12 May 2014, 06:23 PM IST
On May 2, Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) – an NGO dedicated to fighting child labourers – and the Delhi police raided a residential building that was reported to be a hidden factory using child labourers. I was allowed to accompany the operation. I am not sure what I had expected, but I had somehow unconsciously established an image of a clean operation: enter building, find children in horrible condition, gather them up and herd them to organized waiting vehicles, arrest perpetrators. Boy was I ever wrong.
I was wrong that the children would be waiting for us like wrapped presents, all ready to be saved. I was wrong that the locals would have a sense of morality and help the operation, or at least not impede it. I was wrong that it would be a clean operation.
The caravan of NGO and police cars arrived in a heavily populated residential area in NE Delhi called Nand Nagri, where there was a reported illicit bindi-making factory. I enthusiastically ran behind the police officers as they swarmed the alleyway and banged the doors of an innocuous-looking building, demanding entry. I avidly followed a BBA volunteer as he crashed into the small set of blue-painted rooms like a good old-fashioned Hollywood movie to find… no children. There were conspicuous empty spots surrounding the worktables, with half-assembled bindi packets strewn everywhere that little hands had obviously just abandoned. But no children. Someone had called ahead of time and given the traffickers enough time to hide their child labourers.
That was the first indicator that I was dead wrong with my "I know how this goes" hubris. We jogged desperately to a nearby park immediately after receiving a lead that the children would be there, to find quite a few children. But who were the locals? Who were the labourers? Although we found glitter on the hands of many of them, a sure sign that they had been working at a bindi-factory, they glanced around with furtive eyes, desperate to escape. That was where I realized something I stupidly had not even contemplated: the children didn't want to be rescued.
By then a crowd had gathered, and instead of being passive or helpful they were furious. They aggressively grabbed at the children and yelled "these are local boys!" or "that's my son!" creating a cacophony of noise and jostling bodies. I began to realize that these people must be in on it. You cannot be blind to a child labour factory if you live in the neighborhood. These people were actively, consciously, trying to cover the operation, trying to pull the children away from the police's grasp.
Things were getting dangerous, and we had to make a quick retreat. We were able to hack through the crowd and quickly piled into the cars again, police holding out batons to hold the locals back. As we slowly moved to the main road people banged the side of the cars in protest and yelled. The air was sizzling with closely held-in violence and desperate anger.
Once back to the police station, volunteers started trying to gather the 27 rescued children's information. The older boys had small smirks on their faces, sniggering in the corner. "I live in the area, just went to pick up some milk for my mom when the raid happened" one 14 year old blithely told me. Was he telling the truth? The younger ones started talking quite easily though. One 12-year-old boy from Bihar, Sanjay, had been there for 7 months and worked 13 to 14 hours a day. His parents had received 5,000 rupees for him.
Many of the boys, either from fear or shock, kept denying that they were labourers. BBA founder Kailash Satyarthi explained that it was because the children were told that the police would arrest them and would gauge their eyes out and rip their kidneys from their bodies. What must it be like to live in such fear and uncertainty, when the only stable entity is the men forcing you to work in ungodly situations with no pay?
The mystery of who told the factory beforehand was pretty much solved. A BBA member showed me a number he said was found in the dial history of one of the detained factory employers. It was a police number, and had been received mere minutes before the raid started. No one seemed very surprised that a police officer had allegedly tipped off the operation before the police arrived.
No one seemed surprised that locals had actively tried to pull the child labourers away from the would-be rescuers. No one was surprised that the children were lying that they had been bought from their families to work in small, cramped spaces for 12 to 14 hours a day. I seemed to be the only one utterly bewildered.
According to one friend of mine, everyone's in on it. The police get a cut as long as they allow the operation to continue. The factory helps the local economy in the area, so the people living in the area won't report the child trafficking. The children themselves are convinced that they are the bread-winners of their families, despite the fact that they have no way of knowing if the employers are sending money back home.
No one has given me satisfactory answers to these questions: what is being done to stop this whole operation? Not saving the children, but actually imprisoning the employers.
Who is catching the middle-men responsible of finding desperate rural families willing to sell their children for a meager 5,000 rupees and bringing them to cities?
Who is finding and prosecuting the people running illegal child trafficking rings? Who is prosecuting the corrupt police who allow this to continue?
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