”.

As she fidgets with the black dupatta covering her head, Sahiba, a widow, says she had no interest in remarrying, and it was the promise of a job that brought her across the country. “I used to beg on the streets, so when an acquaintance told me that he would find me a job that paid ₹20,000 in Jaipur, I left home without telling anyone. I was sold multiple times on the way and eventually sold to Gayatri [the organisation head and after whom the organisation has been named]. Here, I was made to do chores, and beaten every day after they said they could not get me married.”

The marriage market

Not far from Sajanpura, about 30 km from Jaipur’s city centre, Abhijeet Patil, an IPS (probation) officer investigating the case in the Bassi police station, says investigations so far have revealed that Gayatri and her husband Ramavtar would buy girls and women belonging to vulnerable families from traffickers across States like West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Assam, at prices ranging from ₹2.5 lakh to ₹5 lakh, to “sell them for marriage to older men” in areas of western Rajasthan. The price of the bride would be determined by the physical attributes of the girl, he says.

“Upon questioning, we found that the Gayatri Sarv Samaj Foundation was being run as an NGO from the premises of a farmhouse for the past eight years. It forged the age certificates of minor girls and sold them in marriage. They have conducted at least 1,500 marriages,” says Patil.

A zero first information report (FIR) was filed on April 7 at Jaipur’s Bassi police station and a joint investigation by the U.P. and Rajasthan police was launched after Neelam’s complaint. Neelam is the only minor, so far, whose marriage has been invalidated. Besides sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act and the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, sections under the BNS pertaining to kidnapping, criminal conspiracy, rape, and wrongful confinement, have been included in the FIR.

Four people associated with the organisation have been arrested. The police are on the lookout for the man who married Neelam and the trafficker. They are keeping an eye out for more such girls and women who were married under similar conditions.

Over the past nine years, at least five FIRs have been lodged against the non-profit across stations in Jaipurbut no action was taken against them, sources say.

Under the POCSO Act, 2012, any marital relationship between a man and a girl aged between 15 and 18 yearsis invalid. However, Patil says that the police can only act on cases they are aware of. Residents have complained that more such marriages have taken place and the police say that they are working to identify them.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, in 2022, up to 3,098 girls (under 18) were rescued from trafficking in India.

A missing daughter

Around 500 km away, Neelam’s mother, 32, came home one evening to find her daughter missing on March 29. “I was at work and she had gone to a neighbour’s house. But when she did not return I started looking everywhere for her.”

Neelam says that her neighbour had asked her to go to the market with her so she sat in his car with him. “On the way, he fed me paneer and roti. After that I lost my ability to think; only my body was moving. He left me in a temple,” she said in her complaint. After being forced into marriage and taken to Rajasthan’s Sikar, she fought with the groom’s family to let her go but the man left her at the farmhouse instead. Here, Gayatri told her that she had “bought her” for ₹1.3 lakh and “sold her” for ₹2.5 lakh.

Her mother’s voice quivers as she says she got a call from an unknown number and realised it was her bitiya (daughter). “She gave the phone to Gayatri, who asked us to pay ₹2.5 lakh if we wanted our daughter back. But we do not have that kind of money,” she says. She works as a labourer and her husband is unemployed.

It was when Neelam heard that two other men had come to take her away, that she ran away. At the shelter now, her mother says, “She is not talking much, but crying when she sees me.”

Sahiba was rescued the next day. She told the police everything she knew about the organisation. She is worried her sons, both in their 20s, will be looking for her.

The escape

Recalling the events of the morning Neelam ran away, Sahiba says, “She looked upset and I did not want her to go through what I did. I told her, ‘I know you want to escape. Run, I’ll help you’.”

Early the next morning, she distracted Gayatri, by engaging her in conversation in one corner of the farmhouse. Neelam, who pretended to go to the washroom, climbed the brick wall and escaped. This was followed by a wild-goose chase with Gayatri and two associates chasing her in her car. She told the police that she ran through vast fields, where the car could not follow.

That day, Neelam’s mother got another call from an unknown number and picked up immediately. “It was my daughter again. She had run away and gone to hide in another man’s house. She was calling me from his phone. I was helpless and requested him to take her to the police station.” In her recollections to her mother, Neelam says that she was made to wear a red saree for the wedding, which she left behind when she ran.

Neelam’s statements were recorded on the evening of April 6. On April 7, the raid was conducted and arrests were made. The police have recovered the car used to chase Neelam and have frozen the bank accounts of the organisation’s functionaries. They have also identified six trafficking agents who they are working to arrest.

Hiding behind ‘kanyadaan’ for the poor

Gayatri Sarv Samaj Foundation said they performed kanyadaan of daughters whose families could not afford a wedding. In their social media posts from 2020, they said they had been conducting mass marriages. Photos show young women decked in bright red wedding lehengas, their hands covered in bangles, looking forlorn.

In their posts, they show weddings of mostly couples from upper-caste families. However, according to the police, they targeted people from lower classes and many of them happened to be from SC and ST communities. In Neelam’s case, sections of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, have not been invoked as the man whom she was married off to belonged to an SC community himself.

According to the government think tank Niti Aayog’s directory, the foundation was registered in 2016 as a non-profit under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013. A non-profit organisation is registered under this section when it has the vision of promoting arts, commerce, education, charity, protection of the environment, sports, science, research, social welfare, and religion.

In 2016 itself, three FIRs were lodged in police stations across Jaipur, under sections related to cheating and dishonesty, criminal breach of trust, cheating by personation, voluntarily causing hurt and wrongful restraint. These complaints were made by the groom’s family, mostly after the bride had run away, as the men thought that they had been cheated.

The men who married the women can also be implicated under POCSO if the victims are minors, says David Sunder Singh, a Chennai-based advocate, who has worked on multiple trafficking cases.

He says, “If the woman is a minor, it is the responsibility of the state to rescue them. If an adult too, says that she was forcefully married while she was a child, sections of POCSO will be invoked, and the marriage will be invalid.” However, if an adult has consented to the marriage and the enforcement agency thinks that there is no prima facie exploitation, then no case will be registered. Other sections related to rape, trafficking, and cheating can be included, he points out.

Possible crime contributors

In Sajanpura, where few women are seen on the roads, residents living near the farmhouse say that they often saw marriages take place behind its grilled iron gate and brick walls. Om Prakash Sharma, a school principal says, “They sold brides probably because many of our villages have fewer women.” He says that men would travel from across villages to find a bride here and some had started families too.

According to the National Family Health Survey-5, Rajasthan had a sex ratio at birth (females per 1,000 males) of 882 in rural areas, and 869 in urban areas from 2017-2019. This is much lower than the national sex ratio of 1,037 and 985 in rural and urban areas respectively.

Boards outside diagnostic centres specify that they do ‘not practise female foeticide’ because people do ask for sex selection tests, says Indian Medical Association National Vice-President Dr. Sunil Chugh, who runs a hospital and 32 diagnostic centres across Rajasthan and Bihar. He says his units tell people that is it a crime. “We say, ‘Do you want us to call the police?’”

While the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994, punishes the violators, thereby reducing the avenues for people to terminate the pregnancy, Dr. Chugh points out that there has hardly been any “shift in mentality”. In addition to this, he says that many communities in Rajasthan are known to practise female infanticide.

He says, “Over the years, I have noticed that at the hospital, when a boy is born, there is a lot of celebration but when a girl is born, parents are often upset. They start worrying about dowry from the time that she is born.”

But for Neelam and Sahiba, one planned act of courage helped them break out of the cycle. Neelam, who has recently finished Class 12, tells her mother when she meets her at the shelter home that she still wants to go to college, either to work towards the civil services or become a doctor.

Meanwhile, Sahiba says in a mix of Hindi and Bengali, as she waits to go home, “It was a high wall, but the girl was tall.” She smiles.

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Edited by Sunalini Mathew