The story of six
women who want to put their kidneys on the block to get their husbands released
from a UAE jail
| by Anil Budur
Lulla
Reshma with her
in-laws. Her husband, Syed Karim, was sentenced to jail for 10 years in
mid-2006. But he is not sure if he can return even after serving that term
(Photo: HARSHA VADLAMANI)
( December 21,
2012, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) In 2004, after Ravi Shivarathri and his
brother Mallesh went to Dubai as construction workers, their wives began to
receive Rs 5,000 each as a monthly money order. A few months later, the
transfers suddenly stopped. Their neighbours told them not to worry. This was
common, they said, because companies in Dubai—one of the United Arab
Emirates—often delay paying their workers. But there was no word from their
husbands. The postman had been their only link to them and they had no idea
what to do. One day, an acquaintance showed them a report in a local Telugu
daily. It quoted a Gulf newspaper to say that the brothers had been sentenced
to 24 years in jail for a murder committed during a robbery on 29 December
2005.
They would
subsequently learn about the charges in detail. Within months of arriving in
the desert emirate, the company had—as the neighbours guessed— stopped paying
Ravi and Mallesh. Struggling for survival, they had reportedly taken to
stealing steel cables from a godown in Jebel Ali Free Zone. Apart from them,
four Indians and four Pakistanis were also allegedly involved in the racket,
all of them construction workers. Dil Prasad Rai, a Nepali watchman at the
robbery site, had tried to stop them and was killed in the scuffle.
All ten were
caught and convicted in mid-2006. The Pakistanis received 10- year sentences
each. Five of the Indians, including the brothers, got 24 years each. The sixth
Indian got 10 years. They had not known one another when they landed in Dubai
and none had any police record back home.
The Shivarathri
family lives in Pedduru, a village 200 km north of Hyderabad in Karimnagar
district. Ravi’s wife Rena, 30, lives in a thatched hut with a mud floor, few
belongings and three concrete bricks to serve as a firewood stove. Nearby,
Mallesh’s wife Rajayya lives in similar poverty. The four other convicted
Indians, equally poor, are also from Karimnagar district.
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The wives would
have had no hope of their husbands’ release had an NGO called Migrants Rights
Council (MRC) not intervened in September 2008. A few of its members, led by
its president P Narayana Swami, met the six men in Sharjah Central Prison on 8
December 2011. Under Shariah law as applicable in Dubai, if the victim’s family
agrees to accept ‘diya’ or blood money in lieu of the life taken, the
perpetrator/s may be pardoned. Through Rai’s brother, Til Bahadur, who was
working in Dubai, the MRC got in touch with the victim’s wife Dil Kumari and made
an offer of Rs 15 lakh in Indian currency as blood money. She accepted it. On a
visit back home to Nepal, Til Bahadur got an affidavit of acceptance signed by
Kumari on 17 January 2012, with a local trade union leader as witness. He also
got photographs of it.
There was only
one problem: the families were too poor to raise that sum. After scouting for
cash in vain, the women have put their kidneys on sale. Asked how she could do
such a thing, Rena’s answer is simple: “Without a man in the house, it’s difficult
to make a living. I have children to look after.”
When they were
first told about the blood money, the wives knocked on every door possible.
They filed a writ petition at the Andhra Pradesh High Court and also approached
the state government for help. Nothing came their way. Despairing, they heard
of financial offers for kidneys and got in touch with brokers with links to
some Hyderabad hospitals. The women claim that they got themselves tested, and
that four of them— they do not say who—even had their kidneys medically matched
for transplants to waiting patients.
Indian law bars
an individual from offering a kidney to an unrelated person. Legally, a kidney
cannot be sold in India. MRC members say that when they heard about the
proposed hawking of kidneys, they advised the women not to flout the law.
Instead, they helped them make an application to the State Human Rights
Commission seeking permission for it. The Commission has issued notices to the
AP chief secretary and Protector of Emigrants under the Ministry of Overseas
Indian Affairs. They have to submit their replies by 17 January 2013.
The case has
struck a chord of sympathy across Andhra Pradesh. “These are poor women from
backward class families working as daily wage workers in either stone quarries
or cotton fields,” says the MRC’s Mandha Bheem Reddy.
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We travel 25 km
on a metalled single lane to reach Konaraopeta, a village in Konaraopeta
mandal. A kilometre past the village bus stand, a sharp left—a tractor
track—winds its way up a hillock. We trek up and ask Dandugula Narasiah why he
decided to build his small house up here. “There is a severe water problem
here,” he says, “Up this hillock, water is easier to get.” The 61-year-old has
broken his left leg twice and it is not easy for him to trudge up and down. His
son, Dandugula Lakshman, is in the UAE jail. Lakshman’s wife, Padma, is away—
working at a construction site 12 km off. “If she does not go,” he says, “she
will have to forgo Rs 100 in wages.”
Lakshman had
been to Dubai twice earlier. He first went in 2003 after the family took a Rs 3
lakh loan to get his sisters married. “The third time, he told us, would be his
last trip to Dubai,” says the father. One of Lakshman’s sisters, Lakshmi,
gestures to their two-room dwelling. “We didn’t know what work he did there,”
she says, “But he did help with some money to rebuild this house.”
After reading
about Padma’s offer to sell her kidney, someone sent money to the district’s
rural development officer. Narasiah says that when the officer visited them a
few days earlier, she found that Lakshman’s name was ‘Lachaiah’ on the family’s
ration card. In his passport, it was ‘Lakshman’. “The officer did not tell us
who sent the money or how much,” says the elderly man, “She wants to be sure it
is the same person in [that UAE] jail before handing over the cheque. I am in
no position to chase her now.”
Itkyala
Narasaiah of the MRC later tells us that to compound the family’s woes,
Lakshman lost three of his fingers while working on a machine in jail a few
days ago. “We have not yet told the old man,” he says, “We will only inform the
wife.”
Sattaiah Pallam,
a farmer from the neighbouring Venkatraypet village, had met Lakshman in Dubai
in 2005. “He was very happy and said this would be his last working year in
UAE. A few weeks after I returned, this incident happened,” he says, “He is a
decent guy and had no previous police record. He must have been framed or set
up because he did not know the local language and received no legal help.
Apparently, the Indian embassy has not been of help either.”
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Leaving the Dandugula
family, we travel on a rutted short cut with the SUV’s underside scraping the
surface. We emerge onto a tarred road and park in front of Chandurthi primary
school. Opposite is a modest square house with an asbestos roof. In the small
open courtyard, a manual stone crusher made of granite rests on its side. It
was on this that Nampelli Venkati once worked. After 2002, his customers began
opting for motorised crushers. “As business turned bad, our debts went up. My
husband decided to take up employment in Dubai,” says his wife Yellava Venkati.
His ending up in jail was a shock.
On Yellava’s lap
are bundles of bidis— more honourable work than construction labour, which she
does occasionally to support her children. She gets Rs 100 for rolling 1,000
bidis a day. “No one can do more than 1,000, it’s back-breaking work. She has
worked very hard to survive under such daunting circumstances,” says Jyothi, a
school teacher who has come across to speak to us.
Yellava’s the
oldest among the women who have offered their kidneys. “Troubles come in
battalions,” she says, citing a local Telugu saying. Her younger son, a high
school student, lies on a cot inside the house, having fallen and broken his
chest bone at school about a week ago. Doctors have prescribed him three months
of bed rest, and since Yellava needs to attend to him, she cannot go out
looking for work. She has an elder son, but he has gone limp in the arms and
legs on account of a protein deficiency. The family is barely able to scrape
enough to feed themselves, let alone raise money for their chief earner’s
release. “The local MLA initially promised to pay Rs 1 lakh towards the [pool
of] blood money, but has not done anything so far,” she says, “We have visited
big leaders and approached the courts, but to no avail.”
She points to
her cellphone and says her husband rings her once every two months. She updates
him on their efforts to get him out. “He is obviously not very happy that we
have offered our kidneys. But how else do we raise Rs 15 lakh?”
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About 30 km away
is Gangadhara, a village on the state highway. Behind the local mosque lives
Reshma Bi, along with her in-laws. Her husband, Syed Karim, is the only Indian
who got a 10- year sentence. But he has told her on the phone he is not sure if
he will be able to return even after serving that term. “There is some
ambiguity about his sentence,” says Karim’s uncle, Syed Haider.
Reshma works as
a daily wager and is thankful that her aged in-laws have allowed her to stay
with them. They moved into this new house that belongs to a relative after
their old one partly collapsed under heavy rains last year. The family has
spent the past four years asking people for help. Haider says that when the
Prime Minister was in Hyderabad a few months ago, the families tried meeting
him. “Security personnel turned us away without even listening to us.”
Reshma looks so
frail that her relatives fear she will not survive a kidney donation. She says
the offer is not a gimmick. “It’s a last resort,” she says. “We have to do it.
Hum aadhi zindagi jee rahein hain.” It is half a life she leads anyway.
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