![Women walk in a village in Indian-administered Kashmir. Women here are often lured into unsuitable marriages by the promise of a job. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS](https://static.globalissues.org/ips/2023/09/Women-walk-in-a-village-in-Indian-Administered-Kashmir__-Photo-by-Athar-Parvaiz_IPS-629x472.jpg)
BUDGAM, INDIA, Sep 13 (IPS) – It’s been more than a decade since 32-year-old Rafiqa (not her real name) was sold to a villager after being lured by the promise of working in the handicraft industry of Het Indian-administered Kashmir.
But instead of getting a job, she was sold for a paltry sum of 50,000 Indian rupees ($605) to a Kashmiri man in central Kashmir’s Budgam district. Before the traffickers lured her, Rafiqa lived with her parents and three siblings in a poor Muslim family in West Bengal, a state in eastern India.
Ranging from Rohingya refugees – there are an estimated 40,000 Rohingya refugees in India – to women in other states of the country such as West Bengal and Assam, women are trafficked and sold as brides to men who find it difficult to fit within their communities to find a bride. . These grooms often include the elderly, the physically challenged and men with mental health problems.
Rafiqa’s husband, who drives a horse-drawn cart for a living and lives in a one-room wooden shed, had to sell the only cow he owned to pay the amount to the traffickers.
She has now come to terms with ‘what I was meant to do in my life’. Embracing reality, she says, was the only option left to her.
“I could have tried to escape or taken an extreme step, but I decided to commit myself in a positive way to make some kind of life out of what I ended up with,” Rafiqa tells IPS as he walks to of the small wooden stairs. her house. “My husband’s simplicity and friendly nature also helped me make this decision – even though I didn’t like his appearance.”
“Now I have three children for whom I have to live,” Rafiqa said. “I miss my parents and brothers and sisters. But it is very difficult to visit them. Even if I convince my husband, we cannot afford to visit them as it costs a lot of money to pay for the trip,” she added, saying her husband can hardly provide two square meals for the family.
Rafiqa is not the only trafficked woman in that village. Well over a dozen women eventually married under similar circumstances. Elsewhere in the region, hundreds of other women from the Indian states of West Bengal and Assam have married divorced and physically disabled men.
When 23-year-old Zarina (name changed), a woman from a poor family in West Bengal, became ensnared by a human trafficker, she had no idea that she would end up marrying a man she had never met. double her age. Zarina also fell for the false promise that a job would be arranged for her in a carpet manufacturing unit in north Kashmir’s Patan region. But to her horror, she was sold into marriage.
“How will my situation change after talking to you if it hasn’t changed in the past five years? This is where I have to be all my life,” says an irritated Zarina, but refuses to elaborate.
Some women who encounter human traffickers are much more unlucky. In a village in south Kashmir’s Anantnag district, a young Rohingya woman was sold by traffickers to a family for their son with mental health problems after she was trafficked from a makeshift Rohingya refugee camp in neighboring Jammu province.
“We were surprised to find that the family had a bride for their son, who we had known since childhood was mentally unsound,” said a neighbor of the family. “We heard her scream as her husband beat her almost every day. But fortunately for her, the young Rohingya woman was somehow able to escape after a few months.”
There are no accurate official figures on brides sold, but some estimates say that thousands of girls and women are sold each year. The media sometimes reports on the arrest of human traffickers, but such reports are not very common.
On July 26, India’s Minister of State for Home Affairs Ajay Kumar Mishra told the Indian Parliament that between 2019 and 2021, 1,061,648 women above the age of 18 and 251,430 girls below the age of 18 have gone missing from various states in the country.
However, Mishra said that most of the victims have been found and added that the Indian government has taken several initiatives for the safety of women.
Last April, India’s National Commission for Women launched an anti-trafficking cell “to improve effectiveness in tackling cases of human trafficking, raising awareness among women and girls, capacity building and training of anti-trafficking units, and to the responsiveness of law enforcement agencies.”
In its Trafficking in Persons Report 2023, the US Department of State identifies India as a Tier 2 country.
“The Government of India is not fully meeting the minimum standards for eliminating human trafficking, but is making significant efforts to do so. The government has made overall increasing efforts compared to the previous reporting period, taking into account the possible impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its capacity to counter trafficking in human beings; therefore, India remained at Level 2,” the report said.
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© Inter Press Service (2023) — All rights reservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service