Gujarat’s Secret human pipeline

A 15-feet-high archway with murals of mounted warriors is a dead giveaway of the dominant community in Dingucha village in Gujarat’s Gandhinagar district. The state’s Patel community usually erects these structures to commemorate their warrior ancestors. The village, just 60 km from state capital Gandhinagar, has a population of around 3,500. Most of them live in double-storeyed concrete houses, with Royal Enfield bikes and Bolero SUVs parked outside. Several families from here have migrated to the United States over the past few years, but they haven’t forgotten their roots. The village has a health centre, a high school and a grand three-storeyed Ram temple, all of them built from grants, or what sarpanch Madhurji Thakor calls “NRI money”.

A 15-feet-high archway with murals of mounted warriors is a dead giveaway of the dominant community in Dingucha village in Gujarat’s Gandhinagar district. The state’s Patel community usually erects these structures to commemorate their warrior ancestors. The village, just 60 km from state capital Gandhinagar, has a population of around 3,500. Most of them live in double-storeyed concrete houses, with Royal Enfield bikes and Bolero SUVs parked outside. Several families from here have migrated to the United States over the past few years, but they haven’t forgotten their roots. The village has a health centre, a high school and a grand three-storeyed Ram temple, all of them built from grants, or what sarpanch Madhurji Thakor calls “NRI money”.

On January 19, it was this American connect that fetched Dingucha international attention. Four residents of the village—Jagdish Patel, wife Vaishali, dau­ghter Vihangi and son Dharmik—were found frozen to death over 11,000 km away in Manitoba on the Canada-US border. They had reportedly planned to walk into the US with 11 other Gujaratis, without valid documents. They wore heavy winter coats, masks and gloves to protect them from temperatures which fell 35 degrees below freezing, but were tragically separated from the larger group. The family “faced not only the cold weather but endless fields, large snowdrifts and complete darkness”, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) assistant commissioner Jane MacLatchy told the media on January 22. Their bodies were found just a kilometre away from the US border. The family had set out from Gujarat to Canada on valid tourist visas in late December.

Graphic by Tanmoy Chakraborty

The day after the tragedy, US authorities arrested van driver Steve Shand, who was driving two undocumented Indian passengers. US immigration authorities found and detained another group of five Indian nationals in the vicinity who also reportedly crossed over from Canada. All of them now face legal action in the US.

Patel pipeline

The US has been a hot destination for Gujarati migrants, both legal and illegal, for decades. US census data from 2014 showed that Gujaratis, who are just 6 per cent of India’s population, comprise 20 per cent of the people of Indian origin (PIOs) in the US. They have over the years gone on to run successful businesses, mostly motel chains and grocery stores. Around 40 per cent of the hospitality business in the US is run by Gujaratis. Their dominance in this industry, however, has opened the floodgates for illegal migration in recent years. “Legal migrants who went to the US before 2010 have turned to cheap labour—mostly distant relatives from their native villages,” says Ahmedabad businessman Dharmendra Patel, who too has kin in the US. With legal avenues for migration drying up in Donald Trump’s reign (2017-21), many Indians took to the illegal route.

The Gujarat police believes the migrants are sent to the US border through a wide network of agents in Ahmedabad and north Gujarat. These agents are plugged into a wider human smuggling and trafficking network in Mexico, Canada and the US. Wannabe migrants pay between Rs 50 lakh and Rs 1.1 crore per person to their human smugglers. Estimates prepared by the Gujarat police and NGOs show a near-tenfold rise in the number of human smuggling cases in the past four years, up to 900 in 2021-22. A March 2021 report by US-based think-tank New American Economy esti­mated that there were close to 500,000 undocumented Indian migrants in the country in 2020, with a collective spending power of $15.5 billion (Rs 1.2 lakh crore).

Stories of Patels staking everything and making it big in the US are legion in north Gujarat. The region, with six districts including Gandhinagar, is less developed than the Saurashtra and south Gujarat regions and accounts for the bulk of illegals. In September 2019, Jayesh Patel, 32, was arrested at Delhi airport trying to board a flight to New York disguised as a wheelchair-bound 81-year-old. The electrician from Ahmedabad was exposed by the black hair on his arms. He was travelling to the US at the behest of a female relative there.

Right: The home of the bereaved Patel family at Dinguncha village in Kaloltaluka of Gandhinagar district after news came of the deaths; (Photo: Milind Shelte)

Just how swiftly these dreams can become nightmares unfolded this February 13. The Gandhinagar police rescued 15 Gujaratis, all Patels, in Delhi. The group had been illegally confined there by traffickers. The Gandhinagar police have arrested a local agent, Rajesh Patel, while three alleged traffickers—Kolkata residents Sushil Roy and Santosh Roy, and Kamal Singhania from Delhi—are on the run. They forced the 15 people at gunpoint to inform family members that they had reached the US and then extor­ted Rs 3.5 crore, money that was to be paid after they reached the US.

A Gandhinagar police officer says one of the residents had paid Rs 1.6 crore to the agents to take his family to the US. Another had paid Rs 81 lakh for tickets and illegal transportation. Mitesh Patel, 39, one of the victims freed from the travel agents, had the Vasai police station in Mehsana district file an FIR. He said he was trying to enter the US illegally with wife Sheetal and their two young children because he could not get a passport (he was out on bail in a criminal case). “An acquaintance, Amrut Patel, told me about an agent who helped people shift to Canada without a passport. He got me in touch with agent Ramesh Patel. He met me with Sushil Roy who said he would send us to Canada without a passport for Rs 1.11 crore each,” Mitesh has been quoted as saying in the FIR. Mitesh and his family reached Kolkata via Mumbai on November 14, 2021. Singhania told him that their flight to Canada was booked for November 28, 2021. However, the traffickers took them to a hotel and locked them there. “They forcibly took my daughter and kept her in another room and demanded another Rs 25 lakh. They looted our jewellery and some US dollars. We paid them Rs 1.57 crore over two-and-a-half months,” says Mitesh.

Police got leads in the case while investigating a secret tip-off that a couple, who had left Gandhinagar for Canada, was confined in a hotel in Delhi. The couple had managed to contact their relatives in Gujarat who in turn approached Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel seeking help in tracing them. The agents had taken these 15 people first to Mumbai and then to Kolkata. They were held hostage and tortured there. The agents took them to Delhi only after they received money from their family members. “The victims are in a very bad state mentally, physically and financially,” says Mayur Chavda, the superintendent of police, Gandhinagar.

The Exodus

Jagdish, Vaishaliben and their two children were cremated in Canada on February 6 in a funeral crowdfunded by relatives in North America. A fortnight after the tragedy, the joint family home in Dingucha is still in shock. In a courtyard lined with wheat sacks, a small knot of friends and relatives have come to meet Jagdish’s father, Baldev Patel. Jagdish worked as a supervisor at a garment unit in Kalol, 20 km from his village, but when the nationwide Covid lockdown was imposed in March 2020 ,he returned to farm wheat and castor oil seeds on the family’s 15-acre farm. Maternal uncle Rajnikant Patel insists the story of his nephew and his family going to the US for work is false. “There was no dearth of money,” he says. Yet what else would prompt a well-off family with an average annual income of Rs 15 lakh to pick their bags and travel to the US illegally?

Life for illegal immigrants is a nightmare in the US. They do not have the social security number which entitles US citizens to a job and other state benefits. Harold D’Souza, whose NGO Eyes Open International based in Cincinnati, Ohio, raises awareness on human trafficking, says victims are lured by false success stories. “Immigrants are misguided by agents about US citizenship and work culture,” says D’Souza, a Vadodara native. “The employers promise them legal help in acquiring a green card, which rarely happens. The illegals can neither go back nor fight with their employers.” While there is no data available on which Indian state sends out the most illegal immigrants, NGOs working in the field say Punjab heads the list with Gujarat next.

Road signage in Emerson, Manitoba, in Canada where the bodies of the Patel family were found metres from the US border; (Photo: John Woods / AP)

D’Souza estimates that illegal migration is a $150 billion industry in the US. Prosecutions happen in less than 10 per cent of cases. “No one likes to touch the agents as huge money is involved. I know several cases where illegal migrants were pushed into the flesh trade,” he says. The influential Gujarati diaspora is also worried. “They (illegal immigrants) should remember that they will not be treated with honour if they come to the US illegally. No one should take the illegal route,” says C.K. Patel, president of the California-based Vishwa Gujarati Samaj.

Activists like D’Souza believe travel agents are the masterminds and that the menace has to be halted at its source. Police could move in on the traffickers in Delhi only because the crimes committed came under the sections for extortion and cheating. Anil Pratham, DGP (women’s security and crime), Gujarat Police, blames the US authorities. “We sent letters to authorities in the US and Canada seeking details of the Dingucha case. They did not respond,” he says. “We can’t do much if they are not complaining.”

Yet there is evidence that gullible citizens continue to be targets. On February 5, Kalol resident Vishnu Patel filed a complaint with the police accusing Ahmedabad-based travel agent Rutvik Parekh of cheating. Patel had agreed to pay Rs 1.1 crore to Parekh to send nephew Vishal and his wife Rupani to the US via the Delhi-Mexico route (see Dodgy Trails). Patel alleges the agent started demanding the Rs 50 lakh advance even before the couple left India and that unknown persons shot at him at Parekh’s behest.

With state elections due in December, politics has begun entering the picture. The Patels are politically very significant. They directly impact 45 of the state’s 181 assembly seats and have influence in 35 others. Nitin Patel, a senior BJP leader and former deputy chief minister, said on January 21 in Mehsana that community members were leaving for the US because of a lack of employment opportunities in the state. A senior state government official rejects this allegation: “Our government has provided 200,000 government jobs in the past five years. We have a 10-year jobs plan ready. It is not true that there is a lack of opportunities.”

What is true is that Patels feel left out and have been demanding reservations in government jobs since 2015. Last September, to appease the community, the BJP replaced CM Vijay Rupani, a Jain, with a first-time MLA, Bhupendra Patel. A Patel-centric human smuggling racket and the narrative of a job shortage in the state fuelling an exodus is a challenge for the new CM. With just 10 months left to go for polls, partymen hope he will crack down on such networks. Otherwise, the state’s human pipeline will continue to gush migrants into the desolate frontiers of north America.