Tuesday, January 28. The huge iron gates of the borstal jail of Baharampore town were shut tight. The crowd grew impatient as the gateman took his time allowing them through the wicket-door after checking their papers: papers that identified them as the parents or legal guardians of 75 girls who had been deported from Saudi Arabia for begging.
Inside the jail, called Silayan, the noise level is the same as that on a school campus at lunch hour. However, here the girls were shouting not for their lunch but for their parents, peering through the iron grills of the corridors on the first floor of the two double-storey buildings. These girls were not lucky enough to go to school, rather they had been schooled in the 'art of begging' by the agents and touts who had taken them to Saudi Arabia.
It was an agonising wait for the parents and guardian. The papers were being hurriedly scrutinised by a team of officials including jail superintendent Sheila Dasgupta and her staff, in the presence of the DIG, CID, Anil Kumar, Murshidabad superintendent of police M.K. Singh, and three members of the Baharampore Juvenile Board.
"We are helpless," said Dasgupta, whose Borstal jail usually housed delinquent boys. It has been cleared of the boys to lodge the 75 girls in the age group of five to 15. 'Any mistake on our part may spell disaster for these hapless girls. We want to be very sure before handing them over that the claimants are really their guardians/parents."
The girls had been picked up from the streets of Mecca. Madina and the Saudi capital Jeddah and jailed by the Saudi police. Two months later, having ascertained their identities, they issued the girls and women emergency papers and put them on flight SV 744 to Mumbai. And New Delhi had not been informed!
The girls and the women arrived at Sahara International Airport on the night of January 13. It was around midnight that assistant police inspector Ghogale noticed the girls loitering about the parking lot of the arrival terminal of the airport. he immediately informed his superiors.

On the arrival of the senior officers of the Sahar Airport police station the girls were rounded up and questioned with the hope of an interpreter. It was then help of an interpreter. It was then that the story of the girls, all of them from villages in predominantly muslim Murshidabad district of West Bengal, unfolded in all its pathos.
But the Mumbai Police, who had sent the girls to four children's homes in the city, left it to the West Bengal Police to piece together the Saudi odyssey. The West Bengal police team returned with the girls by train to Barddhaman and then in two special buses to Silayan in Bharampore, the headquarters of Murshidabad district.
It was a story of exploitation - by touts, uncles and parents. If the touts did it for personal gain, the relatives and parents sent even their disabled children to beg so that other mouths in the family could be fed. In fact, the worse the disability the better the price they fetched for their parents.
"TAHAMINA is good-looking and in Saudi Arabia rich people donate generously to poor fair-looking girls." It was a bait that Ziarul Huq, 24, knew Tahamina Khatoon's father Montu would swallow. After all Ziarul was his nephew and his father Hazi Idrish Seikh was a respected man of Sajadpur village.
Indeed, Montu, a daily wage labourer, saw Ziarul's request as the silver lining in the proverbial dark cloud. He had six mouths to feed, including two sons and two daughters, and his only possession was a small mud hut in the village which is 15 km from Baharampore. Here was an opportunity to make some money by sending his nine-year-old daughter on the 'pilgrimage'. Alms giving is a popular practice at holy places and the children usually reap a rich harvest.
Ziarul had promised him Rs 20,000 after one trip to Saudi Arabia, besides a gold chain for his wife Nazira Bibi and six gold coins for Tahamina for her marriage. He even gave Montu Rs 1,000 as advance. Zialrul owned five acres and would not cheat him, reasoned Montu, and sent Tahamin with him.
Tahamina remembers being taken to Calcutta, then Mumbai and from there to Jeddah. To her surprise, Jeddah was swarming with girls like her, all from Murshidabad, a few even from Sajadpur.
More surprises followed in the form of two frocks, a pair of shorts and a clean bed, things he could not even have dreamt of getting. Twice a day she got rice or roti with meat, a glass of milk and some fruit.
In return for all this, shehad to get up at the first call of Azan (call to prayer) and stand before the nearest mosque with a bowl in hand. She had to beg until her own shadow grew smaller and finally 'disappeared'. Her duty got over at noon when another call of Azan blared over the public address system.
Ziarul would collect the earnings, cash or kind, from Tahamina and three other girls, all of whom worked for him. The children usually collected around 40 rials (one rial is Rs 10) daily besides gold coins and chains.
Tahamina has no idea how many months she was in Saudi Arabis but is sure that she was sent back from Jeddah. She is also firm that she faced no sexual harassment or physical assault.
Neither Montu nor the other villagers know the whereabouts of Ziarul and his father. According to some, they are still Saudi Arabia. Ziarul has not been seen in Sajadpur since last February when he left for Jeddah.
In Sajadpur itself there are half a dozen Ziaruls, said a panchayat member. Most notorious among them are Ali Felu and Muzammal Huq. Ali Felu owns about 15. They arrange for the passports and visas of the girls and passage money too.
The panchayat dare not touch them because of their "money and muslce power" , said a panchayat member. "If anybody dares opposed them, they simply kill them. The police and political leaders are in their pockets."
If some leading citizens of Baharampore are to be believed, a huge amount of money has been pumped into this business by a section of government officials and businessmen of the town.
"Just by investing Rs 1lakh one can expect to get a return of Rs 1.6 lakh within three months, " said a police inspector of the district. "Can anyone expect such huge returns in such huge returns in such a short time in any other business?"
How are the police to end the trade? Only four cases have been registered so far, none of the touts is in Murshidabad and in most cases the girls had been sent with their parents' consent. But Superintendent of Police M.K. Singh is confident of bringing the racketeers to book. Anil Kumar, DIG, CID, is far more cautious. "We'll follow the leads and expedite the case," he said but refused to stipulate a time frame.

THE LEADS in many cases stop at the doorsteps of the victims' houses. For instance, it was not an agent or tout who took Arjina Khatoon, 9, of Sajadpur to Jeddah. Said her mother Chopia Bibi: "She had gone to Saudi Arabia with her father last August for Urma (pilgrimage during the non-Haj period)." Chopia had come with her youngest son, who is handicapped, to Silayan to take Arjina. She is worried about her husband, a landless labourer, who has not returned.
With five small children Chopia has no clue how to run the family.
" I have no hestitation in admitting to you that I would have been more delighted if instead of Arjina her father had come back," she told THE WEEK. "After all from the very look of my daughter it is obvious that at least she used to get two square meals a day there. Now where will I get food for her?"
Pravin Khatoon, 12, is luckier. Her father, Seikh Sahanahan, cares for her; he has filed a kidnap case against two persons who took her away. Sahajahan, 60, had long believed that Pravin died of small pox some years ago. That is what he was told by the two touts who took her away, Saifuddin Seikh and Moslem Seikh, a grocer.
"Actually they wanted one of my sons Rafiq," said Sahajahan, who is a marginal farmer of Tiktikipara and has four daughters and two sons. "But I refused."
The duo then allegedly kidnapped Pravin one day when Sahahahan was in the fields. This happened four years ago and he did not complain to the police fearing harm to his family.
A year later during a chance meeting with Saifuddin he inquired about the whereabouts of his daughter but was told that she had died of small pox, a disease that has been wiped out from the face of the earth!
While Sahajahan has filed a case, the police are not very hopeful. They pointed out that when things got hot for the touts they crossed the international border, to Bangladesh.
IT IS rare for the touts or agents to be in trouble. In fact they are more often than not seen as saviours by the poverty-stricken families. Sadek Seikh of Rani Nagar is one such person. Every year he goes for Haj and parents consider it a blessing if he takes a fancy to their daughters.
Ejamuddin Seikh's happiness knew no bounds when Sadek's attention fell on his six-year-old daughter Erna.
"For about an hour he saw my daughter from every possible angle and then agreed to pay Rs 6,000, six gold coins and a gold necklace," he said. Before leaving for Haj in February last year along with Erna, Sadek paid Ejamuddin Rs 2,500.
But now the 32-year-old farmer of Mokrampur village is ruing his fate because his daughter has come back before the expiry of the contract. "I don't think Sadek Seikh will pay me the rest of the promised amount," he told THE WEEK.
Erna is a cripple; her right leg had been amputated when she was just two years old. Perhaps in Sadek's estimation a crippled child was more effective as a beggar than a normal child.
Now Ejamuddin is worried about Erna's future. In his view, if ultimately she had to beg for a living Saudi Arabia was a far better place than Murshidabad.
Not for little Erna such worries. She is happy to return to her family. "I used to go to school before I left for Arabia last year," she told THE WEEK. "I'll go to school again."

Of the 75 girls who were deported 14 were congenitally crippled and five had sustained burns whey they were in India. A team of two doctors and two nurses who examined the girls at Silayan confirmed this and the Borstal jail superintendent Shela Dasgupta added that none of them had to face any sexual harassment in Saudi Arabia. "Besides the medical examination, I personally checked with all the girls," she said.
According to Dasgupta, almost all the girls arrived in good health expect for 10 who appeared to be underweight for their age. Obviously, food was no problem for the girls, as long as they did their bit of begging.
But life was not easy for the girls. They had to beg well or the Indian touts tortured them, said Anjali Banerjee, wife of Left Front minister Debabrata Banerjee, and Prof Sujata De Basu, both members of the Juvenile Welfare Board, who spoke to the girls in the Borstal jail. They said the girls showed them how they were trained to beg.
In alms the girls used to get gold coins, chains and money. But all these were taken away by the agents.
"Only a few older girls were able to hide some money from the touts and bring it," said the two welfare board members.
They were emphatic that "this is nothing new in Murshidabad". "We know of at least two earlier incidents when teenaged boys, who were taken to Saudi Arabia for begging, had been caught and sent back by the Mumbai Police," they said. "In one batch there were three boys and both hands of one boy had been amputated."
A WELL-ORGANISED chain of command controlled from Saudi Arbia is obviously operating, mainly in extremely poor areas like Murshidabad. The links are well established through agents in Mumbai who take care of the children till they board the flight to Jeddah. In Jeddah the main operators take charge.
The Mumbai Police were close to cracking one link in this chain when 47 boys landed from Jeddah soon after they had packed off the girls. The boys, housed at the remand home in Mankhurd, were tightlipped most of the time and when they did speak, it was only half-truths or lies. They told the police and themembers of the juvenile welfare board in Mumbai that they had stayed in a house in Wadala before they were taken to Jeddah.
"We have asked them to identify the house," said Vijayalakshmi Pandit, chairperson of the juvenile welfare board, but even after repeated questioning they would not reveal any names.
All the boys, aged between 6 and 16, were from Murshidabad and 32 of them had some handicap or other like club foot, stumps instead of arms and feet, deformed chest or compressed neck. A couple of them seemed to be mentally retarded.
All the boys were impatient to go home. They were waiting to hear the verdict of the juvenile court at the children's remand home in Dongri.
"We know how to reach home," said Mohammed Ujir, 12. "I'll take a taxi to the station, catch a train, them a bus...." His face fell when he was asked where he would get the money from.
Ujir does not have any deformity and, being fluent in Hindi, he acted as the interpreter between the other Bengali-speaking boys and the members of the juvenile welfare board. "I went to Mecca a year ago with my father," he said. He was caught because he did not have a card and sent back to India. "I stayed alone in Mecca and earned around 15 rials a day by selling zam-zam (holy) water. His smile disappeared when he recalled the days he spent in a Jeddah jail. "They beat us very badly with sticks. We were not given proper food," he mumbled.
Some of the kids appeared disoriented. Main India ja raha joon (I am going to India), they told the welfare board officers. They didn't even know which country they were in. Almost all the boys raised their hands when asked how many went for Haj. Some of them insisted that hey had gone with their mother or father.
"My ammi took me for Haj. She carried me for some time and then took me in a chair." said Qurban Ali, who walks with slippers on the palms of his hands. He seemed to be the leader of the group and the boys shut up when he told hem to. he did not wear the green shirt that the other boys wore.
"We were kept in Mecca jail for two months and then in Jeddah jail for 20 days," he said. 'We started shouting that we want to go home. We made a lot of noise and were beaten up badly. Only then the Jeddah police sent us here."

"This is not really a racket, it is a business investment," said Bashir Pirzada, the proprietor of Pirzada Tours of Mumbai, who conducts package Haj tours. "A person invests around Rs 5 lakh to take these children for begging in Mecca and Medina and then tries to make a profit. But he may even lose money. This 'business' has been going on for at least 20 years."
He explained that it was difficult for children, particularly girls, to go alone to Saudi. They had to be accompanied by their parents or mehram (guardian). In Islamic law, girls cannot be taken by any relative she could get married to them. The mehram has to sign an affidavit confirming the relationship. Obviously, these laws are routinely circumvented.
Sometimes parents take their children along when going for Haj, of course at the expense of the agents. On reaching Mecca, the children are sent to beg while the parents make a living by working as cooks in the lodges and smaller hotels in Mecca and Medina.
"When I went for Haj some years back I had the same experience", said Pirzada. "Some Bengali-speaking Indians offered to cook for us." During Haj many people do not like to eat hotel rooms and cook. Also, women are not permitted in hotels in Saudi Arabia.
"There are 70 more boys in jail. They are also waiting to come back," said one of the handicapped boys. One can expect the exodus of poor handicapped boys and girls to continue in batches.
APPARENTLY, poverty is driving the people of murshidabad to acquiesce in the export of children. And in the tussle between poverty and parental love, poverty has won. But the Murshidabad CPI(M) district committee secretary, Madhu Bag, blames greed rather than poverty for the large-scale trade in humans. "Taking advantage of the greed of the parents, the touts offer money and gold to clinch the deal," he said.
Lawyer Loharam Roy of Murshidabad put it down to poverty fueled by a rising poulation in the Muslim-dominated district. With the side of land holdings shrinking, the worst affected, according to him, are the small and marginal farmers. besides, the pull of Mecca and medina is always there. Beggars, apparently, can be choosers too.

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