Girls from West Bengal, Bangladesh lured into flesh trade in Mumbai

Mumbai, Apr 22 (UNI) Tanuja (name changed) had a dream to make it big in Bollywood.

Hailing from West Bengal, she arrived in Mumbai, the entertainment capital of India, to give wing to her ambitions and also to support her family which was dependent upon her. Although she is in Mumbai now, Bollywood remains as distant as ever and Tanuja finds herself in a brothel, having been embroiled into the flesh trade.

The infamous Falkland Road here, the country's biggest red-light area, has ensnared a large number of girls from West Bengal and from the neighbouring nation of Bangladesh. Driven by poverty or by the lure of Bollywood, these girls land at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus here in the hope of changing their lives for the better, only to find themselves in the murky bylanes of Falkland Road and even in the brothels of Pune city.

They are lured by pimps who promise them jobs in Bollywood or even promise of marriage. Shockingly, a vast majority of these girls, who land here from the country's eastern frontiers, are Muslims.

Mehmood Qureshi, a social worker in a red-light area, points out that earlier Muslim women from Hyderabad were sought for marriage by Arabs for other foreigners, but divorced when they left for their country. This was a form of contractual marriage, but now those girls drifled into the flesh trade,'' he said.

He laments that the increase in the number of Muslim women in the flesh trade has not caught the attention of Muslim leaders and religious scholars.

Untill recently, it were girls from Nepal who were easy prey for the flesh trade sharks. But, now, girls from West Bengal and Bangladesh are being trapped. ''Human trafficking is on the rise, particularly from the state of West Bengal and Bangladesh,'' says a social activist. Many of these Bengali girls are from the Muslim-dominated district of Murshidabad.

According to People's Health Organisation secretary general Dr I H Gilada, ''Earlier, the demand in brothels for girls from West Bengal was only two to three per cent. But, because of strict enforcement by local authorities of late, Nepali girls cannot be brought here and,so, the percentage of girls from West Bengal, and also Bangladesh, in Mumbai and Pune's red-light areas has increased to nearly 20 per cent.'' Triveni Acharya of Mumbai-based Rescue Foundation also corroborates this fact. ''In recent times, the number of girls from West Bengal who are involved in the flesh-trade, has increased manifold,'' she says.

Besides, constant raids by the police at Sonagachi, Kolkata's infamous red-light area, may have driven many of the girls from there to Mumbai in order to sustain themselves.

UNI