‘They would keep me barefoot’

Kajri, 7, was playing with her three-year-old cousin in the backyard of her rented house in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh when she was kidnapped by two men.

Ten years later, in December 2020, another cousin — a bank agent — was visiting a house in the city for work when he noticed a girl who looked like Kajri, mopping the floor. He asked her what her father’s name was but a woman interrupted the conversation and didn’t let them talk. He left the house and called Lucknow’s One-stop Centre, set up by the Ministry of Women and Child Development to support women and girls affected by violence. Within hours, a police team from the police station in Mohanlalganj and the One-stop Centre, raided the house, rescued Kajri, and handed over her custody to her family.

Now 21, Kajri is living with psychiatric disability, her front lower teeth are missing and she has faint recollections of the 10 years she spent as a victim of trafficking, sexual assault, and child labour.

“Earlier I was just sad, now I am completely disappointed and hopeless,” Dhirendra Singh, Kajri’s 56-year-old father, says. He works as a security guard at a private college in Lucknow and lives in a rented house. His wife and two daughters, including Kajri, live in a house they own in Uttar Pradesh’s Hardoi district.

“I have worked as a security guard at different companies or colleges in Lucknow for around 15 years. But since 2021, it’s been difficult to continue my job in one place because I need days off to take Kajri to give police statements, tests etc. I get fired when I ask for frequent leave. Then, I need to look for a new job again,” Dhirendra says.

Dhirendra earns Rs. 9,000 a month which is not sufficient for the family’s expenses. “I can’t bring Kajri to Lucknow again and again, risking her safety and spending the little I earn on travel, when nothing is being done.”

His efforts for justice have amounted to little in the three and a half years since Kajri was found. Even after several trips to the legal aid office, the police station in Mohanlalganj, and the district court in Kaiserbagh, Lucknow, Kajri’s statement has not been recorded before a magistrate as per Section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code, because “the court asks for police FIR from 2020” when Kajri was rescued, Dhirendra explains.

The only FIR Dhirendra has filed was in December 2010 with kidnapping charges under Sections 363 and 364 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), two days after Kajri went missing. It’s a tattered, fading handwritten document. Not much is legible 14 years later. The police don't have a copy —digital or physical— of this 2010 FIR which they say is needed in order to file a follow up FIR with facts that surfaced after Kajri’s rescue in 2020.

In other words, the ‘2020 FIR’ the court needs does not exist and so Kajri’s case is not even in the judicial system.

“As soon as Kajri was rescued, an FIR should have been lodged against the woman in whose house she was found.  The FIR which was lodged when she went missing in 2010 only included charges of kidnapping. But when she was rescued it was important to lodge an FIR with more serious IPC sections making up the offence of trafficking and sexual assault,” Apoorva Srivastav, an independent Lucknow-based advocate with knowledge of the case. “Kajri's statement should have been recorded at the earliest with the police and the Magistrate, the latter of which is pending till date.”

In the 48 hours after Kajri was rescued, her statement was taken at Mohanlalganj police station under Section 161 of the CrPC. She was also medically examined at two hospitals in Lucknow. The first hospital noted a scar on Kajri’s abdomen, some missing lower jaw teeth, and a darkened area on her right breast. The second hospital referred her to the psychiatry department.

A 2021 report from the hospital concludes that Kajri has “mild mental retardation” with an IQ of 50-55, indicating “50 per cent disability.” After the diagnosis Kajri was admitted in the hospital for seven days and received counselling and treatment for her mental illness. “That is inadequate rehabilitation for a case involving prolonged sexual assault and trafficking. Continued psychiatric treatment and psychological counselling is essential to bring the survivor out of the trauma, guilt, and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s also important to ensure societal integration in order to combat exclusion and stigmatisation,” Srivastav says.

In the absence of adequate psycho-social support and a timely FIR, the details of Kajri’s life between 2010 and 2020 are hazy, and fragment further as time passes.

“Two people took me and tied my mouth. They took me to Chinhat in a bus,” Kajri says in a mix of Bhojpuri and Hindi, recalling the December 2010 morning she was kidnapped. Chinhat is a block in Lucknow where Kajri was rescued from; Bhojpuri is the language that was spoken in the house where she was held captive. She often repeats 'nange god rakhte the‘ which translates to ‘they would keep me barefoot’.

As to the inhabitants of the first-floor house, Kajri remembers three people, including a woman named Rekha. She also recalls several tenants who lived in rented rooms on the ground floor.

“I was given two rotis, twice a day. More than that was not allowed. I was always kept barefoot. They would never give me a blanket or sheet even in the winters. All I was given was torn, old clothes…When I would get maheena [menstruate], Rekha would give me dirty clothes. Sometimes she would tell me to use the pochha [mop],” Kajri says.

She remembers doing household chores like sweeping, mopping, cooking, cleaning toilets and washing clothes, always under the shadow and threat of violence. Once, Rekha allegedly punched Kajri in the face for a meal that didn’t taste good to her. That broke her lower front teeth.

“When I was not menstruating, she would take me to a room,” Kajri adds, staring at the floor. A man who lived in the house would “close the room from inside, undress me, lay upon me and do what he wanted to. I would try and stop him but he would force himself on me and also then call his tenants to do the same. They would make me lie down between them.”

Dhirendra adds that when she was first rescued, Kajri had alleged that “Rekha took money from the tenants for getting household chores done by her, and raping her repeatedly.”

The father is drained. “We have been running since January 2021,” he says. The ‘we’ here does not include steady legal help. Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiatives Trust (AALI), a Lucknow-based nonprofit legal aid organisation which takes up pro-bono cases of violence against women had reached out to him through the One-stop Centre in 2020. Since then, Kajri’s case has changed at least four lawyers.

The current lawyer from AALI sent Dhirendra a draft of a new complaint based on which a FIR could be filed. When the father pointed out some factual errors, the lawyer rebuked him, leading to an impasse. Dhirendra has not signed the draft, and the lawyer has not sent a revised one.

“When a phone gets lost, they turn the world upside down but here my daughter was trafficked and enslaved for 10 years and nothing has been done,” Dhirendra says. A large, carefully preserved pile of documents, envelopes and photos—every piece of information he has collected for Kajri’s case since 2010 lies in a locker of his iron cupboard, testament to his resolve to persevere.

The story is part of a nationwide reporting project focusing on social, institutional and structural barriers to care for survivors of Sexual and Gender-Based violence (SGBV) in India. It is part of a Doctors Without Borders India supported initiative.

The names of the survivors and family members have been changed to protect their identity .