Imlisanen Jamir
Last month, a 14-year-old girl was rescued from a house in Dimapur. She had gone there, her family believed, for her education. She stayed, instead, for her abuse. The case has since produced memoranda, press conferences, and the usual chorus of outrage that Nagaland performs whenever a child’s suffering becomes impossible to ignore. What it has not produced is an honest accounting of how such arrangements are made and what the rest of us tell ourselves while they are being made.
Nagaland has a particular relationship with the borrowed child. A family in a village, strapped and overstretched, sends a son or daughter to a relative, a church acquaintance, a former neighbour now settled in Dimapur or Kohima. The arrangement is described in the language of opportunity. The child will go to a good school. The child will learn English. The receiving household gains domestic help and the moral prestige of generosity. The sending family gains the belief that they have done right. The child gains, if lucky, a mattress.
The law has been precise about what this means. The Child and Adolescent Labour Act defines family with a biological specificity that leaves no room for sentiment. A mother, a father, a brother, a sister, an uncle, an aunt — the list stops there. The church elder who arranged the placement does not appear on it. The family friend who promised to treat the child as their own does not appear on it. The household that takes a child from a distant village and puts her to work in the kitchen is not, in any legal sense, a family. It is an employer. And if the child is below fourteen, it is committing an offence that permits no exceptions for good intentions.
The law further understands, more clearly than Naga society has been willing to, that moving children from poor rural households to urban homes under promises of education has a name beyond informality. It is trafficking. The recruiter may be a deacon. The transporter may be a minibus driver who has made the route a dozen times. None of that changes what the child arrives to find: a kitchen, a mop, and a door that is not quite hers to open.
A child was harmed in that house. That fact must sit at the centre of everything that follows, and the accused must answer for it. But a court will deal with the accused. What a court will not deal with is the system that made the placement possible, assembled over years by households who needed cheap help, by families who needed to believe they were doing right, by communities who preferred not to say what they knew, and by a state apparatus that has treated enforcement as somebody else's problem.
The accused have been arrested. The organisations have written their memoranda. In six months, the case will have moved through whatever passage the legal system provides, and Dimapur will have returned to its ordinary arrangements, the children in the kitchens, the families in the villages still sending them, the households in the towns still receiving them, and the rest of us still finding reasons not to call it what it is.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
