read those articles write a short essay (550 words)
Make an argument about the similarities and differences between labor trafficking in India and trafficking issues here in the United States.
Link
Some optional resources:
The Federal Human Trafficking Report 2017:
https://www.traffickingmatters.com/2017-federal-human-trafficking-report/
New recommendations to tackle sex trafficking move ‘beyond law enforcement response’:
https://www.wric.com/news/politics/capitol-connection/new-recommendations-to-tackle-sex-trafficking-move-beyond-law-enforcement-response-/1517642767/
This Labor-Trafficking Case Exposes the Twin Cities’ Seedy Subcontracting Underbelly:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/this-labor-trafficking-case-exposes-the-twin-cities-seedy-subcontracting-underbelly/
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Saving the slaving child: domestic work, labor trafficking, and the politics of rescue in
India
(Manuscript in final revisions with Humanity journal, August 2018)
Vibhuti Ramachandran
Assistant Professor
Global and International Studies
University of California, Irvine
Author Notes: 1. The ethnographic component of this article “happened” to me while conducting
dissertation research on the way foreign-funded NGOs are working with the law enforcement
and criminal justice systems in India to construct and respond to the issue of sex trafficking. One
of the NGOs whose work I followed closely, as well as some of the law enforcement officers and
judicial bodies I encountered, worked on both sex trafficking and labor trafficking, thus giving
me a chance to understand a different (if related) dimension of their work apart from the focus of
my dissertation. While the fieldwork this article draws upon (and the questions it pointed me
towards) was thus not funded as a project on its own, it took place during research I did in India
for Sally Merry’s project on indicators as a technology of global governance on which I was a
research assistant and later, a Wenner Gren Foundation dissertation fieldwork grant.
2. When directly citing Indian legal texts, I have retained the original British English spelling
and punctuation conventions.
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Saving the slaving child: domestic work, labor trafficking and the politics of rescue in India
Domestic labor has had a long, enduring history in India, vital to the homes and lives of
the middle and upper classes, and persisting through changing expectations and structures of
modernity, caste and class relations and domestic spaces.i In the past few years, anti-trafficking
and child rights NGOs in New Delhi, working closely with state agencies, have been calling
attention to the exploitative dimensions of domestic labor by rescuing impoverished young rural
migrants (especially girls) brought by unregulated “placement agencies” to work in upwardly
mobile urban households. These NGOs increasingly articulate concerns around labor
exploitation in the language of human trafficking and “modern-day slavery” employed by their
foreign donors (especially the U.S.) by weaving them into local concerns around forced labor
and child labor addressed within the Indian legal framework. Their interventions, framed both by
recent efforts by the U.S. State Department against “slavery” in the global South, and by
progressive postcolonial legislation in India against exploitative labor practices, rub uneasily
against socio-economic inequities and cultural hierarchies that have long perpetuated profoundly
unequal relationships between household employers and domestic labor.
The concept of slavery has become central to anti-trafficking NGOs’ interactions with
funding agencies, policy-makers and the media. However, as I will demonstrate, their rescue
operations on the ground require close collaboration with the local police, who view and respond
to domestic workers quite differently. Through glimpses into a rescue operation and subsequent
legal procedures in August-September 2012 in New Delhi, this article illuminates multiple
discursive constructions and contestations of what it means to save a slaving child from domestic
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labor. It tracks the law in practice amidst the politics of rescue, to examine deeply varying
assumptions about and articulations of slavery, trafficking, child labor, and childhood itself.
The “slavery” framework has gained traction with an emergent global media and policy
categorization of human trafficking as “modern-day slavery”.ii It is buoyed by instruments of
global governance such as the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report,iii
which has repeatedly chastised India (among other countries in the global South) for not
addressing human trafficking “adequately” per the minimum standards prescribed by a U.S.
legislation, the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA) of 2000.iv This
legislation mandates the production of TIP reports that rank other countries based on the State
Department’s evaluations of their responses to human trafficking. The VTVPA’s stated purpose
to “combat trafficking in persons” encompasses a wide net of concerns, including sex trafficking,
labor trafficking, forced labor, child labor, and involuntary servitude.v The U.S. legal framework
on trafficking thus brings together multiple concerns under one rubric, shaping the way the State
Department approaches these issues in the anti-trafficking agenda it sets for the global South. It
impacts how NGOs in the global South who receive U.S. funding conduct rescues and
“sensitize” police, judges and prosecutors. Legal scholar Janie Chuang describes the way the
U.S.-led anti-trafficking agenda rhetorically conflates the legally distinct concepts of trafficking,
slavery and forced labor to galvanize public outrage, media coverage and donor support, as
“exploitation creep.” vi As one human rights practitioner and researcher puts it,
There has been a recent trend in countries such as the US and the United Kingdom to revert to using the
term ‘slavery’, for example by referring to “modern slavery” (such as a Bill proposed in the UK), while
continuing to focus on the crime of human trafficking as defined by the UN Trafficking Protocol.
Unfortunately the word ‘slavery’ seems to be used mainly for its emotive effect, rather than its technical
accuracy.vii
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The VTVPA and TIP reports make frequent reference to “modern-day slavery” with a
distinctly American referent. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton drew out the connection
explicitly,
This annual Report embodies the United States’ continued dedication to fighting traffickers no
matter where they may be, because fighting slavery and standing up for human rights is part of
our national identity.viii
U.S. legislators and State Department officials concerned with trafficking invoke the
transatlantic slave trade as a horrific and ever-haunting forebear to human trafficking.ix The U.S.’
political and legal deployment of the language of slavery to strengthen law enforcement and
criminal justice mechanisms against human trafficking globally reflects a sense of self-
righteousness at having acknowledged and addressed the past evils of human enslavement that it
continues to condemn.x Spearheading concerns about “modern-day slavery,” the U.S. State
Department “plays global sheriff”xi to strengthen state responses to human trafficking in
countries like India where they are seen as weak.
This article explores the meanings the concepts of slavery, exploitation, trafficking and child
labor acquire or resist in Indian anti-trafficking interventions, through an anthropological
exploration of the socio-legal context in which they are embedded. It examines how the local law
in practice is inflected by global forces, NGO intervention, and myriad socio-economic, cultural,
and individual factors impacting work and migration. Anthropologists have shown how human
rights ideas are appropriated, translated and remade across cultural contexts,xii and how
translations of universalizing human rights language can only be partial, as they constantly
engage with locally situated ethics, moral systems and priorities.xiii Anna Tsing proposes the lens
of “friction” for an ethnographic study of global interconnections. Tsing uses the concept to
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describe the awkward translations, messy negotiations, conjunctures and contingencies through
which universal claims are “charged and enacted in the sticky materiality of practical
encounters,” with those encounters frequently being unequal.xiv The article explores how anti-
trafficking rescue operations in New Delhi are suffused with friction-ridden translations of the
legal concepts of slavery and exploitation, both between the global and Indian contexts, and
between progressive national labor legislation and its implementation in India. It tracks
encounters between new U.S.-driven interventions against trafficking or “modern-day slavery”
and the postcolonial Indian legal framework from a conceptual perspective, and between the use
of both these approaches and the role of the local police from an ethnographic perspective.
Feminist scholars have offered robust critiques of rescues in the context of sex trafficking, as
solutions that the U.S.-led global anti-trafficking agenda promotes without factoring in the
complexities of trafficking and risky migration choices.xv Feminist critiques of anti-trafficking
campaigns initiated in the global North offer useful accounts of the way the issue has seen NGOs
from an unlikely mix of activist persuasions work closely with state actors (particularly law
enforcement) to protect victims and prosecute traffickers.xvi I take a different direction from
these critiques by exploring the complex socio-legal context in which rescues are conducted,
both within and between the “law in books” and the “law in action.”xvii My ethnographic
observations of the rescue of young girls from domestic work demonstrate the need to
disaggregate the perspectives of NGO workers from those of the local police. While the former
speak the language of global anti-trafficking discourse and Indian labor laws, the latter view the
work situations of migrant labor through the lens of a “commonsense” knowledge xviii wherein
the perceived ineluctability of cultural hierarchies and socio-economic marginalization rubs
against both domestic laws and global anti-trafficking campaigns.
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In the first section, I offer ethnographic insights into the messiness that is papered over in
media and policy narratives about slavery and exploitation, yet always haunts moments of legal
intervention against practices upon which those labels are precariously placed. The next two
sections expand upon the socio-cultural, economic and legal contexts that resist and complicate
the rescue of young domestic workers in India.
The Politics of Rescue
They took their time opening their front doors, taken aback at the unlikely set of people ringing
the doorbell–two tall, strapping Jatxix police officers from one of Delhi Police’s top investigation
units in plainclothes, a fresh and enthusiastic bunch of social work interns and two ‘salwar-
kameez’ clad social worker-looking women–a young NGO worker and myself, the
anthropologist-volunteer, from urban middle and upper-middle class backgrounds. The wealthy
West Delhi business families whose homes were being raided were even more surprised when
they heard that we were there to inquire about their maids. The policemen flashed their IDs to
announce their arrival, asked for the maids to be summoned, and left us women to question and
“counsel” the rather terrified-looking young girls who were tentatively brought before us by
their equally anxious-looking employers. The policemen reassured the businessmen and their
spouses, “You’ll see, it’s not that big a deal.” The employers objected loudly, insisting that they
treated these girls “like their own daughters.” Within 10-15 minutes of our arrival at each home,
the NGO staff urged the girls to pack their meager belongings, after which the girls (fearfully,
sometimes reluctantly) piled into the police jeep with us and left their employers’ homes. While
leaving, one of the policemen would give the employers a mildly voiced admonition, “Don’t
employ them if they are below 18!” [Excerpt from my field notes, August-September 2012].
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In about a week, the police-NGO team had rescued eleven girls and one boy from homes
across the city over a total of seven raids. The rescue operation was carried out on the order of a
Child Welfare Committee–a judicial body mandated by a legislation called the Juvenile Justice
Act to take decisions about the custody, well-being and rehabilitation of “children in need of care
and protection.” The Committee had found the addresses of the employers on the roster of a
“placement agent” apprehended in a different case. It directed the Delhi police to conduct the
rescues with an NGO, per established procedure. The NGO had a U.S.-sponsored project to
intervene in cases of labor trafficking, child trafficking, sex trafficking and “slavery-like”
practices. It initiated and actively participated in rescues, bringing those rescued before the Child
Welfare Committee. Those running the NGO were also heavily involved in advising
policymakers on trafficking at the national level and in training state agents like police,
prosecutors and judges on how to use Indian laws to respond to labor, child, and sex trafficking.
I had accompanied this NGO on raid and rescue operations on brothels in New Delhi’s red
light area, in the context of my dissertation research on the intersections and tensions between
the Indian law on prostitution and the discourse of sex trafficking. While spending time at the
NGO office, I became acquainted with its work on labor and child trafficking and accompanied
its staff on this type of rescue operation as well. For the NGO, sending me along was a way to
help meet their staffing needs across the different interventions it was involved in. From my
perspective, it was an opportunity to learn more about the breadth of the NGO’s work vis-à-vis
the focus of my dissertation research. Observing this range of rescue operations helped me to
develop a broader understanding of how NGOs and a global anti-trafficking agenda intervene in,
and are also resisted by, the postcolonial Indian legal system with regard to multiple situations
possibly involving exploitative labor practices.
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The growth of “placement agencies” which source domestic workers through agents from
villages in Jharkhand (a newly created state with a large indigenous and impoverished tribal
population)xx was a cause of great concern among both anti-trafficking NGOs and Child Welfare
Committees in New Delhi. Their growth is attributed both to employers’ demand for young
workers who are cheaper to employ and easier to train, and to the dire poverty in Jharkhand,
from where parents are often eager to send their children (mostly girls) to work in cities and send
money back to make ends meet. Their modus operandi allegedly entails paying agents (who also
get paid a commission by the girls’ parents) to bring the girls to work in the city, and recovering
this money from the employer. The domestic workers themselves are often paid nothing. Some
agencies tell them they will be paid after working for a year, others tell them that the money will
be sent to their parents in the village. There is no mechanism to ensure that they follow through
with these promises.xxi For these reasons, anti-trafficking NGOs describe the operations of
placement agencies as labor trafficking.xxii
Placement agencies are currently unregulated in India, although a Bill to regulate their
functioning and protect the rights of domestic workers has been drafted and is under revision in
response to NGOs’ dissatisfaction with its loopholes.xxiii Drawing on NGO inputs, the U.S. State
Department’s Trafficking in Persons Reports have expressed concern over the growth of
placement agencies in their narratives about human trafficking in India in recent years, explicitly
linking the modus operandi of placement agencies to forced labor and domestic servitude.xxiv
In the rescue operations I describe here, while the recruitment and work conditions of the
rescued girls entailed many elements of exploitation, legal redress requires specificities that are
not easy to establish. Were the girls trafficked? Were they exploited or treated like slaves? Were
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they children? These questions had complex answers, depending on whose perspective on socio-
economic realities, acceptable cultural practices and legal provisions was being considered.
The first question to consider is whether this was labor trafficking. The NGO framed the girls’
recruitment into work and conditions thereafter in terms of both slavery and trafficking (deeming
both the placement agency and employers as perpetrators). When we spoke to the girls–at their
employers’ homes and later, on the way to the Child Welfare Committee (CWC)–their stories
revealed complex paths of entry into domestic work, often reflecting a thin line between
trafficking and migration. Each girl had a different story about her entry into domestic work. One
ran away from home to escape a marriage with a man she didn’t like. Another had herself
approached a placement agent so she could provide for the education of her younger siblings. A
few broke down, saying they didn’t want to work, but were forced to do so by their parents.
Those supplying the girls to the placement agency were often their relatives, family friends or
neighbors. The girls’ narratives thus reflected some overlap between willing migration to work,
being forced to work by their families, and deception by the placement agency.
Next arises the question of whether the girls were exploited in their work situations. The
common thread in their stories was that none were paid wages. The employers claimed that they
had been paying the placement agent, who in turn claimed to be sending the money to the girls’
parents. Most of the girls did not even know whether this money had been paid to their families,
with whom they were in touch only intermittently (some not at all, having lost the phone
numbers they had brought with them from the village, scribbled on fugitive scraps of paper).
Some were sure their families had not been paid. This non-payment of wages clearly made their
employment exploitative, as did their day-long schedule with no rest, including cleaning,
sweeping, cooking, washing clothes, and helping with childcare, eldercare and grocery shopping.
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After being rescued, the girls were produced beforexxv the CWC office, a dank, bureaucratic-
looking office building where they were seated across from a bench of magistrates (two men and
two women) who asked how they came to Delhi, how they were treated in the homes they
worked in, and whether they were paid any money. In response, some of the girls spoke about
being scolded harshly and even occasionally beaten by their employers. Many burst into tears as
they spoke about missing their families in the village and about not being allowed to watch
television in the homes of their employers. Their narratives were replete with examples of ill-
treatment: “Those people used to keep asking me to clean the house. I would get so tired,
running up and down,” or “actually, bhabhiji [term of fictive kinship for female employer] used
to beat me, but I didn’t say anything that day when you all came because she told me not to.” At
the CWC, where their employers couldn’t hear what they were saying, a couple of the girls
mentioned incidents that they had not even told the police-NGO team at the time they were
rescued. One of them, Alice,xxvi who had barely spoken a word at the time of her rescue other
than insisting that her employers treated her very well, suddenly started to talk openly about her
ill-treatment; “They didn’t feed me properly. Some days I wouldn’t get three meals in a day,”
and “they would lock me in the house when they went out so I couldn’t ‘roam around.’”
These work conditions, the role of the placement agency and the non-payment of wages
indicate elements of both labor trafficking per the UN’s Palermo Protocol against Trafficking in
Persons (which India ratified in 2011),xxvii and forced labor per Indian law (see next section).
However, some of the girls’ resistance to being rescued complicated the situation, reflecting a
vexed set of experiences and perceptions. Their resistance summoned the need to acknowledge
what Denise Brennan calls a “subjectivity of coercion,” i.e., that migrant workers may evaluate
exploitative work conditions by different criteria than those provided in legal definitions.xxviii
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Some girls, visually perceived by the police, NGO and CWC to be of “borderline age” (i.e.,
around eighteen), emphatically stated that they had been treated exceedingly well. One of them,
Roopa, was furious because she wanted to continue working for her employers, but now they
wouldn’t take her back. “What will you achieve by sending me back home? Can you get me a
job?” she shouted. Another girl, Asha, was so attached to her employers that she seemed severely
traumatized at the prospect of being separated from them. Outside the CWC, she refused to step
into the police jeep to be taken to a shelter pending inquiry. Accusing all present at the CWC (the
police and the NGO team) of ruining her life, she choked out her unwillingness to go anywhere
without “aunty, who had kept her so well,” referring to her female employer, who stood nearby
offering her words of comfort. A third girl, extremely reluctant to be rescued, kept worrying
about how her “aunty, who was so old, would manage without her.” Some among the NGO staff
chalked the girls’ expressions of affective attachment to their employers up to “Stockholm
Syndrome;” a pop psychology diagnosis that reflected the way the NGO staff, following the
“slavery” analogy, saw the employers as “captors.”
Whether the girls genuinely felt this affection towards their employers, or were pressured by
them to express it, was hard to tell. Their use of fictive kinship terms for their employers
resonates with the irony Rhacel Parrenas observes in the myth of being “like one of the family,”
a phrase used by both employers and domestic workers to de-emphasize servitude, but which
simultaneously works to mask inequalities and exploitation.xxix In an earlier study of the
experiences of Chicana domestic workers in the United States, Mary Romero points out that
employers’ description of domestic workers being “one of the family” carries with it a
redefinition of work obligations as family obligations and of labor for pay as “labor for love.”xxx
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Another crucial question suffusing the rescue operation and its aftermath was whether the
rescued girls were children. Coming from impoverished villages where birth registration rates
were low, none of the girls had any documentary proof of age. Visually, some looked younger
than the others. I wondered how the rescue team would determine who was a child and who was
legally a major (adult). During the rescues, the policemen used visual perceptions to gauge the
girls’ ages. Those who “appeared” to be eighteen or below (considered minors under Indian law–
see next section) were whisked away to stay overnight at a shelter before being produced before
the Child Welfare Committee the next day. There was often considerable disagreement between
NGO staff who, given their agenda to rescue underage domestic workers, were more likely to
perceive a girl as below eighteen, and the police, who were less likely to do so.
The girls’ actual ages were established later through a bone ossification test at a government
hospital (per established medical jurisprudence in India). This test indicates age within a two-
year margin, rather than an exact estimation.xxxi There are other reasons why the ossification test
is not a foolproof mechanism. For example, Pooja was one of the youngest-looking girls we
rescued. Her employer had asked her to tell us she was eighteen. When the bone test results
came, her age was deemed to be eighteen to twenty, which would reduce the criminal liability of
the employer and placement agent. The NGO team was surprised, as was I, because she certainly
looked much younger. Then we remembered that her employer was a politician who had tried to
ask for a “compromise”xxxii with the NGO and police at the time of her rescue. Perhaps that
compromise was achieved later. My suggestion that this was an illicit settlement is based on
suspicion rather than concrete proof. It is intended to convey one among several factors that
render the determination of age neither easy nor reliable.
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The rescues and CWC proceedings revealed a gamut of responses to child domestic labor,
ranging from NGOs’ firm belief in rescue as a solution, to varying and even conflicting attitudes
towards rescue among different legal agents of the Indian state. The members of the Child
Welfare Committee, a judicial agency of the state, had developed a close working relationship
with NGOs. Both entities had come to depend upon each other, with NGOs being instrumental in
carrying out rescues and the CWC often (but not always) ordering the rescues, holding the post-
rescue hearings and deciding the fate of those rescued. On the other hand, the Delhi police, who
were responsible for implementing the relevant laws and without whom rescues could not be
legally conducted, evinced a strong skepticism about the concepts of labor exploitation and child
labor, and of rescue as a solution.
Tensions between the police and the NGO staff became increasingly evident and often
confrontational. NGO representatives frequently voiced concerns that the police did not take
action in these cases, did not take exploitation seriously, or were not well versed in Indian labor
laws. The police, for their part, voiced their dislike of NGOs, whom they described as money-
making enterprises (In Hindi, paise ka khel) that received foreign donations based on how many
children they rescued.xxxiii
When the girls were produced before the CWC, the Committee had asked for the NGO report,
which they relied upon heavily in these cases. The police sub-inspector on our team handling the
case fumbled around, saying he didn’t have it, while the NGO representative insisted it was
there. A CWC member finally asked for the file in the sub-inspector’s hands, where the report
was found. Whether or not the sub-inspector was deliberately hiding the report, I cannot say.
This was certainly the belief in the NGO camp, in light of the rather heated discussion we had
had in the police jeep on the way to the CWC. Reading the NGO’s report, the sub-inspector had
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asked why it said that the girls had been scolded and beaten. We replied that that was what the
girls had told us. “Kuch case nahin banega,” he had said [“this won’t amount to a case”].
The sub-inspector took it upon himself to explain to me (new to the politics of rescue) the
ulterior motives and inefficiencies of NGOs. Knowing that I was volunteering with the NGO for
my research and was thus an external and temporary (and, as he frequently pointed out, unpaid)
addition to their team, he never missed an opportunity to alert me to instances during the rescue
and post-rescue procedures when the NGO could have been at fault, deftly dodging my questions
about some of the police’s actions (or lack thereof).
On a different day, when girls rescued by another team were taken to the CWC, I managed to
make it there only towards the end of the proceedings. Shaking his head in amusement, the sub-
inspector informed me that I had “missed the climax.” I learned that the CWC was upset with the
NGO because of a discrepancy between its report and the account one of the girls was giving.
The girl had apparently told the CWC that she did not wish to go back home to her village as her
father was abusive, while the NGO report based on what she said during her rescue stated that
the girl wanted to return to her parents. I reached in time to overhear frenzied phone
conversations between the NGO representative and its head office as they tried to figure out
whether this was a clerical error, or whether the girl had changed her mind. “Please mention this
in your study,” the sub-inspector told me with a gleeful smile, and I do so (as I did the incident of
the missing NGO report) to illustrate the vexed politics of a police-NGO intervention, rather than
to evaluate what actually happened or to attribute fault.
Besides their dislike of NGOs, the police often articulated their disapproval of the conceptual
framework of labor exploitation that was the premise behind rescues. The police on the rescue
team I was on talked about domestic labor, even by children, as an accepted fact of urban living
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and rural poverty. On the first day of the raids, the sub-inspector turned around in the police jeep
and said, “Ek baat bataoon, madam, aap inki exploitation badha rahe hain” [Let me tell you,
madam, you are increasing [these children’s] exploitation]. “By working in these homes, at least
they have a roof above their heads,” he continued. Another policeman added, “I just hope mujhe
in bachchon ki baddua na lag jaaye” [I just hope these children won’t curse me for doing this”].
The police seemed to take the girls’ narratives about being scolded or slapped by their employers
quite lightly, quipping, “Oh come on, even one’s mother would scold that much.” They did not
view these instances as exploitative, while the NGO and CWC did.
In response, after reminding him that the raid was initiated on the order of the Child Welfare
Committee, a determined young NGO employee, fresh out of social work school, went on to say
that the girls had been treated like slaves, and asked the police why they couldn’t see that.
“‘Slavery?’ ‘Slavery’ kya hai? Uski koi definition hai Indian law mein?” [‘Slavery?’ What is
‘Slavery’? Is it defined in Indian law?] was the sub-inspector’s response. Opening the copy of
the IPC (Indian Penal Code) that I (as a novice still learning these laws) was carrying with me,
we pointed out the relevant sections. The colonial-era Code specified criminal penalties against
the following acts associated with slavery: “Buying or disposing of any person as a slave”
(Section 370) and “Habitual dealing in slaves” (Section 371). “I know these sections,” he said,
“But do they define what a slave is? How can you call this slavery when there is no definition?”
For the NGO, the treatment of the girls amounted to slavery. But slavery was not, as the police
pointed out, defined in the Indian criminal law that could have been applied to the situation,
making it difficult to enforce.
We then drew the police’s attention to the fact that the girls had not been paid anything.
The sub-inspector conceded (albeit grudgingly) that the non-payment of wages was the only
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“crime” that the employers and placement agent could be prosecuted for. In the First Information
Reportxxxiv of the case against the placement agency, the police applied the Juvenile Justice Act,
penalizing the exploitation of a child employee, and the Child Labour Act, penalizing the
employment of children in hazardous occupations. NGO workers also urged them to add on
relevant sections of the Bonded Labour Act, a progressive postcolonial legislation that
criminalizes the non-payment of minimum wage and prescribes the release and rehabilitation of
bonded labor and the payment of restitution (see next section).
In response, the policeman scoffed, “We are all bonded labor, then–me, you,” implying that
none of us were adequately compensated for our labor. The enforcement of the Bonded Labour
Act has been weak, its progressive intent muffled by state indifference and a lack of punitive
action against offenders.xxxv This was reflected in the policeman’s levity at the suggestion that
the rescued girls were bonded labor. “You are a volunteer, yet you have been working on these
raids with us. Are you paid anything? Is that not exploitation?” he asked me, dismissing my
counter-arguments about the privileged position from which I was doing my research, and the
non-monetary benefits I was deriving from my participation. “Yes, madam, why doesn’t the
NGO pay you, after all they get so many dollars from abroad,” his colleague chimed in. I did not
initially read the policemen’s comments beyond the registers of humor and sarcasm, and perhaps
even some genuine concern at my “exploitation.” Later, as I listened to the sub-inspector talk
more about his own unremitting work hours and unending paperwork, I realized that he was also
alluding to the state undervaluing police work as labor.xxxvi
The police’s reluctance to conduct rescues stemmed in part from the long hours of work
involved, which in their view did not merit going beyond the bare minimum required of them.
An especially telling example of the acrimony between the NGO and the police in this regard
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was the rescue of those young domestic workers whose names were not on the list provided by
the Child Welfare Committee. In some of the homes we raided, the girls the placement agency
had sent no longer worked there and had been replaced by another domestic worker sent by
another placement agency or the kin of other part-time domestic help the household had. These
“replacements” also appeared very young and the NGO representatives were keen to rescue
them. However, the police we were with were most hesitant to do so. They wanted to complete
the quota of work that had been allotted to them from the list, rather than pursue cases that could
potentially entail similar exploitative conditions, but were not on the list. Rescuing the
“replacements” entailed coordinating with the local police for that neighborhood (the police we
were with belonged to an elite investigation unit) and would thus take longer. “You can come
back and rescue them later,” they suggested jocularly to the NGO. When assigned to a different
police team during this rescue operation, the young NGO worker who had argued with the police
about “slavery” in the jeep had encountered a “replacement” domestic worker who had reported
being sexually abused by her employer. The feisty and tenacious young woman had managed to
rescue this domestic worker through the local police after heated arguments with the police from
the investigation unit.
The time taken up by post-rescue procedures was another cause of complaint amongst the
police. After the girls were produced before the Child Welfare Committee, they had to be taken
to a government hospital for a mandatory medical examination, and then to a shelter where they
would stay until their parents could come to Delhi and apply to the CWC for their custody. The
police had to submit and fill out a considerable amount of paperwork at the hospital and shelter,
which took a great deal of time. The NGO representatives also accompanied them and waited
alongside, updating their supervisors about the developments and delays over their cellphones.
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The medical examination was an especially lengthy process, more because of the bureaucracy
involved and less because of the duration of the actual examination. Our team usually spent
entire evenings after rescues waiting around at government hospitals. It took hours to locate the
relevant medical officers and doctors to order and conduct the examination, which usually
entailed a perfunctory visual examination to check for signs of physical injury, but sometimes
(depending on the doctor) entailed asking the girls detailed questions about their menstrual
cycles and having them take pregnancy tests. “I don’t mind rescuing boys, it’s so much easier,
make me rescue any number of them and I won’t complain,” remarked the sub-inspector, “but
with girls–look how much time we have to spend!”
The young NGO workers’ determination to carry out the rescues, in sharp contrast to the
police’s reluctance, stemmed in part from the job description (such as “Intervention officer”) the
NGO had assigned to them, and in part from their own class and educational backgrounds and
personal commitments to social justice. These young women (and a small percentage of men)
were between eighteen and twenty-five years old. They were either recent graduates of colleges
offering social work majors, or interns pursuing undergraduate degrees in social work. The
junior NGO workers were, despite the police’s assumptions of the NGO benefitting from foreign
donations, earning very modest salaries. The interns were unpaid, and would receive certificates
from the NGO as one of the requisites for their college degrees. Had the police known what the
young NGO workers were paid (or that some were unpaid interns), they would have likely
bracketed these NGO workers in the same category as what they perceived as my own
“exploited” labor. These young women were from mostly middle and occasionally upper middle
class backgrounds.xxxvii Most lived with their parents in Delhi and a small percentage were from
other states in India, who were pursuing their education in Delhi and staying in “”paying guest”
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accommodations (rented rooms). Because of their young age and family backgrounds, they were
not the sole or main bread-winners for their families. They were just starting out as professional
social workers who were mainly earning for themselves and would no doubt eventually go on to
comparatively better-paid positions at other foreign-funded NGO’s, UN agencies, and so on.
Whether or not they bought into the global “slavery” discourse was unclear, nor had most of
them known much about or worked on the issue of human trafficking before joining the NGO,
but they shared a commitment to social justice issues, especially related to women and children.
From my conversations with these young women, I gleaned that they viewed participating in
rescue operations as a way to do something to help impoverished children. Their own childhoods
had not been spent working, but rather at school or at play, and they felt deeply concerned for
those whose childhoods lacked these opportunities. These backgrounds and motivations set the
young NGO workers apart from the police in the way they viewed the role of the placement
agency, the culture of servitude, and the exploitative possibilities of domestic work.
To complete the story, ultimately, the CWC “restored” nine of the rescued girls (whom the
bone ossification test deemed to be eighteen or younger) to their natal families, and allowed
those deemed above eighteen to work. The “restoration” involved the girls’ parents or elder
sibling having to make a long, expensive, and inconvenient trip to Delhi from their villages to
claim custody. Talking to the girls’ relatives at the CWC, we learnt that it was ironically the
placement agent, Bansi Lal, out on bail after his arrest, who arranged for their arrival and stay in
Delhi to take custody of the girls. Bansi Lal was a short, thin man wearing a gold chain around
his neck and a confused smile on his face as he stood next to his wife, who also worked with him
in the placement agency. One of the NGO interns and I spoke to the couple as they mingled with
the girls’ parents outside the CWC office. The intern asked why they had brought the girls (and
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one boy-who turned out to be Bansi’s own nephew) to work in Delhi. “I don’t know what I did
wrong,” Bansi Lal replied. “They are so poor, the parents send them to me, we find them jobs.
They get food to eat.” He insisted that he paid their families, who had given him a commission.
The CWC asked the girls’ parents whether they had received any money from the placement
agency as their daughters’ work wages. To this question, nearly all of them, some of whom
spoke only broken Hindi, responded they had just been paid Rs. 25,000 (approximately $405)
recently. Having seen Bansi Lal hobnobbing with both the parents and the employers outside the
CWC office, the CWC members chose to treat this acknowledgement of payment as a lie. A
member of the committee bellowed angrily at the police for allowing Bansi Lal to interact with
the girls’ families. “Why have you brought this man here today? And why have you not
separated him from the families? He has influenced and tutored everyone! It seems that the
police are in cahoots with him! [In Hindi, lagta hai police mili hui hai iske saath!]” The CWC
and the NGO were both convinced of the police’s complicity with the placement agent as well as
the employers. Whether this was so, and whether the parents had been tutored or influenced by
the police, Bansi Lal or the employers, it was hard to tell. The CWC hearings were suffused with
these forms of uncertainty and suspicion.
The members of the CWC, one middle-aged man in particular, took the exploitation of the
girls very seriously and loudly scolded the employers of those who looked especially young.
Pooja’s employer was one of them, before her age was deemed to be above eighteen (see p. 12-
13). “You didn’t see her and figure out how young she is? You will send your own son to
Oxford or Cambridge I am sure. Did you educate this girl?” the CWC member shouted. He
severely rebuked another employer, a woman who said she was a counselor specializing in child
development, for employing child labor when she should have known better. The woman replied
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that she thought the girl was eighteen (based on the contract the placement agency had signed
with employers which declared each of the rescued girls to be eighteen or above).
The CWC decided to make the employers pay a restitution amount towards the girls’
rehabilitation, calculated at the minimum wage in Delhi based on how long the girls had worked
for them. The employers protested, claiming that they had already paid the salary due to the girls
to the placement agent, per the contract. With no immediate proof available of such payment, the
CWC directed the police to investigate the matter and have Bansi Lal return the amount to the
employers if this claim were found to be true. The criminal case against Bansi Lal was a separate
procedure, to be investigated by the police and tried in a criminal court. This was outside the
jurisdiction of the CWC, which was responsible for the rehabilitation of exploited children (as
part of which it ordered restitution payment). The police were displeased with the CWC’s
decision to make the employers pay up and sympathized with the employers, pointing out that
they had, after all, paid the placement agency; why must they have to pay up again? They did not
ultimately proceed with a criminal case against the employers.
The employers brought bank drafts that they gave the girls’ families in the presence of the
CWC. The families were in turn instructed to deposit these drafts in bank accounts in their
daughters’ names. They were also made to sign undertakings that they would admit the girls to
school once they took them back to the village, and would not “re-employ” them. Ironically, an
NGO representative saw one girl’s family hand the bank draft back to the employer outside the
gates of the CWC. Perhaps they settled for less money or for a deferred payment. One can only
surmise. As with the age determination test and the parents’ claim that they were paid, it was
clear that some negotiations or “compromise” (see p. 12) took place outside the realm of the law,
or perhaps, were unwittingly enabled by it, undermining the efficacy of rescue.
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Another aspect of the post-rescue procedures that called the rescue model of intervention
against exploited labor into question was the girls’ being placed at a shelter run by a local
women’s group until their age was determined and their parents came to take their custody. The
time lapse between their rescue and “restoration” (the legal term for returning them to their
parents) was over a month and a half. The age determination process would have taken even
longer, had the CWC not intervened to pressure the government hospital to speed up the tests.
When our team visited the girls at the shelter, they would beg us to have them “released” to their
parents or even to send them back to work, to prevent their having to while away their days at the
shelter. Alice, the girl who had described how her employers made her clean the house,
repeatedly voiced her frustrations at the legal process by calling it a museebat [calamity] that was
worse than working at her employers’ house. “See this is why we don’t like to do these rescues,”
the police said. “Is anyone benefiting from them?” [“Isse kisi ka faayda ho raha hai kya?”]
The politics of the rescue operation evince both the glaring differences between NGO and
police approaches to exploitative labor practices, and the problematic aspects of rescue as an
effective solution to young migrant labor doing domestic work for no wages. In the next section,
I examine the laws against labor exploitation in the Indian context, to highlight their disjuncture
from the perspectives of the police enforcing these laws, and to explain their frictional
engagement with the Euro-American referent of slavery used by NGOs and their donors.
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The Indian Legal Framework on Labor
The work of donor-driven anti-trafficking NGOs in India is framed both by the contemporary
“modern-day slavery” discourse emerging from the global North (especially the U.S.) and by
postcolonial Indian laws against child labor and exploitation (one of which, the Juvenile Justice
Act, brought the CWC into being). Indian laws dealing with labor rights are comprehensive,
though their implementation has seen sharp criticism, both by the U.S. TIP Report, and by a UN-
sponsored and USAID-funded human rights report in India.xxxviii I will outline in brief those
provisions most directly relevant to the rescues I described, to situate the disagreements between
the NGO and the police, and some of the uncertainties marking the rescues.
The Indian Constitution, enacted after independence from British rule, prohibits “traffic in
human beings and begarxxxix and other forms of forced labour” (Article 23). It also prohibits the
employment of children (below age fourteen) “to work in any factory or mine or engage in any
other hazardous employment” (Article 24). These provisions are intended to protect citizens
from violations of their fundamental right against exploitation. The Constitution does not specify
the meanings of “traffic” or “forced labour.” The debates of the Constituent Assembly (the law-
makers who drafted the Constitution) on this question reflect concerns about involuntary
servitude, slavery “as it was practised in olden countries, and, until recent times, even in the so-
called civilized countries of Europe or America” and the “large-scale commercialized vice” of
“white slave traffic” that “compels women to a life of prostitution.”xl As for criminal law, the
colonial-era Indian Penal Code (IPC) of 1860 (still in force after several amendments), as the
police on the rescue team rightly pointed out, criminalizes “buying or disposing of any person as
a slave” and “habitual dealing in slaves,” but does not define slavery.
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At the time of my fieldwork in 2012, Indian law did not address “trafficking in persons,”
except in the context of “commercial sexual exploitation” in a separate statute.xli Thus, in the
case I discussed, the possibility of redress for labor exploitation under a law on “trafficking” did
not exist. In the wake of demands for criminal law reform after the public furor over the Delhi
gang-rape incident of December 2012 and the wide-ranging recommendations of the Justice
Verma Committee, the Indian Parliament amended Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code in
2013. The provision, which until then had criminalized “buying or disposing of any person as a
slave,” now largely reflects the definition of trafficking in persons in the UN Protocol (which
India ratified in 2011), and makes it an offense.xlii The colonial-era criminalization of slavery has
thus been substituted by a post-UN Protocol criminalization of trafficking, with a definition
produced through global deliberations. The replacement of the language of “slavery” with that of
trafficking in this provision of Indian law reflects the epistemological closeness between the two
concepts in the eyes of those drafting the law, as well as the political purchase of the new global
dispensation against human trafficking echoing the pervasive influence the abolition of slavery
has had on late colonial and early postcolonial law-making.
Legal provisions against forced labor have been much more explicit. Postcolonial legislation
in India has largely perceived the issue through the lens of “bonded labor” or debt-bondage
penalized under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1976.xliii In the 1980s, the
Supreme Court of India delivered two landmark judgments in petitions filed on behalf of
exploited labor by local organizations committed to civil liberties and social justice. The Court
interpreted forced and bonded labor in relation to each other, with the non-payment of minimum
wage deemed a sufficient condition to seek redress. In its 1982 judgment in People’s Union for
Democratic Rights v. Union of India, the Court ruled that a worker who was not being paid
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minimum wages would be presumed to be bonded labor (regardless of age). The following
observations of the Court are especially pertinent here,
The word ‘force’ must therefore be constructed to include not only physical or legal force but
also force arising from the compulsion of economic circumstance which leaves no choice of
alternatives to a person in want and compels him to provide labour or service even though the
remuneration received for it is less than the minimum wage.xliv
The Court expanded the definition of “bonded labor” in the 1984 case of Bandhua Mukti Morcha
v. Union of India, stating that the spirit of the Bonded Labour Act was against the continuation of
any form of forced labor and not just debt bondage.xlv Some excerpts from the judgment are
especially worth reproducing,
A bonded labourer truly becomes a slave and the freedom of a bonded labourer in the matter of
his employment and movement is more or less completely taken away and forced labour is thrust
upon him (emphasis added).
Even if the workers are not bonded in the strict sense of the term as defined in the Bonded Labour
System (Abolition) Act 1976 but they are made to provide forced labour or are consigned to a life
of utter deprivation and degradation, such a situation can be set right by the State Government.
This brief sketch instantiates how the specter of “slavery” hovers over the legal interpretations of
forced labor in India. The term remains and nebulous, yet is recognized as a
deplorable practice that India, as a progressive postcolonial nation, must obliterate.
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Historians argue that in the South Asian context, actual practices that can be construed as
akin to “slavery” are historically varied, and tied to locally specific usages, relationships, terms,
institutions and processes shifting in time rather than an overarching master narrative.xlvi Yet the
use of the term in Indian law bears the imprint of Western narratives. Historian Gyan Prakash
observes that the framing of the issue of bonded labor in postcolonial law echoes the colonial
government’s denouncement of “unfreedom” in its narrative of progressxlvii and suggests that it
is, at least in part, a legacy of colonial knowledge production. Overall, the language of the legal
provisions I have discussed suggests that in comparing local practices such as begar or bonded
labor to slavery, Indian law-makers and jurists clearly saw resonances with the image of slavery
embedded in colonial-era law and postcolonial global outlooks. In this image, the referent is
implicitly a Euro-American concept, to which certain practices in India are likened. It is
important to note, however, that this likening does not mean that Indian law conflates the
concepts of bonded labor and slavery or considers them to represent the same problem. Instead, I
suggest that postcolonial Indian law recognizes slavery as a global referent, one to which certain
exploitative practices in India bear some resonance, rather than either a stand-alone crime or an
umbrella term in the way U.S. law sees “trafficking in persons” or “modern day slavery.”
While the philosophical foundations of Indian law on slavery and bonded labor and the U.S.
law on trafficking partially share a common referent, the concepts’ translations into actionable
legal provisions are quite different in the two distinct socio-legal contexts. The U.S.-led anti-
trafficking campaign comes close to conflating bonded labor in India with slavery, with the 2010
TIP report juxtaposing images of an 1819 bill of sale of a slave in Virginia with a 2007 release
certificate of a bonded laborer in India under the heading “Bought and Released: Documents of
Slavery.”xlviii However, Indian law has taken on exploitative work conditions in the context of
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forced labor explicitly, as compared to its nebulous treatment of the idea of slavery, which
fortified the police’s reluctance to intervene (see p. 15-16). In the case I described, of course, the
police did not want to implement the comparatively well-defined provisions of the Bonded Labor
Act either (see p. 16). To situate their annoyance at the presumptions of NGOs and their donors,
their sense of exploitation of their own underpaid labor and their sympathy, and possible
“compromise” with the girls’ employers, the next section will explore labor exploitation beyond
gaps in the implementation of laws, by framing domestic work within socio-economic
vulnerabilities and negotiations that exceed the possibilities of rescue.
Like forced labor, Indian law deals with the issue of child labor comprehensively, and in
doing so, recognizes the need to use different age standards than more “developed” countries.
Significantly, the ILO recognizes India not only as one of the countries with the highest
incidence of child labor, but also one with among the strongest civil society movements against
child labor,xlix with the work of child rights activists like 2014 Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi
preceding the current crop of U.S.-funded anti-trafficking NGOs (to which Satyarthi’s NGO also
now belongs).l The ILO Convention on the Minimum Age for Admission to Employment and
Work recognizes the need for different standards for “developing” countries with regard to the
minimum age at which children can start work.li Like other South Asian countries, Indian law
treats any worker below the age of fourteen as child labor, reflecting specific cultural and
economic understandings of childhood and labor.lii The Child Labour (Prohibition and
Regulation) Act of 1986 prohibits the employment of children below fourteen in certain
“hazardous” occupations and processes, and regulates the conditions of other kinds of work in
which children can be employed. It defines a child as a “person who has not yet completed
fourteen years of age.” A 2006 amendment to this legislation includes domestic work in the list
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of hazardous industries in which children below fourteen cannot be employed. Most recently, a
proposal to amend the Act to ban all forms of work (including domestic work) for children
under fourteen, while continuing to permit “adolescents” between fourteen and eighteen to work
in non-hazardous occupations, was approvedliii in late August 2012, a week before the rescues I
described, but had not yet come into force. ︎︎︎
NGOs in Delhi often voiced their frustrations about the Child Labour Act being “weak and
ineffective,” due to its recognition of fourteen as the minimum age for entry into work, its
relatively weak punitive provisions, and absence of rehabilitation provisions. They placed greater
reliance on the more recent Juvenile Justice Act (2000), which they considered stronger and
more effective.liv It prescribes punishment for “whoever ostensibly procures a juvenile or child
for the purpose of any hazardous employment, keeps him in bondage and withholds his earnings
or uses such earning for his own purposes.” The “JJ Act,” as it was called in everyday NGO and
police parlance, defines a child as a person who has not completed eighteen years of age,
establishing the age standard higher than the Child Labour Act does. It thereby expands the
possibilities of who could be a child in need of rescue, hence its popularity with NGOs.
The co-existence of two different statutes using different age standards further complicates the
matter of determining who is or is not “child labor” (see p. 12). When we talked to the placement
agent and his wife at the Child Welfare Committee, they expressed confusion at what “child
labor” meant, based on the contrasting explanations they heard. A magistrate presiding over a
criminal case against them in another Delhi court had apparently told them that “young children
can do jhadoo-poncha (household sweeping and cleaning) but not factory work,” and that the
law treated those fourteen or below as “young children.” This explanation reflects an awareness
of the provisions of the Child Labour Act before, but not after its most recent amendments. “So
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where did this business of eighteen years come from, we don’t understand,” Bansi Lal and his
wife pondered aloud, pleading ignorance of the Juvenile Justice Act.
The ignorance they professed was somewhat suspect, given that Bansi Lal had had the girls
sign contracts saying they were eighteen years old. However, even if his confusion was mere
pretense, the NGO often reported confusion amongst police and judicial officers handling child
labor cases about the multiplicity of Indian legislations on labor exploitation, and low awareness
about their amendments.lv These thorny aspects of both the “law in books” and the “law in
action” thus shaped rescues and their aftermath, complicating the NGOs U.S.-driven anti-
trafficking agenda and the CWC’s concern about the care and protection of children.
Lastly, despite the vast prevalence of domestic labor in India, there is no federal legal
framework yet in place regulating domestic work or protecting domestic workers, increasing
their vulnerability to abuse.lvi Anti-trafficking NGOs, trade unions, labor and child rights
activists and church-affiliated organizations have been pushing for this to change. There is now a
draft National Policy which suggests fixing minimum wages for domestic workers and regulated
work hours, among other measures,lvii but its fate remains uncertain.
Domestic Work and Child Labor in India: Contextualizing Exploitation and Agency
The surprise of the employers, and the reluctance and resistance of the police and some of the
rescued girls themselves at being removed from exploitative work conditions summon the need
to understand domestic work, child labor and trafficking in terms of the alternative systems of
meaning that rescue operations are seeking to destabilize. My intention is not to condone labor
exploitation, but to explain the socio-economic conditions and cultural practices that framed
resistance to rescue, and underscore its limitations as a solution.
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Hiring domestic workers has helped to ease the double burden of work inside and outside the
home that middle and upper middle class women in many upwardly mobile urban households in
India face. In heterosexual marriages and partnerships across the globe, housework still largely
falls to women. With the ample availability of impoverished migrant women and children to do
the housework, hiring a domestic worker is often an upwardly mobile career woman’s only ticket
to a less burdensome life. U.S. feminist Barbara Ehrenreich explains how men’s continued
abdication from domestic responsibilities in the U.S. in the ‘60s and ‘70s (as more women joined
the white collar workforce) resulted in the employment of poor immigrant women of color as
housemaids.lviii Feminist scholars of globalization have argued that global cities are built “on the
backs” of immigrant women domestic workerslix who do the “dirty work.”lx In Indian cities,
Nivedita Menon points out, increased access to education and employment for many women
from the higher socio-economic strata has not changed the sexual division of labor within the
home.lxi These households address the problem by hiring (frequently ill-paid or unpaid) rural
migrant women and children from lower castes and classes for domestic work.
The export-led growth of the Indian economy in the past two decades has led to the
expansion of an upwardly mobile middle class, and concomitantly deepened income inequality
within the country. The rural working poor who have not benefited from the liberalization of the
Indian economy post-1990 are faced with a loss of livelihood, job insecurity and welfare
cutbacks, migrating to cities in search of employment.lxii Domestic work is one among few
employment opportunities for “unskilled” female labor from impoverished and patriarchal rural
families that depend on their labor, but do not expend resources on educating them.lxiii
When the households of the privileged become the workplaces of less privileged women and
children, living and working conditions depend on employers’ personal whims, and remain
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unregulated in a context where unionization is difficult (with the place of work and residence
being the same for full-time domestic workers). Low wages, heavy and incessant workloads and
long and unspecified work hours are common. Domestic work is marked both by socio-economic
marginalization and deep-rooted cultural practices that have normalized the hierarchies of the
employer-“servant” relationship.
Sociologists Ray and Qayum describe as an ingrained “culture of servitude” so essential to
urban Indian life that its practices are taken for granted.lxiv This culture of servitude perpetuates
gender, class and caste inequalities and forms of discrimination that even those who feel they
treat domestic workers reasonably well might not question. In her documentary Lakshmi and Me,
Mumbai-based filmmaker Nishtha Jain provides a deeply self-critical engagement with the
intrinsically unequal relationship that privileged women like herself have with the domestic
workers they employ.lxv In metropolitan Indian cities, though caste politics are not absent from
public places, caste hierarchies are enacted in the private realm of the household in ways that are
less publicly acceptable in offices and other workplaces. Everyday practices of segregation–be it
where the domestic worker eats, sleeps or sits, or which dishes and entrances she uses–are
unquestioned manifestations of caste taboos, often masked in the name of hygiene. The
employer-“servant” relationship thus retains vestiges of historical practices of discrimination.
This culture of servitude, combined with the lack of regulation of domestic work which
remains part of the informal, “unorganized sector” in India, has meant that despite employers’
increased affluence, domestic workers are paid far below the minimum wage. In conducting
rescues, NGOs and Child Welfare Committees come up against practices and relationships that
are taken for granted (even by the police) as a way for employers to cope with middle-income
life and for poor rural migrants to fend for themselves and their families. While ridden with
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exploitation, this “culture of servitude” is more complicated in its economic, historical and
cultural specificities than presumptive appellations of “modern-day slavery” accommodate.lxvi
At the time of my research, the urgency amongst the CWC and NGOs working on child labor
and trafficking to rescue domestic workers was driven by two intersecting developments that
were seen to render the long-standing exploitative possibilities of the employer-“servant”
relationship especially egregious. One was the growth of placement agencies profiting from the
vulnerabilities of poor rural families through deceptive means (see p. 8-9). The second
development, which was evident during my fieldwork but intensified thereafter, was the
increasing number of reports in the Delhi media about the grave abuse (economic, physical and
sexual) of young domestic workers by middle-class employers. A disturbing example in 2012
was a doctor couple who went away on holiday leaving a thirteen-year-old maid locked in the
house with only scraps to eat.lxvii More cases came to light later, including a multinational
executive who physically assaulted her teenage domestic help and kept her semi-naked to
prevent her escape,lxviii a flight attendant who allegedly assaulted and frequently locked her
underage maid in her apartment,lxix and the brutal abuse and murder of a domestic worker,
allegedly at the hands of her employers.lxx In almost all these cases, the domestic workers (often,
but not always, teenagers) were brought from villages by a placement agency.
Grievous physical abuse had indeed been reported by some of the rescued girls in other
recent rescues the NGO I worked with had conducted. Sexual abuse was also reported by a girl
found by another team during the rescue operations I described, though not in the rescues I
observed. The rise in such incidents of abuse and the growth of placement agencies generated
great concern among anti-trafficking NGOs and child rights and labor activists in India about the
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exploitative possibilities of a form of employment already embedded in deep-seated socio-
economic hierarchies and inequities.
As for child labor, its high prevalence in varied sectors of the Indian economy is
recognized by both government and NGO sources. The official census of 2001 estimates the
number of child laborers (across all forms of employment) at 12.59 million in 2001,lxxi with
NGOs citing a figure closer to 60 million.lxxii The ILO estimates that 20 percent of all Indian
children under fourteen years of age working outside their family home do domestic work.lxxiii
Sending children to work is a survival strategy impoverished families adopt to cope with
subsistence living, low wages, job insecurity, high unemployment and inadequate welfare
provisions. Indian social scientists argue that poverty, combined with weak educational
infrastructure and quality in rural areas, and the government’s neoliberal export-led economic
growth model where welfare has taken a backseat, pushes children to work.lxxiv The lines
between voluntary migration, migration to help one’s family survive, and trafficking are often
blurred, as the girls’ narratives in the case I described illustrated.
To understand why rescues ultimately serve as short-sighted solutions to such cases, one
must expand a critique of the irreconcilable global discourse of “modern-day slavery” in a local
context. It is well worth examining the universalized (or rather, Eurocentric modernist)
conceptions of childhoodlxxv at the core of rescues, the paternalist legal response of the Indian
state to female migrants that presumes their movement to be coercedlxxvi and seeks to “reinsert”
women and children back into the family,lxxvii and the question of a child’s consent that factors in
what Brennan persuasively terms the “subjectivity of coercion.”lxxviii
In this endeavor, I owe a debt to Mariana Valverde’s call to socio-legal scholars to pay
attention to the way all legal actors ascertain and negotiate “truths.”lxxix For Valverde, this
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involves taking seriously not only expert knowledge, but also the “commonsense, job-based
knowledge” of “lowly” officials, and to recognize the porous boundary between the two. The
perspectives offered by the police are therefore crucial.
I do not consider the police’s “common sense” to be somehow more truthful than the NGO’s
or Child Welfare Committee’s concerns. I recognize both humor and self-indulgence in the sub-
inspector’s comments, and view his reluctance to participate in rescues as partly the indifference
of someone who himself felt underpaid for his labor. However, these reasons are precisely why it
is important to pay heed to the police’s perception that the labor practices the CWC and NGO
saw as exploitative were the inevitable lot of poor rural migrant domestic workers, better than
their lives in the village, and reflective of a systemic malaise of unfair pay structures and labor
practices that lower-level police also bore the brunt of.lxxx I encountered different shades of this
attitude towards labor exploitation among police personnel across other cases I observed in
Delhi. Two of these were situations involving (visibly) very young children whose exploitative
employment was reported to the NGO by concerned neighbors. The police personnel the NGO
approached at local police stations conducted the rescues only after much cajoling by NGO staff.
I do not endorse the police’s acceptance of the conditions the girls worked in, but consider it
worth taking into account why merely rescuing the poor from exploitative labor situations made
little sense to them. The police, more so than the NGO or the CWC, seemed to recognize the
agency, both in poverty and in childhood, that drives people to migrate to work in cities in order
to survive. An example from a different fieldwork moment illustrates this point further.
When I went to interview an anti-trafficking police officer at a bustling police station in
the heart of Kolkata, she was trying to console a woman who sat sobbing loudly on the
floor of her office. The police officer explained to me that the woman had been (wrongly,
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she added) arrested as a suspected trafficker. The woman and her husband were
intercepted at the railway station as they were about to take a group of girls (some
underage) to work as maids in Delhi. The couple and the girls came from a cyclone-
affected region in West Bengal. The police officer had sent a team to Delhi to investigate,
and learned that the couple was working with a maids placement agency, and had placed
the girls in “good homes.” Sensing my barely-masked surprise at her evident sympathy
for the alleged traffickers, she went on to say, “Come on, you are Indian, you can
understand–these people are poor and illiterate, they have been affected by Cyclone
Aila…after all, they are helping the girls get jobs. Poverty is the cause for all this, until
you generate employment, no rules or Acts can stop this.” She emphasized that this
situation was different from “immoral” trafficking where girls were forced into
prostitution and should be rescued. “You have to be a little open-minded,” she told me
[Excerpt from author’s field notes, July 2010].
Indeed, in the rescues I described in the first section, the Delhi police sub-inspector who was
annoyed at being sent to rescue the girls from domestic work had also pointed out that their
situation was better than “those girls in G.B. Road (New Delhi’s red light area).” “Aapko pata
hai kya haalat hoti hai unki? Hum bayaan bhi nahin kar sakte” [“Do you know how those girls
are treated? I can’t even describe it”], he had told me. Both police interlocutors were thus more
willing to respond to sex trafficking over situations that might entail labor trafficking or labor
exploitation. Rejecting the global imperative against human trafficking, and reluctant to enforce
domestic legislation against forced labor and child labor, they invoked a moral framework
wherein ending up as domestic labor appears a better situation than ending up in a brothel, even
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if the means by which someone was brought into either situation could be similar. In the example
I gave from Kolkata, the police officer drew a distinction between what she assumed to be my
globally mediated understanding of labor trafficking, and her own knowledge (that she believed I
ought also to have), of the socio-economic exigencies that poor rural migrant labor face. She
implied that “an Indian” would inherently have a different understanding of the relationship
between poverty, migration and trafficking than what global anti-trafficking campaigns assume.
The local police’s unwillingness to implement Indian laws addressing forced labor was
certainly a dereliction of duty. However, their comments partly accord with scholarly critiques of
anti-trafficking discourse prevalent in the global North for not responding to structural conditions
for labor migration, and conflating poverty with a lack of agency all too easily.lxxxi Rescues,
foregrounded as a global anti-trafficking response, assume that the “freedom” of the exploited
domestic worker lies in sending her back to her family. Some of the girls in the case I described
did not want to be rescued from exploitative work situations, and were willing to do domestic
work (“for no pay,” as the NGO kept reminding them), as long as their daily needs were met.
They considered this a better situation than the dire poverty (and in at least one case, abusive
conditions) of their families in the village. Indeed, the placement agent had deceived them into
believing their families were being paid for their work. Rescue is thus premised on a limited
view of the problem that does not address the structural realities of poverty because of which
people (including children) work (or are sent to work). Removing children from work to the
temporary custody of the state and the eventual custody of their families, rescue operations skirt
around the socio-economic conditions propelling migration, trafficking, and labor exploitation.
Social scientists studying children in the sex trade make similar arguments about childhood,
poverty and work, highlighting cultural differences in political and historical conceptions of
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childhood. Heather Montgomery shows how the idealization of an “innocent,” work-free
childhood is a Western bourgeois construct that does not always match other cultural and socio-
economic contexts.lxxxii Julia O’Connell Davidson argues against treating adulthood and
childhood as absolutely separate categories of experience, when in reality an adult and child
might be subject to the same structural “unfreedoms.”lxxxiii
Commenting on the issue of child marriage, Indian feminist scholars have pondered the
challenges of recognizing both the agency and subjectivity of children (especially female
children), and their mediation by family and community expectations.lxxxiv Rajeswari Sunder
Rajan urges against exalting the agency of a child as free choice or consent, explaining it instead
as a “heavily compromised pact with the circumstances in which she was enmeshed.”lxxxv While
recognizing that children often have less power than adults to shape their circumstances, Purnima
Mankekar questions interventions that allow the state to invade the sphere of the family “on
behalf of children” all too easily. lxxxvi These observations speak to the complexities and
constraints shaping children’s agency in the context of work and migration (inextricably
entwined with vulnerability to trafficking). As I have described, these complexities are further
compounded by the difficulty of ascertaining (visually, legally, or medically) who is a child.
These critiques in the contexts of child prostitution and child marriage help call into
question the myopic protectionism of the Indian state as represented by the CWC, as well as the
short-sighted emphasis on rescues by global anti-trafficking initiatives in setting priorities for the
NGOs they fund. Rescues are neither a province of the state, nor of NGOs alone, but part of a
new mode of neoliberal government where NGO’s increasingly participate in a field of agencies
mediating between the poor, state institutions and transnational and multilateral entities.lxxxvii
The post-rescue solution entails returning children to their families who, though
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reprimanded for facilitating exploitation in the first place, are treated as the custodians to whom
the responsibility that the state and NGO temporarily took on can be returned. Indeed, those who
are rescued themselves often express a desire for such a return, especially after languishing in
state shelters. However, as Sunder Rajan observes in the case of child marriage, ultimately,
neither the state nor impoverished families are able to make adequate provisions for the financial
security, education, safety and well-being of the girl child.lxxxviii In the cases I observed, rescues,
at best, temporarily addressed one exploitative dimension of the larger structural precarity to
which the rescued were returned. Admonishing families for sending their children to work, and
having them sign undertakings that gloss over their financial situations render the burden of
poverty even heavier. Indeed, the CWC was threatening to penalize impoverished families for
situations that state agencies, NGO’s, or foreign donors have scarcely been able to ameliorate.
In a context where a culture of servitude feeds on income inequality, the blurred line between
volitional migration and trafficking, uncertainties with regard to rescued domestic workers’ age
and consent, the subjectivity of coercion, and the domestic worker’s families’ willingness to
“compromise” with the placement agent or employer bring the limitations of rescue into sharp
relief. How, if at all, can those who wish to intervene “on behalf of” unpaid young domestic
workers attempt to overcome the shortsightedness of rescues?
Given the complexities of the problem, both socially and legally, there are no easy solutions.
Rescues do bring exploitative situations to light that are easily kept hidden within the walls of
middle-class domesticity. It was clear from the rescues I described that some young domestic
workers did not want to work and wanted to go home to their families. By themselves, however,
rescues hit a dead end, and do nothing to alleviate poverty. For instance, pushing for better labor
regulations and protections for “borderline age” migrant workers would likely serve them better
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than obliterating the possibility of their employment altogether. Ordering restitution payments,
while well-intentioned, can achieve little without improvements in the educational infrastructure
and standard of living in villages where rural migrant workers come from. For effective
interventions against labor exploitation, quick fix protectionist solutions will need to give way to
more comprehensive, long-term engagements with the populations they seek to assist. The
regulation of placement agencies, pursued by anti-trafficking NGOs, is one useful step in this
direction, if done in the spirit of facilitating safe migration and not discouraging migration tout
court. Besides this, regulations specifying safe working conditions for domestic workers (see p.
29) have the potential to translate better into police-speak (and therefore a greater possibility of
being enforced) than what are perceived as abstract principles such as “slavery” embedded in
“NGO talk” and vaguely worded laws. A domestic workers’ collective in Bangalore, for
instance, is pushing for such legislation.lxxxix Engaging with such efforts, however, requires a
willingness on the part of NGO’s and state agencies to engage with domestic workers as political
beings, rather than the depoliticized image of slaves passively awaiting redemption.xc
Conclusions
For NGOs, pursuing a global anti-trafficking agenda, and for Child Welfare Committees,
trying to bring legal redress to “children in need of care and protection,” laws are important
instruments of change. The possibilities and efficacy of law are, however, ultimately shaped by
the uncertainties and inconsistencies built into legal definitions and procedures, and the political
economy and socio-cultural context in which laws operate.
An anthropological lens reveals the nuances of a socio-legal context in which a long-
standing culture of servitude and entrenched socio-economic vulnerabilities coexist uneasily with
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donor-driven NGO agendas, progressive postcolonial labor laws and current U.S.-driven legal
advocacy against trafficking. This complex terrain of frictional encounters between the global
and the local, police and NGOs, determines and complicates the meanings that trafficking,
slavery, forced labor and child labor acquire as concepts and legal categories.
In the realm of law, variant interpretations are not merely a matter of discord between global
legal instruments and the priorities of Indian law, nor do they simply reflect gaps between Indian
laws and their implementation by the police, but also reside in the multiple and overlapping
legislations dealing with forced labor in India, their construction of different age standards, and
arbitrary levels of awareness of their existence and amendments amongst judges and police.
On the ground, rescues and subsequent legal procedures were riddled with tensions between
the anti-trafficking NGO and its deployment of the language of slavery and bonded labor, the
short-sighted, “quick fix” protectionism of the CWC, the police’s rejection of these frameworks,
and the vexed negotiations that poor, migrant, sometimes underage, domestic workers and their
families make. Such incongruous perspectives are often suppressed in heavily mediatized global
humanitarian narratives about “modern-day slavery,” yet always shape moments of intervention.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Sally Merry for her helpful suggestions on reworking a shorter paper into this
longer article, Carol Wang and Wenrui Chen for their valuable edits of an early draft, Prabha
Kotiswaran for inviting me to present an earlier draft to an engaged and supportive group of
interdisciplinary scholars and activists at a workshop on “Shaping the Definition of Trafficking
in the Palermo Protocol” at King’s College, and Mike Dottridge, Julia O’Connell Davidson and
Beatrice Jauregui for useful inputs along the way that helped me develop my arguments.
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Notes
i See Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum, Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in
India. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
ii See, generally, Nicholas Kristof’s columns on trafficking in the New York Times, or CNN’s
Freedom Project dedicated to “Ending Modern-Day Slavery,”
http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/ (accessed
December 15, 2014).
iii In her forthcoming book on human rights indicators, Sally Merry discusses how the TIP
reports’ ranking of countries, with repercussions of poor ranking extending to the possible
withdrawal of certain forms of financial aid, functions as an instrument of global governance that
both defines the problem and shapes the solution. See Sally E. Merry, The Seductions of
Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Violence against Women, and Human Trafficking.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
iv See the “India” narratives in the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Reports
especially from 2005 onwards available online, http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/ (accessed
December 15, 2014).
v Including all these facets, the VTVPA defines “Trafficking in persons” as the act of recruiting,
harboring, transporting, providing or obtaining a person for compelled labor or commercial sex
acts through the use of force, fraud, or coercion. The TIP report explains how the VTVPA and
UN Protocol of 2000 both “describe this compelled service using a number of different terms,
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including involuntary servitude, slavery or practices similar to slavery, debt bondage, and forced
labor” (Trafficking in Persons Report, 2013, 29, 31).
vi Janie Chuang, “Exploitation Creep and the Unmaking of Human Trafficking Law,” American
University, WCL Research Paper (2013), accessed November 29, 2014,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2315513
vii Mike Dottridge, “The Meaning of Terms in International Law referring to the forms of
Exploitation for which People are Trafficked,” Paper prepared for a Workshop on Shaping the
Definition of Trafficking in the Palermo Protocol, King’s College, London, May 7-8, 2014, 14.
viii Trafficking in Persons Report, 2011, 3.
ix For a discussion of how “white slavery” or a “traffic in women” is another, less explicit
referent here, see Karen Bravo, “Exploring the Analogy between Modern Trafficking in Humans
and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” Boston University International Law Journal 25 (2007):
209-295, passim.
x Ibid., 254.
xi Janie Chuang, “The United States as Global Sheriff: Using Unilateral Sanctions to Combat
Human Trafficking,” Michigan Journal of International Law 27 (2006): 437-494.
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xii See Sally E. Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into
Local Justice. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
xiii Aihwa Ong, “A Biocartography: Maids, Neo-Slavery, and NGOs,” in Migrations and
Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik (New
York: NYU Press, 2009), 157-183.
xiv Anna L. Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004), 1, 5.
xv Examples of such critiques include Laura Agustin, Sex at the Margins: Migration,
Labour Markets, and the Rescue Industry. New York: Zed Books, 2007; Janie Chuang,
“Rescuing Trafficking from Ideological Capture: Prostitution Reform and Anti-Trafficking
Law and Policy,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 158 (2010): 1655-1728; Gretchen
Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades Against Sex Trafficking and
the Rhetoric of Abolition,” NWSA Journal 17, no. 3, (2005): 64-87.
xvi For a description and critique of alliances formed between ‘abolitionist’ feminist and faith-
based activists and a securitized state apparatus in the United States to combat “modern-day
slavery,” see Elizabeth Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism meets Carceral Feminism: the
Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Anti-Trafficking Campaigns,” Signs 36,
no. 1 (2010): 45-71. For an account of the multi-professional collaborative alliances being
formed between police and NGOs to protect victims of sex trafficking in the Netherlands, see
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Jennifer L. Musto, “Carceral Protectionism and Multi-Professional Anti- Trafficking Human
Rights Work in the Netherlands,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 12, no. 3-4 (2010):
381-400. These critiques have been in the context of sex trafficking, the aspect of human
trafficking that has attracted the greatest media and policy attention in the past decade or so.
Concerns around labor trafficking have started to occupy some of this media and policy space
more recently, though to a lesser extent.
xvii The phrases derive from the American legal realist tradition attributed to Roscoe Pound,
“Law in Books and Law in Action,” American Law Review 44 (1910): 12-36, and subsequently
developed by a breadth of scholarly interlocutors including legal philosopher Lon Fuller,
“American Legal Realism,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review and American Law Register
82, no. 5 (1934): 429-462, and anthropologist Karl Llewellyn, “A Realistic Jurisprudence–the
Next Step,” Columbia Law Review 30 (1930): 431-465.
xviii I borrow this term (with an expanded discussion in the last section) from Mariana Valverde,
Law’s Dream of a Common Knowledge: The Cultural Lives of Law. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003).
xix A largely agrarian, landowning caste in North India with significant economic and political
status in certain states. The lower and middle rungs of the Delhi police are heavily staffed with
men (and to a smaller extent, women) of this or similar caste groups from the neighboring state
of Haryana.
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xx For a detailed account of the marginalization of Jharkhand’s indigenous tribal population and
its scarce access to development projects and resources in a newly formed state ostensibly
created to protect tribal interests, see Alpa Shah, In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous
Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India (Durham: Duke University
Press, Duke University Press, 2010).
xxi Sources for this account of placement agencies include “Country Assessment: Current Status
of Victim Service Providers and Criminal Justice Actors in India on Anti-Human Trafficking,”
(United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, New Delhi, 2013), 10;
(Dasgupta et al 2012; Dixit 2008; Joshi 2012); Debarshi Dasgupta et al, “Domestic helps: Inside
Slave City,” Outlook, April 23, 2012, accessed April 2, 2014,
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?280558; Neha Dixit, “The Nowhere Children,”
Tehelka 5, no. 43, November 1, 2008,
http://archive.tehelka.com/story_main40.asp?filename=Ne011108cover_story.asp; Mallica Joshi,
“Abject poverty at the root of trafficking,” Hindustan Times, July 22, 2012, accessed April 2,
2014, http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/abject-poverty-at-root-of-trafficking/article1-
893874.aspx.
xxii Per the provisions of the 2000 UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in
Persons, Especially Women and Children (see note 26 below), which India ratified in 2011,
available at the website of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime,
http://www.unodc.org/documents/treaties/UNTOC/Publications/TOC%20Convention/TOCeboo
k-e , accessed September 13, 2010.
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xxiii “Bill to Regulate placement agencies coming,” The Hindu, February 15, 2012, accessed April
2, 2014, http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/bill-to-regulate-placement-agencies-
coming/article2895626.ece; Ambika Pandit, “Delhi govt. drags its feet on draft bill on placement
agencies,” The Times of India, April 29, 2013, accessed April 2, 2014,
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Delhi-govt-drags-its-feet-on-draft-bill-on-
placement-agencies/articleshow/19773310.cms.
xxiv TIP report 2013,195; TIP report 2014, 203.
xxv NGOs and police described the act of bringing rescued girls before the CWC, in Indian
legalese, as “producing” them. I use this verb through the article in this context.
xxvi All names changed to protect the subjects’ identities.
xxvii The UN Protocol defines “trafficking in persons” as the recruitment, transportation, transfer,
harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of
coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of
vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a
person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. “Exploitation”
includes sexual exploitation, forced labour, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or
the removal of organs.
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xxviii Denise Brennan, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States.
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
xxix Rhacel S. Parrenas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 179-185.
xxx Mary Romero, “Not Just Like One of the Family: Chicana Domestics Establishing
Professional Relationships with Employers,” Feminist Issues 10 (2) (Fall 1990), 33-41.
xxxi Dr. Jaising P. Modi, A Textbook of Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology, 5th ed.,
edited by Justice K. Kannan and Dr. K. Mathiharan (Nagpur: LexisNexis Butterworths
Wadhwa, 2013), 247-248.
xxxii In her ethnography of rape trials, Indian anthropologist Pratiksha Baxi describes how such
settlements outside the court, while illegal, are a public secret in India, a “culture of
compromise” which in criminal trials often leads to prosecution witnesses changing their
testimonies. Pratiksha Baxi, “Justice is a Secret: Compromise in rape trials,” Contributions to
Indian Sociology 44, no. 3 (2010): 207-233.
xxxiii Rescuing a greater number of children could certainly improve an NGO’s chances of getting
funding. However, this observation greatly simplified the far from transparent politics of global
funding. The NGO I volunteered for did receive foreign funds, but the parameters of evaluation
were more complicated than the number of rescues and included their advocacy work,
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demonstrated capacity to work with the police, courts, CWCs and other state agencies, and so on,
as well as their skill at publicity and networking in the right policy and donor circles.
xxxiv A written complaint lodged with the police about the commission of a crime; the first step in
the initiation of criminal proceedings in India.
xxxv Kailash Satyarthi, 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner and long-time crusader against child labor
(whose NGO, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, receives foreign funding), laments in an op-ed titled
“Getting ready for the new law against child labour” in the national newspaper The Hindu on
September 10, 2012, that the “endemic corruption, insensitivity and indifferent attitude of the
“inspector class” is not a secret.” In a July 12, 2014 opinion piece titled “Of Human Bondage” in
the same newspaper, bureaucrat turned social activist Harsh Mander observes that the
“administration refuses to acknowledge the existence of bonded labour system.”
xxxvi Though Delhi policemen of sub-inspector rank were often from castes with political and
economic power (see note xix above), their class status and salaries are on the lower rungs of the
police bureaucracy.
xxxvii Anthropologists and other social scientists studying “middle-class” identity in India (and
elsewhere in South Asia) have emphasized its performative and discursive dimensions, given its
somewhat fluid empirical boundaries (See William Mazzarella, “Middle Class,” in Rachel
Dwyer, ed, South Asia Keywords (2005), available online at
http://d3qi0qp55mx5f5.cloudfront.net/anthrolpology/docs/mazz_middleclass online [last
accessed July 2017]; Mark Liechty, Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New
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Consumer Society. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Leela Fernandes, India’s New
Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006)). In India, “middle class” is not as much a measurable or accurate
description of an income category, as a normative standard for the acquisition of forms of capital
such as education, credentials, skills, and cultural resources (Fernandes 2006). “Middle-class” is
a category used to describe a fairly wide range of socio-economic situations in India (Jyoti Puri,
Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India. (New York: Routledge, 1999: 2)), referring to a
highly heterogeneous social group (Christiane Brosius, India’s Middle Class: New Forms of
Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity. (London: Routledge, 2010)). Multiple scholars
have recognized the existence of “lower” and “upper” middle-classes in India (see, for e.g.,
Fernandes 2006; Satish Deshpande,“The Centrality of the Middle Class,” In Contemporary
India: A Sociological View. (New Delhi: Viking, 2003, pp. 125-150; Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase,
“Paradoxes of Globalization, Liberalization, and Gender Equality: The Worldviews of the Lower
Middle Class in West Bengal, India,” Gender and Society 17 (4) (2003), 544-566), and drawn
attention to the fissures between hegemonic representations of contemporary middle class
identity and the contradictory socio-economic realities of those who both constitute and aspire to
this group (Fernandes 2006).
xxxviii Shankar Sen and P.M. Nair. A report on trafficking in women and children in India 2001-
2003 Vol. I. (New Delhi: Institute of Social Sciences, National Human Rights Commission, and
UNIFEM, 2004), 170.
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xxxix A Hindi word explained in the Constituent Assembly debates (deliberations of the body of
law-makers who drafted the Indian Constitution) as “compulsory work without payment,” “work
at command,” and “forced work against will,” linked to caste-based oppression and landlord-
tenant hierarchies, and likened to slavery. Constituent Assembly of India Debates (Proceedings)
Vol. VII, (Friday, December 3, 1948), accessed March 31, 2014,
http://www.indiankanoon.org/doc/607985/
xl Constituent Assembly Debates, ibid.
xli The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956.
xlii The section now criminalizes anyone who “recruits, transports, harbours, transfers or receives
a person using certain means (including threats, force, coercion, fraud, deception, abduction,
abuse of power, or inducement) for purposes of exploitation.” For a detailed discussion of the
inclusions and exclusions this new anti-trafficking law entails, see Prabha Kotiswaran, “A Battle
Half-Won: India’s New Anti-Trafficking Law,” Interdisciplinary Project on Human Trafficking
(blog), April 26, 2013, accessed April 10, 2014,
http://traffickingroundtable.org/2013/04/a-battle-half-won-indias-new-anti-trafficking-law/
xliii The most literal explanation, spelled out in the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of
1976, is that of forced or partly forced labor performed by a debtor to pay off a loan advanced by
a creditor, or in “pursuance of any customary or social obligation,” or “obligation devolving on
him by succession.”
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xliv People’s Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India, (1982) (3) Supreme Court Cases
235.
xlv Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India, (1984) (3) Supreme Court Cases 161.
xlvi Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 1.
xlvii Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), xi.
xlviii Trafficking in Persons Report, 2010, 33.
xlix Alec Fyfe, The Worldwide Movement against Child Labour: Progress and Future Directions
(Geneva, International Labour Organization, 2007), 46.
l Although there were strong links between activists against bonded labor and child labor in
India, and organizations in the global North working against the exploitation of children such as
the UK-based Anti Slavery Society (now Anti Slavery International) even in the 1990s before the
US VTVPA Act and the UN Protocol against trafficking came into force. Fyfe, ibid., 47.
li International Labour Organization (ILO), No. 138, “Convention on the Minimum Age for
Admission to Employment and Work ,” June 26, 1973 (Geneva, 58th ILC session), accessed
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April 20, 2014,
http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_COD
E:C138
lii Shakti Kak and Biswamoy Pati, eds., Enslaved Innocence: Child Labour in South Asia (New
Delhi: Primus Books, 2012), 9.
liii “Cabinet okays total ban on employing children below 14,” The Times of India, August 29,
2012, accessed September 15, 2013, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Cabinet-okays-
total-ban-on-employing-children-below-14/articleshow/15912256.cms
liv Gaurav V. Bhatnagar, “Establishments being sealed across Delhi to curb child labour,” The
Hindu, July 15, 2012, accessed September 15, 2013,
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/establishments-being-sealed-across-delhi-to-curb-
child-labour/article3642276.ece
lv Indeed, the NGO’s anti-trafficking work in partnership with the federal ministry overseeing
law and order, for which it received U.S. funding, involved intensive programs to train police,
prosecutors and judges in these nuances of the Indian legal framework.
lvi Sujata Gothoskar, “The Plight of Domestic Workers: Confluence of Gender, Class and Caste
Hierarchies,” Economic and Political Weekly Vol. XLVIII, no. 22 (June 1, 2013).
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lvii “Cabinet must quickly approve national policy on domestic workers: NGOs, activists,” The
Times of India, February 19, 2014, accessed March 20, 2014,
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Cabinet-must-quickly-approve-national-policy-on-
domestic-workers-NGOs-activists/articleshow/30686827.cms; “Questions raised over national
policy for domestic workers,” The Times of India, May 19, 2013, accessed March 20, 2014,
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Questions-raised-over-national-policy-for-domestic-
workers/articleshow/20136681.cms
lviii Barbara Ehrenreich, “Maid to Order,” in Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie R. Hochschild, eds.,
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. (New York: Holt
Paperbacks, 2002), 90-91
lix Saskia Sassen, “Global Cities and Survival Circuits,” in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, ibid., 255.
lx Bridget Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour. (London:
Zed Books, 2000).
lxi Nivedita Menon, Seeing Like a Feminist (New Delhi: Zubaan-Penguin Books, 2012), 20-21.
lxii Kak and Pati, Enslaved Innocence.
lxiii Ibid; Gothoskar, “The Plight of Domestic Workers.”
lxiv Ray and Qayum, Cultures of Servitude.
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lxv Lakshmi and Me, directed by Nishtha Jain (Mumbai: Raintree Films, 2008), available at
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/lakshmiandme/film.html (accessed April 20, 2014).
lxvi The 2010 U.S. TIP report, for instance, reductively traces the origins of domestic work to
“slavery and other forms of servitude,” going on to admit that “despite such linkages, many
countries, including the US, do not offer protection to domestic workers under prevailing labor
laws, perceiving their work as something other than regular employment” (p. 33).
lxvii The case received widespread media coverage, both nationally and internationally. See, for
instance, Jim Yardley, “Maid’s cries cast light on child labor in India,” The New York Times,
April 4, 2012, accessed April 25, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/world/asia/india-
shaken-by-plight-of-13-year-old-maid.html?_r=0
lxviii “Delhi shocker: Senior female exec arrested for torturing 15-yr-old maid,” Firstpost.com,
October 1, 2013, accessed December 2, 2013, http://www.firstpost.com/india/delhi-shocker-
senior-female -exec-arrested-for-torturing-15-yr-old-maid-1144827.html
lxix “Locked in for 2 days, 13-year-old maid seeks help,” The Times of India, October 30, 2013,
accessed December 2, 2013, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Locked-in-for-2-days-
13-year- old-maid-seeks-help/articleshow/24894508.cms
lxx Shobhomoy Sikdar, “BSP MP, wife arrested for maid’s death in their Delhi house,” The
Hindu, November 6, 2013, accessed December 3, 2013,
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http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/bsp-mp-wife-arrested-for- maids-death-in-their-
delhi-house/article5316703.ece
lxxi These statistics are from the website of the Childline India Foundation, a nodal agency set up
by the federal Ministry of Women and Child Development and run in partnership with NGOs, at
http://www.childlineindia.org.in/child-labour-india.htm (accessed January 27, 2015).
lxxii This figure is cited by Bachpan Bachao Andolan (see p. 26 and note 34 above), the NGO
started by child rights activist Kailash Satyarthi, which works against child labor and child
trafficking in India. See http://bba.org.in/sites/default/files/CAPITAL%20CORRUPTION
(accessed July 10, 2014).
lxxiii See more at the ILO’s website at
http://www.ilo.org/legacy/english/regions/asro/newdelhi/ipec/responses/index.htm (accessed
February 25, 2014).
lxxiv Kak and Pati, Enslaved Innocence, 2.
lxxv Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, “The Ameena “Case”: The Female Citizen and Subject,” in The
Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003), 41-71.
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lxxvi Ratna Kapur, Makeshift Migrants and Law: Gender, Belonging, and Postcolonial Anxieties
(New Delhi: Routledge, 2010).
lxxvii Sunder Rajan, “The Ameena Case,” 60.
lxxviii Brennan, Life Interrupted.
lxxix Valverde, Law’s Dream.
lxxx For an insightful anthropological account of the job dissatisfaction and suboptimal work
conditions that subordinate police in India face, see Beatrice Jauregui, “If the Constable Could
Speak: Notes on a Continuing Failure to Secure the Masses and Reform the Police in India,”
India in Transition, December 7, 2009, accessed April 28, 2014,
https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/system/files/(Hindi)+If+the+Constable+Could+Speak+-
+Beatrice+Jauregui
lxxxi Svati P. Shah, “Distinguishing Poverty and Trafficking: Lessons from Field Research in
Mumbai,” Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy 14, no. 3 (Fall 2007), 442.
lxxxii Heather Montgomery, Modern Babylon? Prostituting Children in Thailand (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2001), 159.
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lxxxiii Julia O’Connell Davidson, Children in the Global Sex Trade (Malden, MA; Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press, 2005), 142.
lxxxiv Sunder Rajan, “The Ameena Case”; Purnima Mankekar, “To Whom Does Ameena Belong?
Towards a Feminist Analysis of Childhood and Nationhood in Contemporary India,” Feminist
Review no. 56 (Summer 1997), 26-60.
lxxxv Ibid., 60.
lxxxvi Mankekar, “To Whom Does Ameena Belong,” 50, 52.
lxxxvii Anthropologists studying the state in India have made this point in the context of poverty
and women’s empowerment programs. See Aradhana Sharma, Logics of Empowerment:
Development, Gender, and Governance in Neoliberal India (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008) and Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and
Poverty in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 38.
lxxxviii Sunder Rajan, “The Ameena Case,” 56-57.
lxxxix Sumana Mukherjee, “Geeta Menon: Voice of the Toiling Woman,” Livemint, August 9,
2014, accessed October 19, 2014,
http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/Lg8vDPO6dwMJE9eX21z37H/Geeta-Menon–Voice-of-the-
toiling-woman.html
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xc Samuel Martinez elucidates this point effectively in an earlier issue of this journal. Samuel
Martinez, “Taking Better Account: Contemporary Slavery, Gendered Narratives, and the
Feminization of Struggle,” Humanity 2, no. 2 (Fall 2011), 296.