Women fall prey to ‘faceless’ agents, end up as slaves
NAWANSHAHR/JALANDHAR: It’s like someone died. But Gurbaksh Kaur — crying intermittently as relatives hug her — insists it’s her second birth. She returned from Saudi Arabia on November 4 after three months of “torture” while working for a family there. She’s crying because the fate of her daughter, Reena, 21, wasn’t known till two days ago. Reena was finally home on Friday.
Reena tried for three years but did not get the required IELTS score. So, she settled for Malaysia. The mother thought of going with her. They were promised ₹18,000 a month each.
IT IS A GROWING MENACE IN PUNJAB WHEREIN WOMEN ARE TAKEN TO SAUDI TO WORK AS MAIDS, AND THEN APPEAR IN VIDEOS ON SOCIAL MEDIA, CRYING OVER SLAVERYLIKE CONDITIONS
FACELESS AGENTS
In July, Gurbaksh and Reena were dropped off at the Delhi airport by the family. An agent they call “Neha madam” was the contact. The mother was flown out first and the daughter three days later — to Saudi Arabia, not Malaysia. “I worked for a family with 15 members, including 10 children. I was the lone servant. They did not consider me human,” says Gurbaksh.
She has since become the face of a growing menace in Punjab wherein women are taken to Saudi Arabia to work as maids, and then appear in videos on social media, crying over slaverylike conditions. The pattern involves a tweet by a political leader and the embassy then locating and deporting them.
An agent in Rahon, 6 km away, Sukha Ram, says Gurbaksh may be speaking the truth, “but a lot of times it is a case of building a rosy picture to match imaginations”.
Police register cases of cheating, but cash transactions and oral agreements mean little material evidence. “We’re working on locating this ‘Neha madam’,” says assistant sub-inspector Shah Ram.
THE NETWORK
“Neha madam” resurfaces in another case 50km away in Jalandhar’s Goraya town, where we meet Lal Chand, a mason-turnedmusician whose wife Sonia Ram Murti, 42, went to Saudi Arabia around the same time, and has now sent a video in which she talks of “inhuman conditions”. She has wired ₹18,000 a month regularly to Lal Chand, though.
Dubai is a favoured route for such trafficking. This was the case with Hoshiarpur’s Rina Rani, 40, whose mother lives in a village 5 km from Chand’s house. She was sent to Dubai on a tourist visa, trafficked to Saudi Arabia a year ago, only to start experiencing slavery-like conditions six months ago.
Her case hit the headlines when her video went viral. In it, she begs Aam Aadmi Party MP Bhagwant Mann for help. “She was brought to the embassy’s deportation centre and her papers are being processed,” says Sukhwinder Singh, a local AAP activist. An estimated 5 lakh maids have gone there from India. There are only six authorised agencies for hiring in India, but none in Punjab.
HEADLINE HUNTERS
There is a credit war too. “I gave the Sonia case to Jalandhar Congress MP Chaudhary Santokh Singh as locals asked me to take his help after Mann helped many,” says Sukhwinder.
Rina’s mother was even approached by a religious seminary to raise money to help her return.
Chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh, too, took to Twitter earlier this week to assure Swaraj that the police have been asked to crack down on dubious agents.