She was promised seven times her monthly salary of Rs.8,000 she earned cleaning malls in Hyderabad, if she went to Saudi Arabia. However, on reaching there her hand was scalded with boiling water, her arm was broken and she spent almost two months at a detention centre.
Yet 50-year-old Basanti Devi, an illiterate Dalit woman from Bihar’s Lakhisarai district, was able to escape from the clutches of her employers and reach home without any help from the Indian government. “I consider myself lucky. Other women at the detention centre told me that they were sexually abused and tortured by their employers in ways that I am ashamed to tell,” she told The Hindu .
This paper had last month reported that Basanti and her daughter Kanchan, whose family currently stays in Hyderabad, had been duped into forced labour in Saudi Arabia. Thirty-year old Kanchan, a mother of two, managed to escape and is being held at the Saudi Welfare Housemaid Deportation Centre in Riyadh.
Basanti’s husband Bhagwat Bind, who is based in Patna, had approached External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj through Ali Anwar Ansari, the Chief Whip of the Janata Dal (United) in the Rajya Sabha, last month after all his attempts to get his wife and daughter back failed.
Ms. Swaraj wrote back to Mr. Ansari on August 27 saying that Kanchan would be repatriated after her sponsor, one among a chain of job brokers, completes the exit formalities. She said that Basanti could not be traced by the Indian authorities there. However, on August 27, Basanti was flown back to Hyderabad by the Saudi authorities.
“I went there to work at a hospital in Ha’il with five other women, without telling my husband as our financial condition was bad. On reaching there, I was asked to do domestic work. On my refusal, a local agent stripped me and beat me up with a stick,” she said.
According to Basanti, she was sold twice after that. Her left arm was broken and left hand scalded with boiling water by subsequent employers when she demanded to be sent home.
“I ran away one morning before they woke up and went to a police station. They took me to a dispensary and dressed my hand. I was then sent to a detention centre with several other women. The employment agents there had already taken away my jewellery including mangalsutra, passport, mobile phone and ATM card. I returned to India in the same night dress I was wearing when I escaped,” she said.
After more than six weeks at the centre, Basanti said the police were able to recover her passport from one of her employers in Ha’il and send her back. “My only wish is that my daughter should come back and our government should stop people from going there. Our lives have been destroyed,” Basanti added.
Mr. Ansari has sought an appointment with Ms. Swaraj to ask for assistance for the family. “An illiterate woman had the courage to escape. If our embassy is more proactive, several stranded Indians can be saved,” he said, showing a thick file of letters from families whose relatives are stranded in Saudi Arabia.
