The Human Body : The Great Commodity Exchange

Every year, The U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 mandates the State Department to report as a way of combating human trafficking around the world and punishing those responsible, the annual Trafficking in Persons report. The document for 2007, the latest available, says that as many as 800,000 people -- largely women and children -- are trafficked across borders each year around the world. Many are forced into prostitution, sweatshops, domestic labour, farming and child armies.

Most of us Indians would not like to know that India is a key source, destination, and transit country for humans trafficked for the purposes of forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation. While no comprehensive study of forced and bonded labour can ever be completed, there are estimates that the trafficking “industry” touches 20 to 65 million Indians. Women and girls are trafficked within the country for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced marriage. Children are subjected to forced labour as factory workers, domestic servants, beggars, and agriculture workers, and have been used as armed combatants by some terrorist and insurgent groups. India is also a destination for women and girls from Nepal and Bangladesh trafficked for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation.

Due to the clandestine nature of the problem, little is known about those who carry out human trafficking. Studies show that they may be family members or friends, brothel owners and brokers, community leaders, women in sex-work or people in powerful positions such as police and other government employees. Data collected from victims of trafficking for the UNIFEM study, suggests that 50% of traffickers are women (reported in Sen, A. 2005: A Report on Trafficking of Women and Children, UNIFEM).

And India, says Global Citizens Trust (GCT), is becoming a hub for prostitution, pornography and cyber crime and a growing destination for sex tourists from the west. A large number of women and children from neighbouring countries are also trafficked into the country, with around 10,000 persons brought in from Nepal annually, according to Kumar Yaru, editor of Rajdhani national daily, a Nepalese newspaper.

“Trafficking can be disguised as migration, commercial sex or marriage. But what begins as a voluntary decision often ends up as trafficking as victims find themselves in unfamiliar destinations, subjected to unexpected work,” A BBC report for instance quoting the Assam police informs that since 1996 3,184 women and 3,840 female children have gone missing in the state and many have ended up working as call-girls around Delhi or used as “sex slaves” by wealthy landlords in states like Punjab and Haryana. That piece of statistic means that we are talking of about two women a day.

The market rate for a bride currently it seems is between 4,000 and 30,000 rupees ($88 to $660) and the custom of buying brides has not just infected the states of Haryana and Punjab only, it is spreading. In a district where the urban sex ratio is the lowest in the country at 678/1,000 and where the largest tehsil has a sex ratio of 535/1,000, the system of bride buying has become quite rampant in the last five years. Shahjahanpur’s block Bhawaal Kheda has several villages where, due to the low sex ratio, men have been buying brides from states like West Bengal, Orissa, Jharkhand and Bihar.

Article 23 of the Constitution of India prohibits trafficking in any form. We have special legislations like the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA), 1956, the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976 and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act, 2000.

However , several members of the Indian parliament (from various political parties), the country’s law makers have been implicated in a scandal where these elected representatives, the diplomatic passport-holders, were trafficking people out to foreign countries by taking them along as spouses or children, and helping them clear the immigration check-points at India’s international airports.

So, even as Trafficking is understood and interpreted as modern-day slavery, and a matter of global concern, with India as one of the worst affected countries, clearly a lot needs to be done before the great commodity exchange trading in human bodies is controlled , let alone wiped out.

Punjab: The Fury of the Fanatics

One can only hope that the violent agitation ripping through Punjab will subside. There are uneasy precedents though. One of the earliest episodes in the Punjab insurgency was the 1978 clash between the Nirankari sect and the Akalis. The Akalis represented mainstream orthodox Sikhism and the Nirankaris represented a liberal (heretical in the eyes of the Akalis) face of the faith. The friction between the two led to the killing of Lala Jagat Narain of the Punjab Kesari group of newspapers and the subsequent polarization between the Hindus and the Sikhs. Besides this, there was politicization of religion with the Hindus siding with the Nirankaris and the Congress propping Sant Bhindaranwale who subsequently turned into a Frankensteinian monster.

This time, the Nirankaris seem to have been replaced with Dera Sacha Sauda, another quasi Sikh sect with liberal teachings and views a la the Nirankaris. Again this set, with its headquarters in Sirsa in Haryana is closer to traditional Hindu practice than orthodox Sikh concepts and ideology. Again there is political interference and it was well circulated in the media that the outgoing Congress government had struck a deal with the Dera Sacha Sauda hierarchy that in exchange for withdrawal of police cases against the Dera, they would issue an edict asking their followers, which is considerable in the Malwa area of Punjab to vote for Congress candidates. By all accounts, the Dera delivered and in a significant reverse, the traditional Akali stronghold returned the bulk of the Congress candidates who made it to the State Assembly. But now that it is the Akalis who are in power, it seems to be pay back time for the Dera for having supported the wrong party.

How far the Akalis would be interested in giving a fair deal to the Dera Sacha Sauda is a good question. The Akali movement was born, not so much as a corollary of the Nationalist movement to free the country, but to free the Gurudwaras from the clutches of the hereditary Udasin Mahants who were generally considered corrupt and feudal in their outlook. The capture of power in the gurudwaras has been historically the main objective of the Akalis, and to exercise that power, the Akalis have at different times flirted with the idea of a separate Sikh state. In fact, although it is the Khalistan movement that people remember, it is a known fact that in British India too, there was a proposal for a time to grant a separate Sikh state as much as a Muslim State.

Sikh extremism has always been a genie trapped in a bottle, tamed by its compromises and adjustments with its Hindu neighbours, but only just about. The Sikh identity is a strong yet fragile one. The history of Sikhism is trapped in the historical reality of the Mughal rulers trying to stamp it out completely, the British trying to marginalize them politically, and the Hindus trying to dilute their identity socially and culturally – sometimes blatantly so by floating forums like The Rashtriya Sikh Sangat group, which is a branch of the main Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and also known as RSS was formed in Punjab in 1986 claiming to promote Sikh-Hindu relations. Its main aim however is to attack and swallow the Sikh religion.

No one knows why the head of the Dera Sacha Sauda, Gurmeet Ram Raheem Singh living in the socio cultural mileau that he does, chose to pose wearing an attire that is associated with Guru Gobind Singh and deliberately provoke, unless he has been struck by megalomania. His newspaper Sacch Kahoonhas carried an elaborate code of conduct listed out for followers one of which is to treat elders as one would treat one’s own parents. Clearly this is an occasion when the head of the sect forgot to follow his own dictum.