An Unholy Pilgrimage

OR 12-year-old Bilkis Khatun, it was business as usual during the Haj season on the scorched streets of Mecca last month. Three times a day, the cheerful girl from West Bengal’s Murshidabad district would slip into a burkha and mingle with the milling crowds of pilgrims. Then the handicapped girl would roam around the mosques, accost pilgrims chanting

"Haji baba, shukur alla

h," (God bless, Haji baba), and stretch out her gnarled hands for alms.

But this time the unexpected happened: the police came and picked up Bilkis and her friends begging near a mosque and put them on a flight to Mumbai. And this massive clean-up operation by the Saudi Arabian police during Ramzan has blown the lid off one of the most shocking rackets in recent times: girls from poor families ensnared into professional begging by touts after being promised a Haj trip to Islam’s holy city. When 76 such girls, aged between five and 15, were found wandering at Mumbai’s Sahar airport on the night of January 13 after alighting from a Saudia Airlines flight, the horr i fic dimensions of this human tragedy began emerging. Last fortnight, the girls, who hail from Murshidabad in West Bengal and some of whom are handicapped, were reunited with their parents at an after- care home for girls in Berhampore .

Investigations reveal a familiar modus operandi by unscrupulous neighbours and relatives in spiriting away girls after selling them  dreams of a holy journey. In Bilkis’ case, for example, a

chacha

(uncle) would emerge out of nowhere in her native Sahajadpur village every year before the Haj season, promise the family a decent payoff— anything between Rs 2,000 and Rs 50,000— in return for taking their daughter, getting her a passport and flying her into Jeddah, the administrative capital of Saudi Arabia.

For three months on end, Bilkis and her ilk would beg during the day and retire to their shelters near different mosques to hand over their pickings to her

chach

a. "We had hundreds of children like us from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Burma begging on the streets there," she says. In fact, Bilkis went through this back-breaking routine of begging off the streets in an alien land for three Haj seasons. "We used to beg freely earlier without any problems. Now things have worsened for us, and arrests are being made. It’s not worth begging in Mecca now," she says. More than six lakh Muslims from 60 countries congregate every year at Mecca, the Prophet’s birthplace, during Haj. Naturally, for professional beggars like Bilkis, the pickings are handsome. "I used to collect at least Rs 3,000 a month in rials (the Saudi Arabian currency; one rial equals Rs 10), apart from the occasional gold ring, chain or necklace," says Bilkis.

Girls from Murshidabad, one of West Bengal’s poorest districts, are easy prey for touts. Some 65 per cent of the 47 lakh people of this primarily agricultural district comprise Muslims. Only 30 per cent of the population is productively employed in cultivation, agricultural labour or household work. And Murshidabad’s 125-km porous border with Bangladesh— 84 km of this is actually riverine— makes it an infiltrators’ paradise. The district’s population growth rate between 1981 and 1991 was an alarming 28.04 per cent, way above West Bengal’s average of 24.55 per cent— and demographers attribute this to unchecked infiltration from neighbouring Bangladesh.

The upshot of this is grinding povert y, spiralling crime and the lure of easy money for the poor. Says District Police Superintendent M.K. Singh: "The easy money culture has caught on here. This is reflected in the fact that many of the parents knew that their daughters were being taken away for begging. But the promise of the payoff made them consent."

But touts never honoured the promised payoffs. Ziauddin Sheikh, a marginal farmer from Loknathpur village, gave away his 10-year-old daughter Sanwara after he was promised Rs 7,000. He finally got nothing, but lost Sanwara to a tout for three months. His neighbour Abdul Karim was promised Rs 10,000 for his nine-year-old Lalbani, but the tout gave him an ‘advance’ of Rs 2,000 and vanished with the girl. Shafatullah from Sahajadpur was promised Rs 5,000 for his daughters, Rahima and Shajera, but had to be content with Rs 1,800 instead. "What to do? We are so poor that we have to be satisfied with what we get," shrugs Abdul Karim.

Clearly, the parents’ consent in the majority of the cases is hindering investigations from getting to the bottom of the racket involving village touts, shadowy travel agencies who arrange for fake passports and immigration officials at international airports who do not bat an eyelid as young girls with dubious attendants in tow leave the country. Says Masoodal Hossain, CPI(M) MP from Murshidabad and member of the West Bengal Haj Committee: "What bothers me is how the touts manage to get the passport of these girls done. I believe that their passports have been issued from Assam and Bihar and a section of the police might be involved."

Hossain is not off the mark. Passports were not found on the girls as they had to keep them with their tout

chachas

in Mecca. And since none of the touts have been caught or deported from Saudi Arabia, firm leads are not available. But what is clear is that none of these girls travelled on special Haj passports which are not given to children aged between two and 14 years. "Our investigations reveal that the touts have contacts in Mumbai, Guwahati and Patna to arrange for these passports," says a senior Criminal Investigation Department (C I D) officer.

Immigration officials insist that it is impossible to check the antecedents of every Haj-bound passenger during the rush. But the figures don't look very daunting: against a quota of 3,000 Haj pilgrims for West Bengal, only 2,700 pilgrims boarded flights from Calcutta last year. Of this, only 1,300 pilgrims were from West Bengal, the rest being from neighbouring states.

CLEARLY, immigration checks were shamefully lax when it came to checking records of these Haj-bound girls and their ‘attendants’. Some 14 of the 76 girls deported from Jeddah were congenitally handicapped and "should have made the immigration officials suspicious when they were leaving the country", notes the CID officer. Surprisingly, the West Bengal government had information that 60 deformed people with ‘attendants’ boarded Gulf bound flights from Calcutta during the Haj season last year, but did not follow up on the lead.

"We did not know that such a thing was happening in West Bengal," says state Social Welfare Minister Anju Kar. But Ipsita Gupta, Berhampore -based chairperson of the Juvenile Welfare Board, says the Board had received reports of ‘stray’ cases of such professional beggars in the past. "Once we got a deformed boy who told us that he was forced to beg in Saudi Arabia. But this is the first time the lid has been blown off the racket in a big way. The inflow of filthy lucre from the Gulf is altering the character of many villages in Murshidabad. There are a host of rackets on, including girl-running," says Gupta.

Meanwhile, Bilkis and her friends began returning home from the Shilayan, a derelict 200-bed facility for girls in Berhampore, where they stayed for a week. "They are a precocious bunch. Otherwise, they are pretty normal, singing songs and playing games most of the time," says home superintendent Shila Dasgupta.

But when they spot their parents in the compounds below, all hell breaks loose. In tatty skirts, embroidered salwar kameez and frayed ‘Rambo’ jeans, the sad-looking girls line up along the dusty sunwashed verandah and peer from behind the grilles trying to spot their parents desperately.

"Bap esheche, bap eshech

e" (Father’s come, father’s come), they wail in unison. "Once you are back home, you want to get back to your parents, not rot in some place like this," says an agitated 11-year-old Tanuja Khatun.

For the district administration, the biggest challenge is to ensure that girls like Tanuja and Bilkis do not return to begging again. For the moment, the police has managed to record four complaints against touts from reluctant parents. Five people have been detained from villages around Berhampore. And a raid on the house of a wealthy 42-year-old Kandi resident and a frequent Hajgoer unearthed 50-odd passport size photographs of girls and boys. "This is the best lead we have till now," admits a district police official .

There may be more in the near future. According to reports from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia will be sending another batch of 46 Indian children staying illegally in the oil rich kingdom and begging in holy places. Chances are that most of these children hail from Murshidabad too. Clearly, the Marxist government needs to do much more than the usual investigations and homilies about the effect of poverty to stop such unholy trips to the holiest of lands.