Ajeet fights against female trafficking

Varanasi, August 03: Minor girls being sold for sex trafficking in the holy city of Varanasi, but Ajeet Singh decided to take on the police-pimp nexus. Girls, as young as 10 years of age, are bought and sold.

“Right from the moment a girl is trafficked and brought into a red light area, the rate is fixed. For every new girl they will get Rs 1 lakh to 50000 and we let it pass by. My biggest question is how do we let it pass by? We have to be a questioning society,” Ajeet said.

As a teenager in Varanasi, Ajeet could see prostitution thriving in this tourist hub and the turning point for him came when he was 18 years.

Ajeet said, “When I was in college I went to a marriage where a nautch girl was dancing. People were passing the most lewd comments. I immediately took a decision. I waited till the morning and told her what if I adopted her children?,”

Ajeet did adopt the three children, but in turn faced the worst kind of social ostracism.

“It was the most difficult moment of my life. In school whatever you’re taught about being Mother Teresa isn’t true. In real life you get castigated. I was treated like I was a pimp or something,” Ajeet recounts.

Ajeet now took his fight to the red light area of Varanasi, Shivdaspur, but he needed a new strategy.

“Just condom distribution or HIV programmes are not going to solve the problem, that’s just a part of it. The hallmark of this is that it is an organized crime and you have to take it head on,” he said.

Through his organisation Guria, Ajeet’s first aim was to rescue the minor girls. Ajeet roamed the red light areas posing as a customer recording the locations and details of minor girls. After collecting evidence he took a unique action.

“We involved civil society and took 4000-5000 people. We did inform the police, but we didn’t wait for them to take action. We did our legal homework and we marched on. As citizens of this country we have to take action, we covered the whole red light area and rescued 50 girls,” Ajeet said.

But he believes he could have rescued more.

Over the years Ajeet Singh has been slapped with multiple cases of rape and robbery. Despite this he has succeeded in sealing all the brothels that traded with minors in Varanasi’s red light area.

Ajeet is fighting 200 cases against 450 human traffickers, like that of Meena. Meena was just 14 years old when she was kidnapped by a local brothel broker and taken to Mumbai. She was raped multiple times in transition.

Meena’s fight is one in many ongoing battles for Ajeet. He is ever ready to move when the next call for rescue comes.

Ajeet fights on, but he also knows that he needs the society to support him if minor sex trafficking is to be eradicated.

“It has been created by the society and the society must solve it,” he said.

–Agencies