Slavery In Modern India

The Price Of Being A Woman:
Slavery In Modern India

By Justin Huggler

04 April 2006
The Independent

In the villages of Haryana, just outside Delhi, abortions of baby girls have become so common that the shortage of women is severe. Unable to find wives locally, the men have resorted to buying women from the poorer parts of India. Just 25 miles from the glitzy new shopping malls and apartment complexes of Delhi is a slave market for women.

Last week, an Indian doctor became the first to be jailed for telling a woman the sex of her unborn baby. India is trying to stamp out the practice of female foeticide. But in the villages of Haryana, the damage has already been done. Indian parents want boys because girls are seen as a heavy financial burden: the parents have to provide an expensive dowry for their weddings, while sons will bring money into the family when they marry, and have better job prospects.

But in Haryana, so many female foetuses have been aborted that there aren't enough women for the men to marry. The result is a thriving market in women, known in local slang as baros, who have been bought from poorer parts of India. Anyone in the villages can tell you the going rates. The price ranges from 3,000 rupees (£40) to 30,000 rupees for a particularly beautiful woman. Skin colour and age are important pricing criteria. So is whether the woman is a virgin.

When the police arrested Tripla's husband, he could not provide a marriage certificate. Generally, there is no real marriage. The women are sexual "brides" only. Sometimes, brothers who cannot afford more share one woman between them. Often, men who think they have got a good deal on a particularly beautiful bride will sell her at a profit.

Munnia was sold when she was only 17. Considered particularly beautiful, she was resold three times in the space of a few weeks. Like Tripla, she came from Jharkhand, but she was lucky: she escaped. Today she is in a government shelter for women. As she tells her story, she breaks down in tears several times.

"My father sold me to a man called Dharma," she says. "I don't know if he paid for me or not. I came to Delhi with my mother on the train, and then Dharma took me to his village. He used to beat me very badly. He used to hit me until I allowed him to sleep with me. Usually it went on for half an hour."

She was with Dharma just 20 days before he sold her. Her route criss-crossed northern India: Dharam took her to his home in Rajasthan, before selling her to a man in Haryana. "He told me: 'I have sold you to a man for 30,000 rupees'," she says. "But when we got there I realised that man wanted to sell me on as well. Then I ran away."

She found a social worker who helped her escape. In that she was fortunate: few of the women who run away from the villages where she was make it out alive. Government medical tests found she had been raped by two men. She was only 17 at the time, and the age of consent in India is 18.

"My father told me Dharma would marry me, but the marriage never took place," she says, blinking in the sun. She is deeply traumatised by her experiences; all the time she speaks, her hands play nervously with her shawl. When we ask if she wants to go home, she says: "I don't know anything. I have no will and no hope in this world."

She is the lucky one, all the same. In the villages she escaped from, hundreds of women are trapped in similar slave marriages. The village of Ghasera is a world away from nearby Delhi. It is still walled, like a fortress from centuries ago, and you enter through a narrow gateway. The roads are dirt and the houses ramshackle huts: It is hard to believe you're just an hour and a half's drive from the bright new India that is being courted as an ally by the US and attracting investors from across the world. More than 100 brides have been imported to this village alone, according to locals.