A victim or a perpetuator
According to a web based news and information source, at least 50 girls and women are lured and sold across the border everyday in Bangladesh, with false offers of employment or marriage without dowry, by local touts, family members etc.
IF YOU find someone has entered a foreign country without valid travel documents, the thing to do is to report them to the police who then arrest them. Then they are charged as illegal immigrants and sent to police custody for trial under the Foreigners’ Act. There they may languish for years if unlucky. Or the other option is that they just get deported back to their home country in ignominy and disgrace. That is the way, it should be, right? After all, we have a population of a billion plus to feed and why add extra mouths along the way? We all have assumptions, particularly about migrants from a particular country and faith – they are here to subvert the economy or the state or probably both and in the current socio-political climate these theories can get amplified. But are conjectures like these always valid.
Suppose that the person in question is a woman who has been lured into the country, even kidnapped perhaps and not even aware of where exactly she is going? She is brought into the country, often not even knowing where she is going, what she is going to do and how much she is going to earn. But once in India, something goes wrong, the police get her and she is in a jam. The question now is whether such a person is a criminal who ought to be jailed or a victim of a criminal conspiracy who ought to be treated with compassion and sent back to her homeland? This is partly a human rights question, partly a political parley and partly a police –judicial issue.
According to a web based news and information source, at least 50 girls and women are lured and sold across the border everyday in Bangladesh, with false offers of employment or marriage without dowry, by local touts, family members, neighbours or even 'fake husbands'. The middlemen are usually in connivance with law enforcement agencies on both sides. A lot of the trafficking is carried out without the consent of the trafficked person. These girls/women are thrust into prostitution or the pornography racket, while some are coerced into selling their organs and beggary.
Clearly there is a need to differentiate between different categories of people here. Touts, middle men and traffickers should not be treated and classified the same as the people they kidnap and victimise but law enforcement agencies often do. Because the migration of people from Bangladesh into India has long been politicised, no one now takes the trouble to recognise that people who are trafficked into the country are a sub se that forms part of the larger issue of the migration of Bangladeshis into this country. This is something that is not usually acknowledged by the Dhaka government or discussed by mainstream society in Delhi who lump everyone together in one and the same boat.
In the absence of any identity documents, many of the victims of trafficking are de facto stateless citizens with the Indian government declaring them aliens and the Bangladesh government often also taking time to verify their identity as none of them possess a passport or any other kind of travel document. Whether they languish in jail or the relative leniency of the government home, largely depends on whether they have been booked as illegal migrants under the Foreigners’ Act or as victims of trafficking deserving of humanitarian aid. But in the backdrop of the amount of money involved in human trafficking – some say in excess of two million dollars per year, the lieu between perpetuator and victim is often blurred.
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