Other States - West Bengal   

Growing flesh trade causing concern to Bengal Govt.

By Malabika Bhattacharya

Kolkata Nov. 5. The growing trafficking in women is causing worry to the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee Government because it has sucked several rural Bengal districts into its vortex, creating grave social and economic tensions in the countryside.

Aggravating the Government's concerns are intelligence agencies' reports that often the traffickers are an extension of Pakistan's ISI-backed terror groups which have already set up networks in the State and carried out deadly strikes such as the one at the American Centre in which several policemen were killed.

The Government is careful about going public with the reports on the burgeoning flesh trade because of political and security implications, but as The Hindu learns, it has provided the Union Home Ministry — it was the Centre which alerted several eastern States to the ill early — with its findings, especially in relation to the working of the terror groups.

The flesh trade collects the hapless creatures — mostly girls in their teens — from populous and underdeveloped districts like South and North 24-Parganas, Malda, South and North Dinajpur and Coochbehar.

Additionally, the women are identified and trapped from the steady flow of refugees from neighbouring Bangladesh.

An idea about the enormity of the disturbing issue can be had from the report that nearly 50 women were trapped and taken away by the gangs from different parts of the two Dinajpurs, of them about 20 in the past one and a half years from Tapan block in South Dinajpur alone. Hardly a day passes without the police having the pictures of missing women published in leading newspapers for information on their whereabouts.

Investigators as well as the non-governmental organisations engaged in campaigns against atrocities on women have informed the Government that the women were being "sold" to brothels or "individuals" in North India, especially Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.

For the crime syndicates running the traffic, North India is a "lucrative market" because the percentage of women is alarmingly low in these States because of an unseemly gender bias inherent in the society.

"You can measure the bias from the mushrooming of illegal centres for foetus sex determination centres in these States. The unchecked extermination of the female foetus has created this imbalance in that society," said an official of the West Bengal women traffic resistance committee which has been leading a campaign with help from Action Aid.

According to Home Ministry officials, the crime syndicates have also targeted States such as Assam, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. One report says that there are at least 7000 women, trafficked from Bengal, Assam and Bangladesh, in Haryana's Mewat region comprising Faridabad, Gurgaon and Rewari.

Having rescued a few women from villages in Punjab and Haryana in the past two months, the investigators have stitched up the horror story which shows how the women from simple, unlettered and economically challenged rural families are being trapped and sold like cattle for a price ranging from Rs. 5000 to Rs. 50,000 per head.

"One day he told me to go with him for a stroll in Gangarampur. I saw nothing wrong because we were to get married,'' says Hasina in a statement to the police in Siraj.

His so-called fiancé was actually a cat's paw for one of the syndicates. "We went to a sweetmeat shop where we met his cousin, also known to me. They gave me a sweet which tasted delicious and soon after, I lost consciousness. I could vaguely feel that I was being put in a train, being helped out of it in a station and faint noises around me. When I fully came to my senses, I was in the house of Manjit Kaur in village Mangania of district Mansa(in Punjab). In April, they sold me to Gulam Singh for Rs. 40,000 who abused me all these months."

The statement of Hasina, 22, a resident of village Salsa in Tapan block, has opened the lid on the murky trade that has been going on for the past five years without anyone in the administration or in Delhi becoming wiser about it. It has also led to the rescue of at least three more women from Punjab.Another important finding is that the women are being "sold" to older men for "marriage."

The men who would become so-called husbands, according to reports, are mostly marginal farmers who could not marry in time either because of their social station or lack of economic advantage, but are now in a position to raise a family for which they would not get wives locally because of their advanced age.

Based on these statements, the investigators have drawn, with the help of computer graphics, the pictures of a few suspected masterminds — Rayajuddin alias Raju being one of them — and their agents and are distributing them for identification.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Other States

News: Front Page | National | Southern States | Other States | International | Opinion | Business | Sport | Miscellaneous |
Advts: Classifieds | Employment | Obituary |

Stories in this Section

• Upsurge in militancy on Bengal-Bhutan border
• Growing flesh trade causing concern to Bengal Govt.

Copyright © 2003, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu