"Women weren’t seen as political actors; they existed in the news only as victims. I wanted to change that." Ruchira Gupta
I grew up in a home where Gandhi’s principles of
freedom, equality, and service shaped everything we did. Simplicity was at the core
of our lives—whether it was my mother, who ran one of Calcutta’s most renowned
saree boutiques and taught me that women could be independent and confident, or
my father, who spent a month in jail answering Gandhi’s call for nonviolent
resistance. During India’s freedom struggle, English was seen as the language
of the oppressor, yet court proceedings continued in it, shutting out those who
couldn’t understand their own trials. In protest, my father held the judge’s
hand—a silent but powerful act of defiance. For this, he was jailed. To this
day, he buys khadi every year on October 2nd, a quiet tribute to the ideals he
has always lived by.
I studied at an all-girls school in Calcutta and spent summers in Forbesganj, my mother’s hometown—a small agricultural town in Bihar. My days in Calcutta were filled with stories and a growing desire to make an impact. I was deeply influenced by Mother Teresa, whose charitable home in the city was a testament to compassion in action. But it was the open, fearless conversations in my own home that taught me what freedom truly meant. I knew early on that I wanted to make a difference. And I realized that I had a voice—one that could create change through writing.
Early Steps in Journalism: Finding My Voice
I started writing early, contributing to my
school magazine, Lotus Bird, before going on to study English literature at
Loreto College, Calcutta University. When I heard that a new newspaper, The
Telegraph, was about to launch, I ran straight to MJ Akbar, asking for a job.
He refused, saying they only hired graduates. Two years later, degree in hand,
I went back and asked again. This time, he hired me—on the condition that I
would complete my honors alongside my work.
Balancing college and a newsroom was challenging,
but The Telegraph was an exciting place to be. It was one of the few papers
that gave women real opportunities at a time when journalism remained largely
male-dominated. Yet, I noticed a glaring divide—when men were at the center of
a story, it was considered political; when women were, it was dismissed as
‘cultural.’ Reporting opened my eyes. I covered caste conflicts, insurgencies,
and gender violence, and I saw firsthand how crimes against women—rape, dowry
deaths—were pushed to the inside pages, while elections and caste riots took
the front page. Women weren’t seen as political actors; they existed in the
news only as victims. I wanted to change that.
Determined to go further, I left my job and moved
to Bombay to work at The Indian Post, a newspaper still in its pre-launch
phase. While working on dummy editions, I traveled across Maharashtra,
witnessing the realities of rural life. In villages in Thane and Malegaon, I
saw Adivasi women walking for hours to fetch water, only to find that local
authorities controlled access to taps—turning them on only in exchange for
sexual favors. It was a chilling realization of how power functioned in the
most fundamental ways, and it strengthened my resolve to bring these stories to
light.
As The Indian Post kept delaying its launch, I
grew restless. Every day, I walked past The Independent, where Vinod Mehta’s
office was. One day, I decided to walk in and ask for a meeting. I was in my
twenties, driven only by determination. To my surprise, he agreed to see me. I
asked him to appoint me as the Eastern Region Correspondent in Calcutta.
Perhaps he saw something in my confidence because he said yes. I pushed
further—could I have the title of Special Correspondent? He agreed again.
With a shoestring budget but no shortage of
ambition, I immersed myself in reporting. I covered caste struggles in Bihar
and Odisha and the Gorkhaland movement in Assam in the early 1980s. Some days,
two of my stories would be published in the same edition. I interviewed
political figures, activists, and even cricket legend Imran Khan when he played
at Eden Gardens. Journalism was more than just a job—it was my platform to
question, to challenge, and to give voice to those the world overlooked.
After two years of relentless reporting, The
Sunday Observer transferred me to Delhi during an election year. It was there
that I witnessed the rise of the anti-corruption movement against Congress. My
editors allowed me to follow L.K. Advani on his rath yatra through North India
as Hindu nationalism and the RSS began to gain ground.
I was in Ayodhya in 1992 when they demolished the
Babri Masjid, standing on a rooftop with Advani and other leaders, watching
history unfold. But I couldn’t just observe from a distance. I needed to be on
the ground, to verify facts firsthand, to speak to those caught in the storm.
So, I went inside the mosque.
Dressed in jeans and a shirt, I covered my head
with a handkerchief. In the charged atmosphere, I was mistaken for a Muslim.
Before I could explain, a mob turned on me. Hands grabbed at my throat,
squeezing, silencing. In the chaos, I was also sexually assaulted. As my vision
blurred, I felt myself slipping away—until a man I had interviewed earlier
recognized me. He fought through the mob, pulled me out, and broke his leg in
the process.
Back on the rooftop, shaken but determined, I
turned to Advani and pleaded with him to stop the violence. He lifted his
binoculars, watching houses burn in the distance. Then, he dismissed me with a
wave of his hand. Forget it. Something historic is happening—celebrate.
At that moment, I understood, in the deepest way
possible, what it meant to be a woman. To witness injustice, to scream for it
to stop, and to be ignored. To be silenced, dismissed, and erased.
After barely escaping with my life, I decided to
testify. First, I spoke with a group of journalists, many of whom had also been
attacked while covering the demolition. Then, I stood before the Liberhan
Commission of Inquiry. I told them what I had seen—how the demolition was
planned, the ropes tied to the mosque, the people from Bombay who had arrived
specifically for this purpose. It wasn’t a riot. It was deliberate.
But testifying as a woman came with its own cost.
Instead of focusing on what I had witnessed, they questioned me—Do you believe
in God? Do you smoke? Do you have male friends? They asked why I had gone to
speak to Advani after the attack in such a ‘disheveled state.’ They suggested I
was doing it for publicity. I felt dismissed, ridiculed, and gaslighted. But I
answered them all. When they asked if I believed in religion, I told them I
believed in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna tells Arjun to fight injustice.
Speaking the truth was my duty. Somehow, I found answers within me that I
didn’t know I had.
But breaking the silence came at a price. I was
no longer the "good woman." I began to see the unspoken rules—the
divide between good and bad women, between those who stayed quiet and those who
spoke up. I had never called myself a feminist then; I didn’t even have the
vocabulary for it. I didn’t know what gaslighting was, but looking back, I
recognize it now.
Speaking out made me a target. Threats started
coming in. RSS and VHP supporters vandalized my car. I was followed in
Connaught Place. Colleagues whispered that I was ‘exaggerating.’ Some even
suggested I was suffering from "A Passage to India Syndrome," as if I
had imagined the danger.
I no longer felt safe, even in my own home. One
night, I watched from my terrace as men smashed my car and left a threatening
note. That was when I knew—I had to leave. I resigned from my job at Business
India and left for Nepal, hoping to escape, to clear my head. But instead, I
found another story that would change my life.
After resigning from Business India, I needed to get away. The
threats, the constant fear, the realization that truth alone wasn’t enough to
create change—it all left me drained. I went to Nepal, hoping for a break, a
chance to clear my head. Instead, I stumbled upon a story that would change the
course of my life.
As I traveled through remote villages, I noticed something
unsettling—there were almost no young girls. When I asked where they were, the
men sitting around, sipping tea and playing cards, responded casually,
"Sab Mumbai mein hain" (They’re all in Mumbai). Their words sent a
chill down my spine. How could an entire generation of girls from these
villages—where access to education and healthcare was already scarce—end up in
Mumbai? I started asking more questions, and every answer led me to the same
dark truth: they had been taken, sold, trafficked.
I followed the trail to the Indo-Nepal border, just 14 kilometers
from my mother’s childhood home. There, I saw it unfolding in real time.
Girls—some as young as ten—being led across in buses and trucks while border
guards looked the other way. Some of them were dressed in their finest clothes,
excited, believing they were heading to a city for work or marriage. Others
were silent, their faces frozen in fear. I tried to speak to them, to
understand, but before I could, they were gone—disappearing into a system I was
only beginning to grasp.
Determined to uncover the full story, I traced their journey from
these border towns, through Bihar, and finally to the brothels of Mumbai.
What I saw in Mumbai’s red-light districts will never leave me. It
was a marketplace of human flesh. Women and girls stood behind iron bars, like
caged animals, while men roamed the narrow lanes, inspecting them, choosing the
ones they wanted. The younger the girl, the higher the price.
Many had been betrayed—sold by someone they trusted, kidnapped, or
deceived with promises of work. Some were drugged during their journey and woke
up imprisoned in these rooms, where their "training" began. But this
training was nothing less than torture—beatings, starvation, repeated
rape—until they stopped resisting.
I met a 15-year-old girl forced to see 20 to 30 men a day. Another
had tried to escape three times; now she was blind in one eye from the beatings
she had endured as punishment. One girl had been sold at seven—too young to
even remember life outside those walls.
One day, as I tried to film inside the brothels, a man pressed a
knife to my throat and warned, I won’t let you film here. I thought that was
it—I was going to die. But then, the women stepped forward. About 22 of them
formed a protective circle around me. One of them spoke: "If you want to
kill her, kill us first, because we’ve decided to talk."
The man hesitated. Killing 23 women was too much trouble. He slunk
away.
I filmed everything. Every shattered dream, every stolen
childhood, every girl who had been trafficked, sold, and broken. I traced the
entire network—from the remote villages of Nepal to the brothels of
Mumbai—following the invisible thread that bound these women to their fate.
Their stories weren’t just statistics; they were raw, human, and urgent.
The result was 'The Selling of Innocents', a documentary that tore
the veil off the horrors of sex trafficking. It exposed a system that thrived
on silence, complicity, and the vulnerability of the powerless. The film won an
Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism, a moment that should have felt
victorious.
I flew to New York to accept the award, standing before a room
filled with powerful people who had never walked through a red-light district,
never seen a child sold like a commodity. I thanked the women who had trusted
me with their stories, but as I held the golden statue in my hands, I felt
nothing. The award wouldn’t unlock doors or unshackle wrists. It wouldn’t bring
back the years stolen from the girls I had met.
So, I took the Emmy back to where the story had begun—to the women
in the brothels. They turned it over in their hands, tracing its edges,
weighing it as if it held some kind of answer. Then one of them asked,
"Will this get our daughters out?"
Her words hit me like a blow. I had no answer.
I looked at them and said the only thing I could: "I don’t
know how, but I will try."'
That moment changed everything. I was no longer just a journalist
exposing injustice—I was a woman standing beside other women, ready to fight
for change.
Apne Aap was born in the red-light districts of Mumbai, not as an
organization but as a sisterhood. It started with 22 women who had been trafficked—women
who had spent their lives being bought and sold, but who now wanted something
more. We sat together, sharing tea and stories, and I asked them what they
needed.
They didn’t ask for charity. They didn’t want sympathy. They
wanted their daughters to go to school. They wanted ration cards, voter IDs,
and a way out of the brothels.
So, we began. We rented a small room in a municipal school, laid
out straw mats, and brought in a teacher. Chalk, pens, paper, and a little
food—that was the foundation of our first community classroom. The children
were eager, ready to learn. But when we tried to enroll them in school, the
principal refused. He said he wouldn’t admit children of prostitutes.
That was our first collective act of resistance. The mothers and I
marched into his office. They pleaded, they cried, they refused to leave. They
told him their children had the right to learn. Finally, the principal
relented.
That moment was just the beginning. Over the years, those same
children grew up to become police officers, nurses, artists—even animation
designers working in Paris and New York. We transformed red-light districts
into what we called green-light districts—places where women had choices, where
their daughters had futures beyond prostitution.
What started as 22 women in a cramped room became a movement. A
movement of women helping women, refusing to be forgotten.
Fighting trafficking in India wasn’t enough. To dismantle the
system, I had to go beyond borders—to where policies were made, where laws were
written, where power truly lay.
I worked with the UN to redefine trafficking, shifting the focus
from illegal migration to exploitation. At the time, women were blamed for
their own trafficking, asked if they had "consented" to their
exploitation. I fought to change that. Alongside other activists, I helped
draft the UN Trafficking Protocol, ensuring that traffickers and sex buyers—not
the victims—were criminalized. Today, 168 countries have ratified it.
In the United States, I helped shape the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act (TVPA), shifting the burden of proof from victims to traffickers
and securing funding for shelters and legal aid. Across Europe, I pushed for
the Nordic Model in France, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, and Canada—decriminalizing
prostituted women while penalizing buyers.
In Southeast Asia, I worked with governments in Thailand,
Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines to establish anti-trafficking laws. In
South Africa, I testified before Parliament while Nelson Mandela was still
alive, advocating for policies that tackled demand. I watched women in South
African townships build their own organizations using the Apne Aap model,
proving that grassroots activism could ripple across continents.
But there were battles I lost. One of them was with Bill Gates and
the global AIDS programs. His foundation funded condom distribution in
red-light districts instead of helping women escape. When I argued for
education instead, he dismissed me. "What’s the guarantee they’ll even
finish school?" he asked. I shot back, "Your kids are at Stanford.
What’s the guarantee of anything? At least give them a chance." Years
later, when his ties to Jeffrey Epstein surfaced, I understood his indifference.
Despite setbacks, the movement grew. Today, trafficking is
recognized worldwide as a crime of exploitation. Consent is no longer a
loophole. And more than ever, sex buyers are being held accountable. The fight
isn’t over—but the world is finally listening.
This is not just my fight—it belongs to every girl who was ever
sold, every mother who watched her daughter be taken, every woman who was told
she had no choice. We fight to dismantle a system that treats women as
disposable. We fight because no girl should inherit a life of exploitation.
I have seen women reclaim their power. I have seen the daughters
of prostituted women grow up to become police officers, doctors, and
lawyers—women who now protect others from the fate their mothers endured.
I now teach courses at NYU, training the next generation of
activists, journalists, and change-makers. Because this fight must continue
beyond me. We need more voices, more warriors, more people who refuse to accept
that prostitution is "inevitable." I believe in a world where no
woman or child is for sale. Where a girl’s body is her own—not a commodity to
be bought and sold.
The fight is far from over. But we are not stopping. Not now. Not
ever.
