dna edit: Sins of condonation

If laws could end injustices, India would have been a much better place to live in. The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, the Employment of Manual Scavenging (Prohibition) Act, 1993, and the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, outlawed all these inhuman practices. But their medieval remnants have continued and even intensified under the watch of an indecisive State. Indulgent towards the perpetrators and indifferent to the victims, police, judicial and civic authorities selectively intervene in such cases, often content to leave a social problem and a crime to families, local chieftains, caste and village panchayats to settle. But now comes a new survey estimating that 14 million of 29 million people entrapped in modern slavery are living in India.

Modern slavery practices include those forced into labour and human trafficking like debt bondage, domestic and industrial labour, marriages, and the sex trade. There is no reason to disbelieve these numbers. The Indian news media is replete with reports of harassment of men, women and children “rescued” from situations where their lives were in danger and they faced extreme physical, sexual and mental abuse. Two recent incidents of a domestic help — a tribal woman from Jharkhand — kept in captivity and tortured by a South Delhi resident, and a brutalised Assamese woman rescued from a Haryana family, which “purchased” her as a bride, caused much outrage. The daily reports of children  and bonded workers being rescued from brick kilns, sweatshops, small factories and farms across India give a fair idea of the extent of the problem.

In the Haryana incident, Palwal police refused to extend help to the victim’s family. A combination of apathy, ignorance of laws, laziness and fear of irking the local community bogged down the Palwal cops before they acted. In rural areas, the hesitation among authorities to upset entrenched hierarchies is evident. This is why the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which was touted as a game-changer against bonded labour and debt bondage, failed to end this menace. In urban areas like Delhi, despite hundreds of incidents of trafficking of women and children for domestic and industrial work and flesh trade being uncovered, organised rackets continue to flourish. The inability of state police units to work in tandem means the supply chain continues to operate despite occasional arrests.

For decades now, the praxis of democratic governance in India has involved a clever subterfuge of laws. On paper, rights-based legislations criminalise many inhuman practices but they continue to operate in an “underground” system where poverty, illiteracy and migration hinders an effective political response to such injustices. The “modern slave” is often a migrant or a Dalit — treated as an outsider — who becomes a candidate for automatic exclusion from the local government’s services. The inability to organise worsens their plight. Most “rescue” interventions have been at the behest of vigilant civil society and activist groups. Undoubtedly, such surveys, portraying a grim scenario of India’s human rights record, and coming out in regular succession, create adverse international opinion against India. But the country manages to brazen it out on the international stage, thanks to the democratic miracle we have fashioned. India proves how a hallowed democracy, can also be hollow.