Trafficking first link: the cellphone

TT UTTAM DUTTA The disappearance and the rescue of a minor girl has laid bare the modus operandi of a trafficking racket that operates for men in a bride-starved area in Haryana. And the main tool in the hands of the racketeers is the mobile phone. A 17-year-old girl who had disappeared from Khanakul in Hooghly in August was rescued from Haryana a month later. A woman arrested for trafficking her told police that she used to keep young men on her payroll who would call up girls and develop friendship with them. The men would promise to marry the gullible girls who would be asked to leave their homes and reach Delhi. 

 The trafficked girl, a resident of West Midnapore, lived with the family of her maternal uncle at Khanakul and was studying in Class XI. On August 27, she went out for private tuitions and didn’t return. Two months before her disappearance, she started to get calls on her cellphone from an unknown man. She ignored the calls at first, but began to talk to him later. Gradually, she grew to like the caller. The day after her disappearance, the girl’s family lodged a missing person diary with Khanakul police station.

 A case of abduction was filed against unknown persons on September 10. The police tracked down two phone numbers from where the girl got calls frequently. “We could locate a place in Delhi from where one call was made and the same number could be traced to Howrah on the day the girl went missing. We sent a team to Delhi,” says Suman Roychowdhury, the officer in charge of Khanakul police station. The team caught a woman, Fatima Sheikh, in west Delhi. 

The phone number belonged to her. Fatima led the police to Ajay Sarwa, a marble mason, at Sonepat in Haryana. Fatima, now lodged in Arambagh jail, had sold the girl to him for Rs 47,000. The arrested woman used to run a tea stall in Delhi and it was a front for her activities. The men who were a part of the racket would dial numbers randomly. If a young girl answered the call, they would try to start a conversation with her and then a “relationship” on the phone. The girl would be promised marriage and would be asked to reach Delhi, where she would be sold to one of Fatima’s clients in Sonepat, Haryana. 

 According to the 2011 census, Haryana had the sex ratio of 879 females per 1,000 males — one of the lowest in the country. The trafficked girl told the police that a youth called Raju Saha had got in touch with her over phone and she fell in love with him. The youth told her that he would marry her, for which she would have to come to Delhi. He would meet her at Howrah station. 

Later, he told her his grandmother would meet her. Fatima met the girl and introduced herself as Raju’s grandmother. In Delhi, the girl was locked up for seven days and then sold to the mason. She told the police she was raped repeatedly by Raju and his brother. Fatima has been charged with trafficking a minor. Raju was arrested from Krishnagar on October 5. The police said his real name was Raju Sheikh.