Mumbai: A year ago, five madrasa teachers traveling with 59 students from Araria in Bihar to Pune in Maharashtra were intercepted by the Government Railway Police (GRP) on a train.
Accused of trafficking children for “child labour”, the five men – all between 20 and 35 years of age – were sent to jail for close to a month.
A year later, the GRP has concluded the investigation and found no evidence against any of the five teachers. They now claim the case was the outcome of a “misunderstanding”.
The GRP’s decision to first arrest them and later claim the case was baseless makes no sense to 24-year-old Mohammed Shahnawaz Haroon, one of the five persons who were arrested on May 30, 2023, from two different stations in Maharashtra.
“How does one make sense of a crime that was never committed in the first place?” he asks. Haroon, along with Saddam Hussain Siddiqui (24), Noman Alam Siddiqui (29) and Ezaj Ziyabbul Siddiqui (34), was arrested on May 30, 2023, from Manmad station.
Another teacher, Mohammed Anjur Alam, a Sangli resident, who was also traveling with a few children, was arrested from Bhusaval station.
Two separate FIRs were filed by the Manmad and Bhusaval GRP. Although separate, the crux of both investigations was identical, as was the eventual closure report.
“This was the first time I had set out on such a long journey. We are all trained teachers traveling with children all known to us from our remote district, Araria. But suddenly we were branded as traffickers who were transporting children,” he recalls.
Haroon, who is unsure of the exact way in which their arrests came to be made, says he heard later (after being released on bail) that someone had posted a video on X (formerly Twitter) and made false claims of children being trafficked in large numbers.
“Tweet kar diya kisi ne aur police ne bina soche case daal diya [Someone tweeted something against us and police acted without thinking],” he says.
At the railway station, the five men were detained and taken to Nashik. The children were also taken along.
“We were questioned about our backgrounds and asked for documents. We had all the documents the police demanded,” says Saddam. “Even on furnishing the necessary details of each child and the centres where we were teaching, the police produced us before a magistrate the next morning,” he adds.
The men were sent to police custody for 12 days and later, they spent time in Nashik central jail for over two weeks. The children – all between 12 and 17 years of age – were sent to a children’s home.
The Bihar police, which got involved in the case after the arrests, collected statements of the children’s parents. The parents testified in favour of the teachers implicated in the case.
The incident changed everything for the men. “Bihar is a poor state and our district, Araria, which is on the Nepal border, is among the poorest districts. There are no jobs available here. If we don’t travel to cities like Pune and Hyderabad, we can’t run our families,” Saddam says.
But since the incident, he has barely stepped out of his village. “The teaching job fetched me Rs 10,000. It is not much but still helped in taking care of my family,” he says.
When the five men were arrested, Haroon says, their families in the village panicked.
“YouTube is full of videos of Muslims being attacked and targeted while on trains. Our incident shook our families and also the families of the children who travel to cities to study in madrasas.”
Haroon was referring to a mob lynching incident in 2017, where a minor boy was beaten to death on a Mathura-bound train.
The police filed a ‘C summary’ report in March this year. A ‘C summary’ report is filed when the investigating agency is of the opinion that a person is wrongly implicated in a case due to errors in recording facts.
The Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind, a socio-legal organisation in Mumbai, intervened and provided legal aid to the five men. Advocate Niyaz Ahmed Lodhi represented them.
“Right in the beginning, the police knew they had no evidence against these men. Yet, they were taken into custody,” Lodhi told The Wire
A few months ago, Lodhi moved an application before the Bombay high court seeking that the case against the five teachers be quashed.
“That was the first time the GRP even indicated that they didn’t find anything against them. In a few months, they filed a closure report,” Lodhi said.
