Wife’s kidney sold without her knowing

NEW DELHI — It was about two years ago when Rita Sarkar began to feel a sharp ache in her abdomen. Sarkar, of West Bengal, India, told her husband about the pain, and he took her to a medical facility in Kolkata for treatment.

“They convinced her she needed an operation,” her father said in a phone interview with The Washington Post. Medical staff at the facility told Sarkar that she needed an immediate appendectomy. She underwent surgery the next day.

“My husband warned me not to disclose the surgery in Kolkata to anyone,” Sarkar told the Hindustan Times. They kept her inside her home for several months afterward, her father said. But after the appendectomy, Sarkar’s pain intensified — this time, in her lower back. She pleaded with her husband to take her to see a doctor, but he refused.

Then, about three months ago, relatives of Sarkar’s took her to a local medical center. An ultrasound there uncovered the fact that Sarkar’s right kidney was missing.

“I was shattered,” Sarkar said. In addition, her left kidney was infected, her father told The Post. “She’s still very ill,” he said.

Last Friday, the 28-yearold woman filed a complaint with West Bengal police. And on Monday, police arrested the woman’s husband, Biswajit Sarkar, a cloth merchant from the Murshidabad district, and his brother, Shyamal Sarkar, said Uday Shankar Ghosh, the inspector-in-charge.

The men have been charged with commercially trading human organs and detaining a woman with criminal intent, according to local news outlets. Police say the husband confessed to selling his wife’s kidney to a businessman in the Indian state of Chattisgarh.

Sarkar alleges that her husband sold off her kidney to make up for her family’s failure to meet dowry demands.

According to her father, the couple wed in 2005. At the time, her family gave the groom’s family gold, silver and 180,000 rupees in cash, he said, “but they kept asking for more.”

“He used to say, ‘your father has so many cars, he’s sitting there with so much wealth, look at us, we have nothing,” the father told The Post.

Dowries — the payment from a bride’s family to a groom’s — have been banned in India since 1961. But they persist, and women continue to be abused and even murdered by their husbands and families when dowry demands are not met. Stronger laws were introduced in the 1980s to protect married women from cruelty and battering, but the practice of dowrygiving remains entrenched.