[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 India,
using undercover operatives and camera crews to find the airless workrooms and
mine shafts where children were being kept.]
NEW DELHI
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 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 India,
using undercover operatives and camera crews to find the airless workrooms and
mine shafts where children were being kept.
The circus raid was a reminder of the factors that
converge in favor of employers using bonded labor in India India
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 the eighth
Indian to win a Nobel, and only the second — after Mother Teresa — to win the
Peace Prize.
As India
Simon Steyne, a longtime friend and colleague of Mr.
Satyarthi’s, said reducing child
labor was ultimately
the responsibility of governments and lawmakers. “I don’t think Kailash would
say, ‘We are going to go out and rescue the other 168 million,’ ” Mr.
Steyne said. But he added that his friend was driven by a sense of moral
urgency and a ground-level network of informants who continually provide
reports of exploitation.
“If there is intelligence that
there are children being physically trafficked on a train, they will get raid
and rescue workers together at a station,” said Mr. Steyne, an official
at the International Labor Organization. “And when the train stops,
they’ll board the train and rescue the children.”
Born about 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 child workers.
A2002 documentary for PBS followed Mr. Satyarthi to a
quarry at 5
a.m. , where he found children
and adult workers living in brick shacks. 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.”
