Yesterday my colleague in Nepal, Shailaja CM, and I joined Kelvin Symon of ChildLine India and a former circus girl in lodging a petition to the Supreme Court of Uttar Pradesh, north India. We did so at the Allahabad offices of human rights lawyer, Mr K K Roy, who is a member of the Human Rights Law Network (http://www.hrln.org/). The petition was supported by affidavits from 50 circus victims that we had contacted in Nepal and it requested that the Court investigate the excesses, abuse and exploitation of circuses registered in or visiting that State. We hope that such an investigation could lead to circuses having their licenses revoked and shut down if they are found to be acting illegally and trampling over human rights. Uttar Pradesh is notoriously lawless and this may not lead to anything but if by good fortune it does it could result in many more releases of trafficked girls. It's certainly worth a try. We submitted two other petitions to the criminal court, one asking for action to be taken against a named circus owner for rape and another requesting that five girls who were sent to circuses and have gone missing be traced.
During the meeting the young girl who was with us, now 22, told how she had suffered serious stomach pains at the circus. The owners had ignored this, accusing her of faking it in an attempt to escape their clutches. Eventually though they relented. When she returned to Nepal she was diagnosed as having stomach cancer (this was supported by her medical notes). It seemed that the worst experience for her was the punishment that was meted out for "bad behaviour". The circus owner, who was paraplegic, would have the girl perform a full body massage on him. She was so ashamed of this that she we learned of this indirectly through her companion at the interview.
Leafing through the paperwork supporting our requests I stumbled upon a picture of one of the missing girls that had been sent to the parents by the circus. This is part of the trickery to show the girls happy and successful. Pathetically it showed the girl holding a phone to one ear while in the other hand she had a cut out picture of a Bollywood star holding a phone, the implication being that the young girl had herself achieved some star status or was mixing in the right circles. It was an image that haunted me all day.
In the afternoon, and to clear the head, Shailaja, Kelvin and I took a stroll at my invitation to visit Allahabad cathedral. I had spotted this piece of late Victorian architecture the previous day looking very incongruous in the heat of the Allahabad skyline. My intrigue was rewarded with a chance to study some brass memorials that were so evocative of the last few decades of the Raj. There was mention of long-forgotten regiments like the "3rd Brahmans", and army officers dying from blood poisoning (two doctors within two months of one another) and even from a polo accident. There were some great stained glass windows, sadly now in need of restoration, but best of all an altar piece of the crucifixion with a gold leaf mosaic background. I was really getting into that when I was spotted running my fingers over it (one of the delights of mosaic is its tactility) and was politely but firmly shooed off by a cathedral attendant. Apparently I had been standing on some kind of hallowed ground.
