By Ila Ananya
18-year-old Tejasweeta Pradhan and 17-year-old Shivani Gond from West Bengal, volunteers at the NGO Mankind in Action for Rural Growth (MARG) have been awarded the National Bravery Award or the Geeta Chopra Award this year. The police and the NGO used them as decoys to bust a cross-border human trafficking racket, which led to the arrest of suspects in the cases of missing girls from India and Nepal.
The Free Press Journal reports that when MARG got a request to trace a Nepalese girl who had gone missing, the NGO, the police, and the CBI, asked Pradhan and Gond to join their plan and act as decoys. The obviously very risky operation began with the creation of a fake account on Facebook, through which the two girls befriended the traffickers (who reportedly had also been trying to target the two girls).
They went on to pretend to be Nepalese girls looking for employment — Reuters reports that the two girls spent many days communicating with the traffickers over the phone, trying to convince them they were willing to run away from home. The traffickers asked them to send them photographs to “make sure we were pretty girls,” Gond said. Finally, they were asked to meet the traffickers at a hotel somewhere on the Indo-Nepal border, where the traffickers were caught by policemen in civilian clothes.
While we’re not dismissing the bravery that it takes for Pradhan and Gond to do something like this, there is also something extremely unsettling about the NGO and the police asking the girls to act as decoys to bust the trafficking ring.
“Our backup plan was that if things went wrong, we would just run for our lives,” Tejasweeta said — a terrible back up plan for something as big as this. Anything could have gone wrong. It reminds us of the horrifying case where a 17-year-old was raped for the second time after the police attempted to use her as “bait” to catch the perpetrators, but didn’t appear in time to save her. The Geeta Chopra Award (in another erasure of female suffering) is named after 16-year-old Geeta Chopra who was raped and murdered in 1978) will be given to Pradhan and Gond by the Prime Minister on 23rd January, 2017.
While everyone is raving about their bravery, and they were brave, we also need to look sharply at the adults who put them in a situation that required their bravery.