India in Love

by Ira Trivedi

  The meteoric rise to wealth, and infamy of Shiv Murti Dwivedi alias Ram Murat Dwivedi alias Rajiv Ranjan Dwivedi, more popularly known as Ichadhari Sant Swami Bhimanandji Maharaj ‘Chitrakoot waale’ or simply ‘Baba’, was bewildering, to say the least. A Class X dropout, Baba hailed from a family of criminals. His father was named in five criminal cases including murder, dowry and theft, his elder brother was convicted for the murder of his wife, and his two younger brothers were convicted in cases of theft. After holding a variety of odd jobs in his hometown of Chitrakoot in southern Uttar Pradesh, Baba arrived in Delhi in early 2000, though at this time he was known by a number of simpler names like Shiva, Rajeev, Shiny or Swami. He began his career in Delhi as a rickshaw driver, but was later employed as a security guard at a five-star Delhi hotel because of his good looks and muscular body. At the hotel he was introduced to the flesh trade when he served as a delivery boy for payments. Observing the potential of the business, Baba became a gigolo. One of his first assignments was to have sex with a newly-wed couple from Punjab who paid him a handsome 1.5 lakh for a week of sex. It is unclear exactly when Baba gave up being a gigolo to become a pimp, but it is likely to have been in the mid-2000s. It is also unclear when Baba became a self-proclaimed swami, donning saffron robes, and preaching at a temple in South Delhi which he personally funded, but sources say that it was right around the time that he became a pimp.

  During the day Baba gave impassioned religious discourses; handed out CDs, books, and pamphlets of his teachings; and lured female students away from colleges, private coaching institutes and hostels into his net through his spiritual humbug. At night he was a pimp with a network of over a hundred sub-pimps and a thousand prostitutes, eventually growing his business to become one of north India’s most extensive prostitution rackets. Through his operations he had also amassed property in Mumbai, Noida, Kolkata and Varanasi. Baba was meticulous in his operations, keeping extensive records of his business, of the women he employed, their movements, clients and payments—one of the reasons he was able to avoid arrest for a long time. He also had multiple mobile phones and cars in which he transported the girls, and he was well connected politically and with the police.

  In an interview for Hard News magazine, a woman claiming to be Ichadhari Baba’s girlfriend revealed how he conducted his operations:

  [H]e used to lure drop-out college girls and girls working with BPOs with expensive gifts. Once these girls fell in his trap, he compulsively used them in the flesh trade. This was like a honey trap plus a vicious circle. A few days back, he spoke to me about the CWG [Commonwealth Games]—“how lucrative it could be for us”. We could earn lakhs in just one week and even get a chance to settle abroad. He told the girls that lots of guests would come during the games, from India and abroad, and that he has arranged “facilitation jobs” for girls during the games in Delhi.86

  On the night of his capture, Baba traded in his saffron robes for a pair of jeans and a stylish shirt, and tied his long hair in a ponytail. He brought six girls with him that evening, two foreigners and four Indians, all of whom were English-speaking, attractive and well turned out—dressed conservatively in jeans, long-sleeved shirts, and scarves. Of the girls on offer, two were airhostesses and the other four were students and foreign tourists. The two customers had spoken to Baba on the phone and asked him for fine girls, and were willing to pay a premium for the right ones. They settled on two Indian girls, offering to pay 20,000 for the whole night. The men finalized the girls of their choice, paid an advance, and agreed to meet at one of Baba’s flats the next day. On the way out of the bar Baba was nabbed along with the six girls. The two customers were policemen in disguise, one of whom was Kailash Chand on the first sting operation of his career.

  This was not the first time that Baba had been arrested. In 1997, he had been charged with being involved in the flesh trade under cover of running a massage parlour. Another time, he had been arrested for buying stolen items. His two arrests qualified him to be tried under the Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime (MCOCA)—a strict law used against terrorists, under which the accused is held under severe conditions, making it near impossible to get bail. The punishment for being charged with MCOCA is severe and life imprisonment is common. After his arrest Baba went back to jail, this time for a much longer period than he had anticipated.

  Chand remembers a few things about the time that he spent with Baba. He remembers how handsome he was and how ‘solid’ his body was. He was also charming and personable, and Chand had found it easy to talk to him. Baba had been forthcoming with his information. Usually he had to beat criminals, but Baba happily regaled Chand with his life story. Baba told Chand that he felt that what he was doing was ‘karma yoga’, or selfless service; through his prostitution racket he was ridding society of rape, sexual assault and other crimes that could arise due to sexual frustration.

  Baba has been in jail since 2010. He is yet to be convicted, but the endless trial goes on. Records reveal that he has a wife and daughter in his native village, though they are not in touch. Chand tells me that Baba has become quite a personality in jail where he continues to give daily spiritual discourses. As I prepare to leave Chand’s office he turns philosophical. He points to the columns of smoke rising slowly into the clear night sky and tells me that he, like Lord Rama, burns evil—modern day Ravanas like Ichadhari Baba—to the ground.

  THE QUEEN BEE

  There are certain things that stand out about Sonu Punjaban from her case files. The first is her fetish for men with criminal minds. All three of her ex-husbands were gangsters who were killed in shootouts. Another is her extensive network and impeccable organization—impressive for a woman who hasn’t studied beyond Class VII. Her phone book has more than 1,000 contacts: women are listed according to the prices they charge, pimps according to the area they serve. The third is her perspicaciousness. Though she owns flats and cars, and some estimate her daily income to be upwards of 1 lakh a day, nothing is registered in her name, a move that may end up saving her from a lifetime in jail.

  After the arrest of Ichadhari Baba, Sonu Punjaban was the new kingpin of the flesh trade in Delhi. Like Baba, Geeta Arora alias Sonu Punjaban entered the flesh trade as a prostitute. Desperately in need of money after the death of her husband and the birth of her son, she was inducted into the trade by her colleague at a beauty parlour. Her husband, Vijay, had been a gangster who married a sixteen-year-old Sonu when he was out on parole. Vijay was killed in a shootout when she was pregnant, and his death was a turning point in Sonu’s life. Her father was dead, her sister’s husband was in jail, and her two younger brothers were school dropouts with no jobs. She was with child, and had no means of survival. This is when she turned to prostitution, and then quickly moved on to pimping.

  According to Sonu’s mother, who spoke to journalist Chinki Sinha when she was trying to piece together Sonu’s story after her arrest, ‘If Vijay hadn’t died, Sonu wouldn’t have become what she has. She wouldn’t have destroyed herself.’ 87 By the time her son Paras was born, Sonu was a drug addict and could not breastfeed her child. Sonu tried her best at motherhood, something that didn’t come naturally to her, but eventually she left the upbringing of her son to her mother.88

  Sonu may not have been a natural mother but she proved to be a natural Madam, and the timing of her business was just right, what with the growing consumerism and greater disposable incomes of the Indian middle class. Sonu married again—this time a car thief who helped her grow her business by acquiring flats to house her prostitutes and cars to transport them in. He was killed two years after they were married in a police encounter. Sonu’s greatest love was her third husband, Hemant alias Sonu, a gangster whom she married in 2002. It seemed she had bad luck with men, for he too was killed in a police encounter in 2006.89

  At the time of her third husband’s death, Sonu’s business was flourishing. She had identified her target market as middle-class men with limited disposable income who w
anted a pleasant sexual experience that the brothels on GB Road could not offer. So she employed middle-class women who spoke English, were attractive and well dressed. She set up brothels in flats that she either owned or rented and appointed pimps who worked under her, in charge of specific areas.90

  Prostitution is thought of as a soft crime by the police. Usually the police don’t get involved with sex workers and leave them alone because they know that even if sex workers are arrested, they can afford bail and good lawyers, and they usually resume work almost immediately upon release. It is only when a pimp is involved in other criminal activities like drug trafficking or he/she becomes too powerful and their racket grows to threatening proportions that the police feel compelled to step in. By 2010, Sonu’s network reached across the country, with an estimated monthly income of 50 lakh. Once again it was Kailash Chand who posed as the decoy customer to trap Sonu. Assuming that the baby-faced Chand was a customer of means, Raju Sharma, Sonu’s right-hand man, led him straight into Sonu’s den.

  This is where Kailash first met Sonu—an attractive woman of medium height with sharp, hawkish features, fair skin and streaked blonde hair. The women that she offered were young and attractive, and as he negotiated the price with Sonu, Kailash remembers how the women titillated him, squeezing their breasts and groping their crotches through the short, polyester skirts that they wore. They licked their lips, fluttered their eyelashes, and blew him kisses. ‘They acted drunk, or high, or maybe even both, though I could tell from the way they walked in their high heels that they weren’t,’ Chand tells me.

  Sonu was nabbed and taken to the Saket Police Station, where she spent a week in jail, being interrogated by Chand. At that time, she was going through a rehab programme since she was addicted to cocaine. Without drugs or treatment, Sonu was fading, and she would smoke an endless number of cigarettes, almost a hundred a day, to get through the interrogation. ‘The only time she cried,’ says Chand, ‘is when we put MCOCA on her.’ She knew that there was no escape from this, and that she could be in jail for a long time.

  Sonu has now been in Delhi’s Tihar jail for three years. Her son is eight years old and lives with his grandmother. He hasn’t seen his mother in two years. Even though Sonu is in jail, she has a boyfriend. Arun Thakral, a young man in his early twenties worked for Sonu as a driver and pimp, ferrying girls back and forth from their homes to clients. He was arrested with her but is now out on bail. He is hoping to marry Sonu when she is released from jail.

  ♦

  Rashmi is sick. Her face is the colour of chalk, she has fiery red welts on her lips and face, and she is rake-thin, dressed in a pair of tight jeans and a kurta which hangs loosely on her skeletal frame. Rashmi is one of the fifty women who worked for Sonu on a monthly wage of 1.5 lakh. For this wage she was obliged to do five ‘shots’ a day, or have intercourse with up to five clients. She had one day off a week.

  Rashmi joined the sex trade when she was nineteen years old. She was newly married and had moved to Delhi from Kolkata. Hers had been an arranged marriage to a man whom she had met only once, chosen on the basis of his Brahmin caste and a steady government job. He turned out to be a wife-beater and an alcoholic who raped her regularly. Rashmi left him, only discovering later that she was pregnant. Her parents would not take back a tainted daughter, and when she told her husband she was pregnant, he did not believe that the baby was his and threw her out of her house. Rashmi was forced to get a job, which she didn’t have trouble finding as she was armed with a good education and could speak English well. A colleague of Rashmi’s at the BPO she worked for introduced her to the easy cash of the sex trade, which she desperately needed now that she had a baby to care for.

  At twenty-nine, Rashmi has now been a sex worker for a decade. She tells me that she has left the sex trade, and now works at a beauty parlour. From the look and feel of her soft-as-cotton, immaculately manicured hands, I do not see the evidence of hard beauty parlour work. Her comfortable, well-lit apartment strewn with bright children’s toys and photographs of her pretty daughter suggests that she makes more money than a job at a beauty parlour would bring in, and there is only one way that Rashmi knows how to do that.

  Over the five years that Rashmi worked for Sonu, she saw her grow from a lowly pimp into the kingpin of New Delhi, India’s biggest market for prostitution. She attributed this to Sonu’s business acumen and her connections with Delhi’s gangster networks that could keep the police at bay. ‘She was a mean, hard woman, with only one thing on her mind—money,’ says Rashmi about Sonu. ‘She was also a cheater and a scamster and was not willing to let even a rupee go.’

  According to another employee who worked for Sonu as a pimp, Punjaban was an aggressive and domineering employer, interfering in his family life, and demanding absolute loyalty in return.91 Sonu would systematically fleece the girls working for her. Sometimes she would send goons pretending to be police when the girls were with clients. When the girls called Sonu, she spoke to the men and offered them money to let the girls go. Sonu would then withhold this money from their salary, saying that she had used it to protect them. Rashmi had considered getting off Sonu’s payroll many times, working only on contract, where she would get 50 per cent of the money that the client paid. But for this, the client usually chose the sex worker, and Rashmi felt she wasn’t as attractive as she was when she was younger, and wouldn’t be able to pull clients. She needed the regular income to maintain her household expenses.

  Rashmi admits though that Sonu was occasionally kind. She says she would smile and act nice when she held Rashmi’s daughter in her lap. ‘She was kinder to women with children, maybe because she was a mother herself. She would occasionally give us small gifts and sometimes money. She was also nice to children, like she was to my daughter,’ says Rashmi. Rashmi looks at a picture of her daughter and says with a sigh, ‘I never imagined this to be my future when I was young, living in Kolkata with my parents. I was a very decent human being back then, but today, even though I am not decent, I am happier than when I was married to that demon. My daughter’s future is not in my hands. I came from a good family but ended up like this. My daughter doesn’t come from a good home but could end up with a good man. The only thing I can do is to pray for her.’

  HIGH-CLASS HOOKER

  ‘Our waitresses are beautiful, polished, and friendly. When you come to LAP [Lounge and Play] you feel like you’ve come home,’ says the manager of LAP, the hippest nightclub in Delhi, promoted by Bollywood star Arjun Rampal. One of the unique offerings at LAP is foreign waitresses and hostesses. Every few months, a new batch of girls is brought in from various parts of the world, including Eastern Europe, South America and South Africa. According to a manager at the club which opened its doors in 2009, it is this concept of hiring foreigners as waitresses, hostesses and bartenders that has helped create a loyal member base for the club.

  To Stephanie, a job at LAP sounded tremendously exciting. She was working at a resto-bar in Cape Town, South Africa, when a conversation with an agent, an Indian gentleman of silky refinement, led to the job offer. In her country, where unemployment was high, New Delhi seemed to be the centre of an alluring new world, so she signed a year-long contract, quickly packed her bags and moved. However, her experience at LAP had been disappointing. The nightclub itself wasn’t bad, they paid her a decent salary, and the place, though gaudy, was fashionable. It was her experiences night after night that were unbearable. The nightclub seemed to her dominated by the worst kind of people—rude, tackily dressed men who would get too drunk too fast, and women who always looked bored, not caring what their boyfriends or husbands did. When she first arrived, she had thought about leaving the job and going back home, but she knew that with the current market scenario, it would be impossible to find a job, and she could not afford to stay unemployed.

  While she was working at LAP, Stephanie met Sabrina, a French woman who ran an escort service in New Delhi and claimed to provide sophisticated enterta
inment to Delhi’s most elite society. She offered Stephanie a job which included going to fine parties, hosting fancy dinners and providing companionship to lonely, wealthy, single people who wished for refined company. This was Stephanie’s way out. She quickly quit her job at LAP and began working with Sabrina. Within a few months, it was clear to Stephanie that her elite clients wanted more than just refined company. In the beginning she only had sex with her steady clients, men she considered to be her boyfriends, and only because she wanted to, but soon she realized how lucrative this was, and began selling sex to whoever paid generously. She began making more money than she ever had in her life.

  Stephanie’s clients are mostly businessmen from Delhi and Mumbai. Her business is nation-wide and she travels frequently to the south, to Chennai and Hyderabad to service clients there. Recently there has been demand from smaller cities like Indore, Raipur and Ahmedabad as they explode with new money. She typically gets paid around $2,000 or 1 lakh per ‘shot’. This is about twenty times more than what Nita gets paid, and 200 times more than Vimla. Stephanie’s most gainful earnings were during the Commonwealth Games held in Delhi in 2010. She tells me that the pimps (many of them foreigners who flew in to reap the benefits of the Games) were very professional about the whole process. She was put through a series of medical tests and asked to show her reports before she was hired to service top athletes. She says that this was the first time that she actually felt like a hooker.

  ♦

  The pioneer of the high-end professional escort business in the country was the ‘Cadillac Pimp’, aka Kanwaljit Singh who earned the nickname from his expensive taste in automobiles. The Cadillac Pimp’s women of choice were from Russia and the CIS who came to India via Dubai. These women demanded a premium for their services (compared to their Indian and Nepali counterparts) and operated in five-star hotels, booking three to four clients a night: usually wealthy individuals—businessmen, politicians and visiting foreigners.