Kashmir the jannat of India is not the actual jannat for the women’s who are forced into a marriage constitution without their consent in the state. Women’s are being abducted from the different places from India and get them married off to elder men’s.

Kashmir has many stories of women being abducted and sold off by an organised system, which helps people who cannot get married locally. They bring hundreds of non-local brides in Kashmir in which some gets married off on their own and live happily while huge of them gets sold and re-sold.

India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) recorded more than 1,700 cases of human trafficking in 2020. His includes adults and children trafficked into marriage, slavery and prostitution. But experts say this is just the tip of the iceberg. “Trafficking is gravely underreported in India,” explains Tarushika Sarvesh, an assistant professor of sociology at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

 “Sometimes the families of women and children who are recovered and brought back don’t want to acknowledge the fact that they were trafficked, as trafficking in popular perception is mostly understood as sexual exploitation,” she says, adding that there is a huge stigma attached to this.

Nazima, a woman who was kidnapped from her home West Bengal was transported to Kashmir where she was forced to marry a man 20 years senior, who has paid the trafficker $250 for a bride. But that marriage was neither a love marriage or an arrange marriage.

Nazima was the daughter of an agricultural labourer; during summer in 2012 a friend of her told her about the NGO who were looking for the women and girls from poor families in Kolkata, West Bengal. After reaching to Kolkata she has reached to the assigned destination in hope of the job where she has been offered tea which made her unconscious, so she cannot protest against the happenings.

After being abducted from there, she has been taken to Kashmir by the traffickers, who handed them over to the Kashmiri Men. They were taken to the home of one of the traffickers, where they were made to change out of the clothes they had by now been wearing for days. Soon they had taken one by one and handed over to the men they were to marry.

Tarushika Sarvesh has said that is difficult to detect the trafficking and that “many of its form don’t attract attention or raise suspicion”. “Adults and children are visible as workers all around us in abysmal conditions, but the back-story of their entrapment is not known.”

Sunita Krishnan is the founder of Hyderabad-based Prajwala, a non-governmental organisation, “When marriage happens all the previous experiences are nullified and marriage is seen as a pious thing and not as a crime,” she says. “People think ‘how can marriage be tantamount to trafficking?’”

Anti-trafficking activists believe sex-selective abortions have contributed to the prevalence of bride trafficking. According to the most recent census, in 2011, India’s sex ratio was 943 females to every 1,000 males. There are more men but fewer women for them to marry.

Places like Kashmir which is conflicted zones says that the issue of bride trafficking becomes more complicated as public institutions do not function as they should and many individual stories are lost among the “meta narratives of politics”.

Nisar Ahmad is in charge of the Kashmiri police’s Anti-Human Trafficking Unit (AHTU) and says his department has rescued a number of women and girls forced into marriage over the years. “But we are only able to act when we receive formal complaints,” he adds.

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