Meera (name changed) was just 16 years old when she was ‘sold’ to a 30-year-old man in Haryana by her female cousin. For the next five years, her ‘buyer’ and his father held her captive and repeatedly raped her, before Meera managed to escape from their clutches with the help of her father.
Now a 21-year-old mother of a toddler, Meera is back home in Chhattisgarh’s Kabirdham district with her family. Her maternal uncle’s daughter, who sold her off for Rs 2 lakh, has been arrested but the father-son duo from Haryana’s Rohtak, who repeatedly raped her, are yet to be caught, according to a report by Times of India.
“Based on the survivor’s statement, an FIR was lodged for trafficking, rape and criminal intimidation under IPC against her cousin and the two accused. Police have arrested the cousin and a team of cops will be sent to Haryana to nab the two others,” the report quoted Kabirdham SP Abhishek Pallava as saying.
Since Meera was a minor when the crime took place, additional sections under the POCSO Act would be imposed on all the accused, police said.
In 2018, 16-year-old Meera was looking for work to help her family’s economic situation when her maternal uncle’s 32-year-old daughter, who lived in Madhya Pradesh back then, told her about how she could work in Delhi and get paid well.
Meera came to Delhi with her cousin in December 2018 and was put to work as a domestic help at a doctor’s house initially.
However, after some time, the strenuous life and loneliness broke her resolve and she told her cousin that she wanted to return home, Meera told the police, according to the TOI report.
Instead of taking her back home, her cousin sold Meera to a man in Rohtak.
Meera told police that she had no clue she had been sold until she was in the man’s grip and forced to perform wedding rituals at a temple.
From then on, the trafficked woman’s life became hell, as both the man and his father would rape her any time of the day, torture her, and would make her work like a slave.
To escape the torture, Meera decided to escape from them. After her baby boy was born, she started acting as if she had accepted her life with the father-son duo and gradually persuaded them to let her speak with her family members.
They eventually agreed but let her talk, but only in their presence.
The woman went along with their condition waiting for them to let their guard down at some point.
One day in early October this year, Meera got her chance and told her father about her escape plan.
As per the report, Meera’s ‘husband’ and his father worked as contractors for construction companies and were struggling to get manpower.
She told them that there were labourers in abundance in her village and they could accompany her there to fix rates and get workers in bulk, the woman told the police.
The man agreed and took Meera to her village in November with her child. It was only when they reached the village that he reportedly realized he had been tricked.
The man tried to fight with the survivor’s parents, who retaliated and drove him out. However, he managed to take the child away.
Later, the father-son duo returned and tried to take the woman back, leading to another fight, which they lost. Undeterred, they even approached local police with false statements but could make no headway and returned. They had to hand over the two-year-old boy to his mother.
The matter came to light when the woman narrated her ordeal in detail to the police.
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