North Lakhimpur: Amid the crackdown against child marriage, police on Wednesday afternoon arrested two persons from Rajasthan on the charges of marrying underage girls.
The arrests were made by Banderdewa Police, as the two men, husbands of two minor girls arrived in Laluk in North Assam’s Lakhimpur district on February 8.
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The arrested persons were Kanhaya Lal, 29 and Hari Prasad 31, of Rajasthan, who had married two underage girls in 2021.
One local woman Monica Bora, 45, was also arrested in connection with the incident.
A link of bridal trafficking is highly possible in this case as one of the arrested men came to marry a local girl as arranged by the other one.
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Lakhimpur district has been in news for bridal trafficking to Rajasthan grooms for quite some time now in which girls from economically poor and socially marginalized communities are married to long-distance matches as far as Rajasthan and Haryana through agents and previous connections.
On May 22, 2022, Lakhimpur Police arrested six persons along with a trafficked girl from North Lakhimpur Railway Station as they were about to board a train to Rajasthan.
The arrested persons included a trafficking agent named Rita Dutta from Harmutty in Lakhimpur.
The mother of the victim was also arrested by the police. According to the police, the mother of the 18-year-old victim, who is from Mazgaon in Panigaon, Lakhimpur, sold her to the trafficker at Rs. 1.30 lakhs to be taken as a bride to Rajasthan.
In November 2021 a young woman from a tea garden in the Lakhimpur district escaped the clutches of bridal traffickers in Rajasthan after experiencing gruesome atrocities including an acid attack followed by abuses on social media from her husband.
The victim, hailing from No. 10 Line of Zoihing Tea Estate in Lakhimpur district was married to a man in Jodhpur in Rajasthan through an alleged bridal trafficking arrangement in 2017.
A marriage ceremony was performed in a local temple on July 24, 2016, in Koilamari Tea Estate in Lakhimpur district between a groom from Rajasthan’s Sikar district and a school girl and a marriage agreement was signed before a notary in North Lakhimpur next day.
According to the girl’s family members, the groom from Rajasthan was introduced to them by one woman from No. 10 Labour Line of Koilamari Tea Estate who was married off to village Garoda in the Sikar district of Rajasthan in 2014.
Apart from the tea plantation areas, an increasing number of young girls from the religious minority community are also married to men from Haryana and Rajasthan from the Lakhimpur district. They are even mostly married to men from other faiths.
Registering marriages before the notary by faking the underage of the bride and the roles played by priests are also areas of concern for the continued cases of bridal trafficking of minor girls from here to Rajasthan, Haryana and other states.
Poverty and lack of awareness on the dignity of girl children and their rights are some reasons for this trafficking and child marriage.