BANGLADESH: Dreams – and Hunger – Drive Trafficking into India

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Anindita Dasgupta

DHAKA, Dec 9 2003 (IPS) - Thirty-year-old Safia Begum, a domestic worker at a high-rise apartment in the upwardly mobile Gulshan enclave of the Bangladeshi capital, has a little secret.
Till last year, she had been a prostitute in a small border town of India for as little as five rupees, or 16 U.S. cents.

Thirty-year-old Safia Begum, a domestic worker at a high-rise apartment in the upwardly mobile Gulshan enclave of the Bangladeshi capital, has a little secret.

Till last year, she had been a prostitute in a small border town of India for as little as five rupees, or 16 U.S. cents.

She has a long cut mark on her left arm where a client had hit her with a rod when she had suggested that he use condoms. She has also nearly lost sight in one eye where a drunken client had hit her with the broken end of a beer bottle.

Safia Begum rarely used a condom in her 12 years as a prostitute in India. Even the cheapest condom sold for two rupees (seven cents) was too big an overhead for a desperate business by desperate Bangladeshi women smuggled across the Indian border by traffickers, robbed of their money and left to fend for themselves in an alien land.

She was only 18 years old when she was trafficked into India by her father’s younger sister, Hamida Bua, on the pretext of getting her a good job in the north Bangladeshi border district of Kurigram. Unknown to her, Safia had changed hands several times over and was finally sold to a flesh trader across the border.

In course of one single night, Safia had become an illegal entrant into India’s north-eastern state of Assam, just a stone’s throw from Hamida Bua’s home in Kurigram.

Safia’s is not a unique story. At least 50 such Safia Begums are lured and sold across the border everyday in Bangladesh with false offers of lucrative employment or marriage without dowry. The local touts, commonly women, are relatively familiar with targets and in many cases, even family members, neighbours or ‘fake husbands’.

Much of the trafficking is, in fact, carried out with the unknowing consent of the trafficked person herself, who believes that there is a job or a husband at the end of the line. Some are thrust into prostitution, others into pornography, sale of organs, or forced beggary through use of violence, threat of violence, or drugs.

With a low average per capita income of 225 U.S. dollars and a massive labour surplus, Bangladesh is one of the largest migrant-exporting countries in Asia.

Migration to the West and migrant for work in the Middle East and South-east Asia are crucial poverty alleviation strategies for Bangladesh, as the value of migrants’ remittances is 30 percent or more of the country’s national savings. There is also considerable irregular migration into adjacent India, mostly illegal, and undertaken with the help of middlemen in collusion with law enforcement agencies on both sides.

The most extreme form of this irregular migration is trafficking, particularly in women and children with dreams in their eyes and hunger in their stomachs. Many would have not been eating more than one meal a day back at the home village.

"Sometimes we did not eat any food during the whole day. I thought if I worked, everybody could eat two meals a day,” says 40-year-old Noor Banu by way of explanation, as she squatted and mopped the white marble floor of her master’s living room. "That was how I fell into this trap."

"Extreme poverty, land fragmentation, floods, cyclones, landlessness and demand for dowry are among the reasons that push out both men and women of their ancestral homes to journey into the unknown," says Uttam Kumar Das, assistant professor of law at the Dhaka campus of Queens University, who did his doctoral dissertation on women trafficking in South Asia.

The luckier ones, he says, manage to get regular jobs in garment factories or other industries inside Bangladesh, while many others become unwitting victims of trafficking to India or Pakistan.

India shares 4,222 kilometres of border with 28 districts of Bangladesh, most of it open and have rivers running across. Thus, Bangladeshi touts build up powerful bases in the border districts of India in West Bengal and Assam, to the north and west, and these are now favourite transit points of trafficked women.

Once in the hands of the procurers, the women are controlled through threats of violence and solitary confinement. Some hotels or even godowns are used to keep the women brought in from different parts of the country through land or river routes. Later, they are smuggled out across the border.

The ones that are trafficked by organised syndicates usually end up in the brothels of Kolkata or Mumbai in India or even as far south as Karachi in Pakistan. Those traded by unorganised traffickers are sold just across the border for petty sums.

Prices vary according to age, ‘beauty’, skin colour and virginity. According to a recently concluded study, the highest known price for a Bangladeshi woman reported from the Pakistani city of Karachi’s ‘human bazaar’ was 4,700 U.S. dollars.

The female touts earn about 10,000 to 50,000 takas (167 to 834 dollars) for each victim while the traffickers earn anything from 50,000 to 500,000 takas (167 to 8,334 dollars) after sales. For many of these women, the first sexual assaults begin with the traffickers as well as border security personnel on either side of the border. Once across into India, clueless and penniless, most trafficked women have no option but to sell their bodies. The girls and women are made to entertain clients ranging from five to 20 a day. It does not take long for them to develop various sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV/AIDS.

Safia had to entertain about 12 customers in a 24-hour period. Often, she would have to provide different kinds of sex several times a day, besides normal sexual intercourse.

For her part, Ruma Bibi had to swallow a pill – which made her bleed for seven days – to get rid of her first unwanted pregnancy. The second time, she said, she just pushed a sharp bamboo stick inside and the baby was gone. "One of the girls in our house died while doing thatà"

These women were repeatedly threatened by their bosses that they would be handed over to the Assam police on charges of being illegal immigrants if they failed to cooperate.

For Safia and many others like her, the choice was between a jail term and prostitution. They chose prostitution and hoped that someday they would be able to go back home.

The trafficking of women across into border towns of India forms one part of the larger issue of migration of Bangladeshis into India, something that is not officially acknowledged by the Dhaka government or discussed in polite society at the capital.

Even though there is an official ban on migration of unskilled women from Bangladesh, this is honoured in its flouting. Given its sluggish economy and inability to open up job opportunities at home, Bangladesh does not have the capacity to re-absorb its own repatriated peoples.

The Indian government conveniently overlooks the great demand that exists within its own borders for cheap labour from overpopulated and labour-surplus Bangladesh, and treats all border crossers as undocumented immigrants to be pushed back unceremoniously.

Safia Begum, Ruma Bibi and Noor Banu were among the lucky few who managed to save a little money with which to bribe their way back into Bangladesh. But upon their return, the women found that their families did not want to take them in. The fear of scandal overcame love of a sister, daughter or cousin.

Today the only homes they know are these beautiful apartments of Dhaka’s newly affluent, where they cook and wash, clean and mop and try to forget those fearful memories. But all three hope that someday, their families will take them back.