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“It was a happy marriage for the initial few weeks, but eventually it turned into a nightmare,” says Shamita*. “I was waiting for my husband to return from work, when his elder brother entered my room and closed the door. He raped me,” says the 29-year-old who lives in Baghpat district of Uttar Pradesh.
Located 40 km from Delhi and sharing a border with Haryana, Baghpat has 861 women to every 1,000 men compared to the national sex ratio of 940, as per the 2011 census.
The district had a child sex ratio (in the age group 0- 6 years) of 841. For children born in the last five years, the child sex ratio was 818 in 2019-21 against 763 in 2015-16, according to the National Family Health Survey.
A normal gender ratio at birth is between 102-106 boys per 100 girls, which would be equivalent to 943-980 girls per 1,000 boys, according to a report by organisations working on gender issues, as IndiaSpend reported in August 2017. This ratio is not 1,000 boys for every 1,000 girls because it is nature's way of balancing a higher risk of death for boys as they grow older, according to the World Health Organization.
Decades of forced female foeticide complemented by illegal sex determination tests has led to a situation where many men in the district do not find brides. Devendra Kumar Dhama, founder of local non-profit Chetna Kalyan Samiti, which works for gender rights, tells IndiaSpend, “Due to the root cause of patriarchy, several immoral and illegal practices are commonly seen in the district. They begin with female foeticide, and later on they end up buying girls for their sons, causing trauma to that girl and her family in the entire process.”
The story of Baghpat is the story of trafficked brides falling prey to abuse and wife-sharing, and forced female foeticide, all of this compounded by a failed law.
Generations-old torture
“My in-laws were in the house,” Shamita, who was married in 2017, recalls of her rape. “I kept shouting but nobody did anything. He did the job and left; my husband came the next morning and till then I remained wide awake.
“I told him what had happened and to my shock, he supported his brother…said that his brother was not getting married so I would have to compromise. Also, he said this was a common practice in the society; his mother has also gone through the same and it is common among his friends too.”
Ruchi (she uses one name), a Baghpat-based social activist working on women’s issues for eight years now, says, “Almost every third household in this district has at least one daughter-in-law from another state, most of whom are trafficked. They would not let you talk to them in person.”
“It happened several times again,” Shamita says of her rape. “In fact, a few times my husband compelled me to sleep with strange men from whom he would have taken some money and was unable to pay it back.”
Today, Shamita lives with her parents in a different village of Baghpat, and has no intentions of going back to her in-laws unless they promise to never compel her to sleep with anyone.
Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar are the worst states for women, IndiaSpend reported in July 2016. Female foetuses in these states were most likely to be aborted in the womb; women had the lowest literacy rates, died most frequently while pregnant, bore the most children, had the most crimes committed against them, and were least likely to be employed, we had reported.
Almost 8 million people are trapped in human trafficking in India. The most vulnerable are those from marginalised social classes, living in poverty, without a strong family structure and with little education.
Multilayered violence
In the five years to 2016, “23 percent of human-trafficking cases filed ended in conviction. As many as 45,375 people were arrested and 10,134 were convicted,” a study from 2016 says. “Punishments range from fines to imprisonment. West Bengal is the hub of human trafficking in India. It had the maximum human trafficking cases (669) among all states in India in 2013.”
Gudiya* was 16 years old when a man from another state visited her economically poor family in West Bengal’s Canning town in the South 24 Parganas district. “He had come to offer us financial help,” Gudiya told IndiaSpend. “He said he would get my brother a job and get me married to a wealthy family in Delhi. I was excited, just like my parents, and I was sent off with him. I left Bangal with the dream of seeing and living with my husband in a big city.
“But all my dreams were soon shattered. He brought me to Baghpat and kept me isolated for a day before sending two men to rape me. Three days later, he took me to a house in some village and said that’s where I had to live. I was devastated,” says Gudiya.
Today, 28-year-old Gudiya is the mother of three children and has settled well in the village. But none of this came easy.
“I had no phone back then,” she recalls. “I would beg others to make a call to my family, but no one would do that. I was raped several times a day and beaten badly by my [now] husband’s brother. Both of them would have sex with me without bothering about my health. This went on for a few months before I tried to run away, but was brought back by Sumit, my husband. He said he would marry me if I came back home, and so I went back,” Gudiya said, speaking to me in hushed tones that her husband and in-laws, who were in the house when I visited, could not overhear.
Gudiya and Sumit have an age gap of 14 years. “I have now adapted to this place but maybe this hasn’t accepted me,” Gudiya says. “I struggled with the entirely different language initially. Nobody would visit me; I was not allowed to go anywhere. I know there are many women like me, from Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and god knows where else. But they don’t want us to know each other and talk to each other.”
The Sakhi One Stop Centre scheme of the women and child development ministry under the Nirbhaya Fund aims to support and assist women facing violence in public and private spaces, including spousal violence, as IndiaSpend reported in May 2023.
Naina Sharma, administrator of the one-stop centre in Baghpat, told IndiaSpend, "We get several cases of domestic violence but no one directly complains of wife sharing, female foeticide or trafficking. One aspect to this can be that they are not independent enough to come to us, and another is that they compromise within the family so that the marriage does not break.”
The web of legalities
Baghpat differs from other districts of Uttar Pradesh since the culture, livelihood and traditions practiced by its residents are akin to those of Haryana.
Arpit Vijayvargiya, superintendent of police, Baghpat, says, “Since Baghpat borders Haryana and Delhi, we see tendencies of such cases [trafficking, sex determination centres and foeticides] in the district. Last year, we raided two centres in Baghpat that were illegally conducting tests, and filed an FIR against them. The people who had come for the test were from Haryana.”
Asked what steps the police were taking to identify and help survivors, he says, “We send a team of women police to the villages every Wednesday to meet the locals and discuss any issues anyone is facing or has heard of. This project is being run under the Mission Shakti of the government.”
Sakshi Singh, the sub-inspector heading the local programme under Mission Shakti, says, “Every Wednesday, one constable, along with one SI from each thana [police station], goes to different villages of the district to counsel, hear and sensitise the women. They gather in the Gram Pradhan’s [village head] office and we do the discussions. Most of the cases we hear of are women being brought into Baghpat from Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha – maybe because these states have more poverty.”
“We're always unable to file a trafficking case since the women say they're here with consent as their families were in need of money, and they were paid; so they don't speak up unless there is some cruelty they go through,” Singh adds.
“We get two types of complaints in these cases,” she says. “One is from the husband’s or the family's side, which is that the woman has run away with the child, leaving no traces of her whereabouts. In my thana, on average, we get four to five such cases per month. The other type of complaint we get is from the woman's side, that they have been sexually assaulted or harassed by their brother-in-law and that the husband does not speak up against it.”
The police say that on average, 60 cases are registered each year of women who leave the house, implying that such numbers are likely a fraction of unreported cases of trafficking.
Female foeticide and the cycle of patriarchy
For Gudiya, a new challenge occurred during second pregnancy, in 2016. “My daughter was two years old when I got pregnant again,” she recalled. “During the third month I was taken to another city, I think it was Meerut, for a check-up. My husband said it was a very good clinic and we must go there.“
“Upon arrival, I noticed a very small clinic with no board or name on it. It was quite dark inside, where they made me lie down for the ultrasound. On our way back, my husband said that I lack iron, so he stopped at a medical store to buy some medicine and asked me to take it once we got back home.”
Under the Pre-Conception & Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994, sex determination tests are banned in India. The Act prohibits sex selection, before or after conception, and regulates prenatal diagnostic techniques for detecting genetic abnormalities, metabolic disorders, chromosomal abnormalities or congenital malformations. But there is a need to implement the Act better, IndiaSpend reported in March 2018 based on a Niti Aayog report.
But India’s strong son-preference means such tests continue illegally. “While sons offer security to their families in old age and can perform the rites for the souls of deceased parents and ancestors, daughters are perceived as a social and economic burden,” according to a 2022 study of female foeticide in India.
Dhama adds, “If it is a first child, there is still a chance of not sending one’s daughter-in-law to the illegal sex determination center. But a second pregnancy is definitely to be sent for sex determination. Most times, the woman is unaware of what is being done. The family members team up with the centres and fool her, saying it is a normal ultrasound, and then give her an over-the-counter pill to abort.”
“Within 10 minutes of consuming that medicine I started feeling nausea and had a bad stomach ache,” Guidya recalls of that day. “I don’t know when I fell unconscious but when I got up, my lower half was drenched in blood and it took me a while to realise that I had been made to abort the female foetus I was carrying.”
The third leading cause of maternal mortality in India is unsafe abortions. Unsafe abortion-related causes kill nearly eight women a day.
“I was not taken to see a doctor,” Gudiya recalls. I did not talk to my husband for a week or so – but nobody cared.” After this ‘miscarriage’, Gudiya went on to have two more children – had a son and a daughter.
We have reached out to the state’s Ministry of Women’s Welfare, Child Development and Nutrition for comment. We will update this story when we receive a response.
*Names have been changed to protect their identities.
This report is republished with permission from IndiaSpend.org, a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit. It has been lightly edited for style and clarity.
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