HARLOT FARMING

The ingenuity of evil can be far more outrageous than you fear. Now infants are being

biologically manipulated by abductors not willing to wait for their youth. With engineered puberty, these abducted infants are being pushed into flesh trade, enabling touts to mint instant money.

Years after the Agra police stumbled upon a heinous "prostitute grooming" racket which packaged infant abductions with forced female hormone injecting processes for faster growth of victims, the menace is far from over.In the notorious Bedia settlement of Basai Khurd which, incidentally, is a red-light area just a couple of km from the monument of love Taj Mahal, little girls look much older than their biological years, having achieved pre-mature puberty due to growth injections. Abducted from all over the country, they live a captive's life in Bedia homes till they are ready to be dispatched for earning mega bucks in the widespread sex market spreading from Mumbai bars to the G B Road redlight area of Delhi.

Picked up from their homes in far off States at infancy, these girls mostly do not remember their true parents. This means no redemption from hell as even after being rescued by the police there is hardly any avenue to establish their true identity in the absence of clues.

Frustrated by efforts to locate the real parents of these girls who do not have the faintest memory of their past, the Agra police is now mounting a huge search operation throughout the country and is preparing gene imprints to identify the most likely community they come from.

Scores of these girls treat their captors as immediate guardians, having been brainwashed by Bedia "mothers". Their heart-rending story first came out in 2004 with the rescue of pre-teens Chandni and Mona and a 3-year-old girlchild Aarti in a raid on Bedias in Shaheed Nagar, located quite close to the original Bedia settlement of Basai.

As it then turned out, this was no simple call-girl racket. It was a preparatory school for bar girls where pre-teens were being nurtured to service clients in Mumbai. Five women and two men were arrested and Chandni, Mona and Aarti freed from their clutches.

Subsequent interrogation revealed a structured and elaborate racket which shocked even the most hardened of cops.

Chandni, aged 5 at the time of her rescue, had a faint memory of having being kidnapped by two women from her home in Delhi along with her friend Jaddo and kept for some time in the house of one Vimla. Her friend was taken to another place. Vimla sold her to Munna Bedia and his wife who were arrested in the police raid.

Chandni said she was fed well but not allowed to venture out of the house. She agreed to lead a police team to her home which she thought was in Chandni Chowk in Delhi. The Agra police managed to locate her father Shakur in a Jahangirpuri slum and she was reunited with her family. Sadly though, her mother had by then passed away in the grief of her missing daughter.

Aarti, too, was reunited with her family in Delhi as the police were able to find her parents by pursuing the missing persons reports filed in Delhi police stations over a period of one year.

But Mona was not that fortunate. Though kidnapped at age six, she remembered nothing about her family after four years of living with these tribals. The only thing she could recall was that she had been kidnapped by a woman and a man from her home and had travelled for three nights in a train before coming to Munna in Agra.

Sunita, the kingpin of the racket in Agra, claimed she was childless and had adopted Mona after finding her abandoned on a roadside several years ago, a claim belied by the captive girls.

The police produced Mona in court from where she was sent to the children's remand home on September 13, 2004. Sunita, Munna and five others were booked under the UP Gangster Act and sections 366A and 372 of the IPC and sent to jail. While Munna and the rest of the accused were granted bail by the High Court, Sunita is still in Tihar Jail.

In 2005, Munna Bedia, Mona's self-proclaimed father, moved a habeas corpus petition claiming that she was his daughter and he should be given custody. The claim, however absurd, was provisionally accepted by the court, which asked the police to conduct a DNA test on Mona and Munna on September 16, 2005. The report from the Chandigarh Central Forensic Science Laboratory nullified Munna's claim over Mona. It was after this report that the High Court bench of Justices M C Jain and Vinod Prasad instructed Agra police launch a search for Mona's biological parents.

As per this order, the police ran a picture of Mona along with her description in three national newspapers and all regional newspapers of Rajasthan, West Bengal and Karnataka, twice a week for two months and also book a 10-second slot for 15 days in all Doordarshan channels. Besides, her case was registered in the National and State Crime Record Bureaux.

Mona, now 15, is currently in the children's home on the outskirts of Agra, well past the permissible age of 10 for a girl to stay in this home. After 10, she should have been relocated to the children's home at Kanpur where she can stay on till she gains adulthood. Bound by court orders, the home authorities are unable to transfer her to Kanpur.

Zubaida Khan, till recently assistant superintendent of the home and the only woman to whom Mona responded, claimed that the girl had suffered serious brain damage due to the growth hormones she was administered. Besides stunted brain development, Mona is also suffering from failing vision.

Zubaida feels there is little hope that the police will ever find Mona's parents. "No pictures of Mona's childhood are available to enable her parents to identify her," she said.

Mona, incidentally, is not the only victim of Bedias. There's Shelly who has been living in the same children's home ever since she was rescued from Tajganj in 2003. She, too, does not remember her parents and treats the home as her abode.

Shelly was abducted at age three by Rakesh Bedia who sold her to Mukesh Bedia for Rs 7,000. Mukesh had been planning to send Shelly over to his sister Surekha in Mumbai when the police raided his house and arrested him.

Another three-month-old infant girl, Sujata, was recovered in February 2005. She and her sister Sunanda had been kidnapped by a gang that sold her to the Bedias for Rs 8,000. Though she was returned to her father, her elder sister is still missing.

Despite police vigil on the kidnappings of infant girls for flesh trade, a raid conducted in Basai last week revealed that the practice is far from over. Only, it has slipped behind curtains.

The raid rescued six girls between ages two and 16. "The raid was conducted on a tip-off by locals about the presence of a large number of pre-teen girls in a house in the Bedia settlement," said Rajesh Kumar Dwivedi, inspector in charge, Tajganj police station. The police raided the house and recovered a dozen girls, including an infant. Eleven persons were arrested but kingpin Hari Singh managed to slip away.

While some of the girls were "released to so-called parents" in the presence of the media, six girls - Monica (16), Monica (12), Jyoti (12), Nandini (10), Nippi (12) and Roshni (2) were held back as these so-called parents could not provide papers for the girls.

Reshma, who claimed to be the mother of Nandini and Roshni, demanded custody of her two daughters. A perfunctory medical check-up of Reshma revealed that she had never become pregnant in her life.

Dwivedi says, the police are now seeking to get to the root of this racket. Recent arrests have led them to a series of clues linking the gang to the recovery of eight teenage girls in 1998. In the 1998 operation, Bhanwar Singh, brother of Hari Singh, had been arrested. Now, with the arrest of another half-dozen members of Bhanwar Singh's family, the police are hoping to crack this racket once and for all.

The identity erasers

The flesh trade racket run by Bedia gangs has roots buried deep into a corrupt administrative system where identity papers can be easily forged to hide the real identity of abducted girls.

Elaborating on the methods used by Bedias to erase the original identity of their victims, Dwivedi said the preferred age for abduction by these gangs was infancy so that the girls do not remember much about their real parents "and even if she does she is brainwashed by the mothers in the tribe."

The first step taken after the abduction of an infant girl is to get a birth certificate from the municipal corporation stating that the girl was born at home and the certificate is required for a school admission.

Once the girl gets admitted in school, elaborate paperwork, including the school registration certificate, transfer certificates and annual report cards are kept in record though curiously, no picture of the girl's infancy is found. "This because the gangsters do not want any picture of the infant which may later be used to identify her by her true parents.

The girl's name is also put on the "family's" ration card. "Significantly, her name comes on the ration card 4-5 years after her claimed birth," points out Dwivedi.

After the directions issued by High Court to ascertain Mona's true identity, the Agra police is now planning to put the remaining rescued girls through a DNA test to prepare their gene profile and matching it with their so-called parents.

Sadar inspector Dilip Kumar Mittal says Mona is just the tip of the iceberg and "there are thousands of young girls still awaiting their liberation from Agra's sleazy bazaars run by Bedia gangs in the narrow alleys of Basai."

Mittal, who, having lost his only son to an unfortunate incident, had applied for Mona's adoption, claims that most of the girls living in the Bedia settlement are abductees. "They will not be able to recognise their original parents after living with these Bedias for so many few years," he said.

He stressed there was an urgent need to conduct a comprehensive DNA test of the entire Bedia settlement and prepare genetic profiles of all residents in this area, matching them with girls they claim as their progeny.

But this is a mammoth task fraught with legal complications. "It can only be achieved if the Supreme Court deputes an NGO to conduct the tests," he adds.