A bolero jeep moved up through a busy Delhi Street one day a few months ago. People inside were heading for a mission. One man in his 50s looked struggling with emotions, and his eyes brimming with tears. In shivering voice, going above the rattle of the vehicle, he said into his mobile phone “where are you? Just stay there, we are on the way with the police”
Another man, with three-day stubble, sitting in the front passenger seat, looked-- being uncannily confident-- quite sure about his powers, unlike others in the jeep. A few minutes later, they pulled up before a gated house. Soon a girl, ---- may be in her 20s, wearing salwar kameez, looking really beautiful---- came out, bursting into tears, and she flew into the tight embrace of her father, the man who had talked on the mobile phone in the jeep.
He too wept uncontrollably. All his anxiety, fears and nightmares melted away in the tears. Yes, he found his missing daughter. The leader of this mission, Kailash Satyarthi, also hugged the girl and said, “She is like a daughter to me”. While everybody rejoiced at this, another man -- may be in his 50s, looked sad -- because his daughter too was missing for a long time then. Now Kailash had another mission at hand—yes, finding that girl as well.
The girl was one of the many missing ones in the tea planting state of Assam. Although home to world’s most famous tea brands, --- especially ‘Tetley’, a 177-year-old British company, now owned by Tata --- lives of the people here are worse off. Young boys and girls work in plantations for small wages. What Kailash found was girls were becoming easy prey to traffickers. They would lure them offering best jobs in Delhi, especially, as maids and eventually get them to red-light districts. That could be the worst fear of many parents searching for their missing daughters. Kailah works through a network of volunteers to locate the missing girls, and has successfully tracked down many. More than being the savour of missing girls, he is more concerned about children’s rights.
This 60-year-old founded Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) in 1980 and he has since been campaigning against child labour. As of now, the outfit has saved more than 83,500 children from bonded labour in India. His activities, according to sources, are spread in many nations.
Still, we Indians haven’t heard of him. Why our mainstream media failed to see him is a mystery. According to Daily Telegraph UK, during his 2009 India visit British premier Gordon Brown took time off to meet Kailash. That should have been an eye-opener to the media. Somehow it didn’t happen.
Talking to Hindustan Times earlier this year, he said 70 per cent of child labourers are sourced out from villages. That is where BBA’s presence is vital in rural India. The outfit has single-handedly set up some 356 child friendly villages in 11 Indian states. Most of them are located in Rajasthan and Jharkhand. The sunny side of this move is that children attend schools and discuss how to run the village governments. Born in some 50 km off Bhopal, he gave up his career as an electrical engineer to help children out.
Although ‘little known’ in India, Kailash is reportedly a member of UNESCO’s education programme, he serves on the board of Centre for Victims of Torture, USA, and also part of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.
It’s a mystery how he has escaped media glare all these years despite living in Delhi, the epicenter of Indian politics. We can’t blame Indian media, because they, mostly, have far more serious things to do. For instance, they have to take care of cleavages, bikinis, wardrobe malfunctions of women. Who else would debate, “which actor got perfect abdomen muscles, which actress has perfect beach body”. To them Kailash Sathyarthi is a total stranger despite he has been active for 33 years. People outside India know more about him, and that is why he is honoured with the Nobel Prize.
That became all the more evident when UK’s Guardian newspaper accompanied him to the ‘rescue-mission” in Delhi. The one described at the beginning of this article. It turned out to be a major documentary on modern day slavery in India. Many leading newspapers don’t even know this happens in India.
So don’t blame them, let them write editorial about cleavages.
V K Sreelesh can be contacted at vk.sreelesh@gmail.com. His other articles:
Why did we cry foul at Yesudas?