http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/11/world/asia/kailash-satyarthis-nobel-peace-prize-caps-decades-of-fighting-child-slavery-in-india.html 2014-10-11 04:10:21 Kailash Satyarthi’s Nobel Peace Prize Caps Decades of Fighting Child Slavery in India Mr. Satyarthi, a co-winner the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, has fought child slavery in India for decades, and his organization is credited with freeing some 70,000 of them. === NEW DELHI — Many years have passed, but a police chief named Amitabh Thakur can remember the precise moment when he first set eyes on Kailash Satyarthi, who won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. Mr. Satyarthi was lying on the ground, bleeding profusely from the head, while a group of men converged on him with bats and iron rods. They worked for the Great Roman Circus, which was illegally employing teenagers trafficked from Nepal as dancing girls. Mr. Satyarthi, a Gandhian activist in a simple white cotton tunic, had come to free them. As he approached the scene, the chief realized he was interrupting a savage beating. “I remember that when I reached this man, he was rather composed,” Mr. Thakur said. “I was very impressed, for the simple reason that a man was putting his life in danger for a noble cause.” Mr. Satyarthi is not an international celebrity like 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, with whom he is sharing the prize. Instead, he has labored for three decades to shave away at the numbingly huge problem of child slavery in The circus raid was a reminder of the factors that converge in favor of employers using bonded labor in India: caste differences, religious differences, political and economic leverage. About 28 million children ages 6 to 14 are working in India, according to Unicef, the United Nations children’s agency. Mr. Satyarthi’s organization, called Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or Save the Children Mission, is credited with freeing some 70,000 of them. In 1994, he started another group, called Rugmark, now known as GoodWeave International, in which rugs are certified to have been made without Asked to explain the origin of his life’s work, Mr. Satyarthi sometimes tells a story from his childhood, when he proudly entered a schoolyard for the first time and noticed a boy his own age, the son of a cobbler, gazing at him from outside the gate. He screwed up his courage and approached the cobbler, asking why his son did not go to school. “He replied, ‘Look, sir, we are the people who are born to work,’ ” he said. “I was so disturbed. Why do we people have so many dreams, and they have none? This has gone so deep to my heart, and that is when I started working with poor children. It was a nonissue in my country.” Mr. Satyarthi is only the second Indian — after Mother Teresa — to win the peace prize. As India undergoes swift economic expansion, a growing middle class has created a surging demand for domestic workers, jobs often filled by children. There is virtually no enforcement of labor laws, and newspapers regularly carry accounts of children sold into service and confined in horrific conditions, paid nothing and barely fed. They are sought-after employees, and in a population struggling with dire poverty, there is little will to stamp out the practice. Simon Steyne, a longtime friend and colleague of Mr. Satyarthi’s, said reducing Born some six and a half years after India won independence, Mr. Satyarthi, 60, was so deeply impressed with Gandhi’s teachings that, as a teenager, he invited a group of high-caste local bigwigs to a meal prepared by low-caste “untouchables”; the invited guests boycotted the event and then shunned his family. Deeply upset, the boy dropped his Brahmin family name in favor of Satyarthi, which means “seeker of truth,” according to an account on his website. A few years later, Mr. Satyarthi was studying engineering at college when Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency, cracking down on civil liberties and suspending elections. Already a Marxist, he mobilized students against the government and spent much of the period avoiding arrest warrants, said Prabhat Kumar, a longtime friend and fellow activist. Mr. Satyarthi ultimately came to prominence by organizing raids to free child laborers. Undercover operatives posing as buyers or laborers would persuade businesspeople to reveal the location of their child workers. A few days later, Mr. Satyarthi would return with investigators and journalists, “keeping everything very secret, because the secrecy and the speed are the two key factors of conducting such secret raids,” he told PBS for The film follows Mr. Satyarthi to a stone quarry at 5 a.m., where he finds children and adult workers living in brick shacks. They look panicked or confused, and some of the children cry as he hugs them. The workers lift cloth parcels with their belongings onto their heads, and he ushers 52 people onto a truck to take them away. “If they are caught, any kind of torture is meted out to them,” he tells the camera. “They are beaten up severely, burned with cigarettes, sometimes tied down on trees and beaten with stones.” He added, “It’s very difficult for them to realize or internalize freedom.” Many of the children were temporarily resettled at an ashram run by Bachpan Bachao Andolan before returning to their villages. Among those who celebrated on Friday was Mohammad Manan Ansari, who began working at a mica mine at 6, digging ore that would sell for 5 to 20 cents a pound. Mr. Ansari, now a college student in his late teens, recalled watching as a small friend was crushed by falling rocks in one of the mine’s tunnels. He said he would be grateful to Mr. Satyarthi for the rest of his life. “My happiest moment was when Bachpan Bachao Andolan workers came and saved me,” he said. “Now Kailash’s Nobel is the second happiest moment of my life. I can’t explain my joy in my own words.”