Indian Workers Trafficked to Malaysia on Tourist Visa: Sold Like Cattle

Indian Workers Trafficked to Malaysia and Sold Like Cattle Into Bondage

In the first week of September, Babbar came back home to Asilpur village in Uttar Pradesh's Meerut district with nothing. No wages, no savings. He is now back in the sugarcane fields where he started, tying cane for a daily wage. "Today is my third day going to work," he told The Probe. His two eldest daughters, 16 and 15, have stopped going to school because he cannot pay the fees. "I don't even have money to buy a packet of salt," he said. 

Six months earlier, Babbar had left for what he was told was a well-paid packing job in Malaysia. He was trafficked to Malaysia instead, on a tourist visa, walked across an international border on foot, stripped of his passport, and sold from one company to another as bonded labour. He was one of at least five men from two Uttar Pradesh districts moved through the same pipeline by the same network. One of the others, Sameer, left Delhi on the same day as Babbar. He is still in a Malaysian jail. His family has not heard his voice since 20 July.

This is the story of how poor men from western Uttar Pradesh are being trafficked to Malaysia, and of the Indian police and officials who, the families say, did almost nothing to stop it.

Also Read:  Ludhiana Brick Kiln Horror: Bonded Labourers Sold and Assaulted

To Go to Malaysia, He Sold the Only Asset He Had: a Buffalo

Babbar was working as a daily-wage labourer, earning ₹200 to ₹300 a day, when a man named Isha approached him. Isha was from his own village but lived on its edges; Babbar says he barely knew him. "One day he came to me and said, 'Brother, your brother Billu knows me. The whole village knows me, but you don't know me,'" Babbar recalled. The pitch was simple. "He said, 'Brother, you earn ₹200, ₹250, ₹300 here. I will send you to Malaysia. You will get a salary of ₹60,000 to ₹70,000 for a packing related job.'"

Babbar has five children, the two eldest are daughters. "My daughters are grown up," he said. "I thought if he was offering ₹60,000 to ₹70,000, I would go for a year or two, maybe four, and earn enough to marry off one or two of them."

The price Isha demanded was ₹1,60,000. To raise it, Babbar sold the only asset his family owned. "I had a buffalo. I sold it for ₹90,000. I borrowed the rest from my brothers, and also took money on interest from someone in the neighbourhood," he said. "I put together ₹1,60,000 and gave it to Isha." He paid in cash and got nothing in return, no receipt, no document. 

The Route: Delhi, Mumbai, Thailand, and a Border Crossed on Foot

Nirmal Gorana, convener of the National Campaign Committee for the Eradication of Bonded Labour, has handled cases like this for years. He describes Isha's method as textbook. "First he identifies the poor people. Then he goes to them and gives them false promises," Gorana said. "He tells them, 'I will send you to Malaysia and you will get 80,000 to 90,000 rupees.' Then he asks them to give money for ticket and visa. These poor people sell their land or borrow money or take loans and then they pay. But what Isha does is he only makes a tourist visa. There is no work permit, nothing."

That is precisely how Babbar was moved. Isha called him to Delhi at a day's notice. "He called me in the morning and said, 'Come quickly. There are three more men like you in Delhi. The tickets and everything are ready,'" Babbar said. At Nizamuddin railway station he met the men he would travel with, among them Sameer, the man now jailed in Malaysia. 

Isha travelled with them by train from Delhi to Mumbai but did not show them their tickets until they were at the airport. "Five minutes before entering the airport, he gave us the tickets," Babbar said. "We went inside and saw that the ticket said Thailand. We asked him, 'Brother, what is this?' He said, 'Don't worry. You go to Thailand. A man of mine will meet you there.'"

In Thailand, the group was taken by bus and put up in a hotel. "The next day, the agent there took three or four of us at a time across the border into Malaysia," Babbar said. "We crossed on foot." At the crossing, he said, uniformed officials sat watching, "they had three or four stars on their uniforms," but the group was waved through. To Babbar, it looked less like a lapse than a system: the officials, he believed, knew exactly what was happening. Once inside Malaysia, the men were put on a train, then a bus, then a Grab taxi to the room of an agent named Shameem. Only later did Babbar grasp that he had been trafficked to Malaysia on a tourist visa, with no legal right to work. "We didn't know any of this at the time," he said.

The first thing Shameem did was take their passports. "I asked, 'Why do you need these?' He said, 'I need them, so give them to me.'"

Also Read:  Ghaziabad Bonded Labour Survivor Gets Release Certificate | The Probe Impact

"This isn't your father's house. You have to work"

Babbar was put in a room with 17 or 18 other men, two fans between them, workers from Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Bihar. He was suspicious within days, after watching what happened to another Indian worker, Ramzan, who said he had a fever and could not work. "Aman slapped him so hard that he hit the wall," Babbar said. The agent's words, he recalled, were: "You people come from India and then you expect things to be free. Electricity isn't free here, water isn't free."

Then it happened to him. Babbar was made to work at a company he identified as GNT, loading and unloading sacks weighing 30 to 55 kilos on a conveyor. "It was not work we could manage," he said. Promised nine or ten hours, he worked twelve. He was paid nothing. When he fell ill, he said, he was kicked awake. "They would say, 'Get up. This isn't your father's house. You have to go to work.'" A vegetarian, he says he was forced to eat meat he could not identify. "They forced me to eat it. I don't know what kind of meat it was." During this period he was not paid any wages.

From the first company, Babbar was sold to another agent, Ali, and moved to a firm he named as VK Vege in Johor Bahru, cutting and packing vegetables. There, the hours turned brutal. "Instead of 12 hours, they made us work 15, 16, 17, even 18 hours," he said. He worked there unpaid for nearly three months before being sold to a third company. It was another Indian worker, a foreman from Bareilly, who finally explained the scam to him: the company was paying wages, but the agents were pocketing them. "The company has paid the salary; your agents have taken the money," the foreman told him. It was exactly what Gorana had described, that in this racket, the Malaysian employer pays the worker's wages straight to the trafficker.

There were days, Babbar said, when he simply did not eat. "Sometimes I went two days without food. Sometimes three," he said.

"No Help At All": The Embassy That Never Came

As his situation worsened, Babbar and the other men contacted Gorana in India, who wrote to the Indian mission in Malaysia. Babbar says embassy officials called, took his location, and then did nothing for weeks. "They kept saying, 'We are coming today, we are coming tomorrow.' They kept us waiting for about 20 days. Nobody came to us," he said. At one point, he says, officials told the penniless men to make their own way to a bus station. "I said, 'We haven't received our salaries. We don't have any money. How can we travel?'"

"No help at all," Babbar said of the mission. "You can ask them yourself."

In the end, Babbar says, it was not the Indian state that got him out. It was a sympathetic Indian foreman inside the company, who paid for his taxi, along with pressure from Nirmal Gorana back in India. Babbar flew back on a ticket dated 30 August and landed at Kolkata airport on 1 September. His documents bear out the journey: an Emergency Certificate issued by the High Commission of India in Kuala Lumpur, and a Malaysian exit stamp dated 30 August. Asked who had helped him most, Babbar did not hesitate. "The person who helped me the most was Nirmal sir."

Also Read:  Saharanpur Bonded Labour Crisis: Children Expose Exploitation

Two Months Late: The FIR That Left Out the Crime

Babbar's family had been trying to get the police to act since the start of July. Billu filed a written complaint at Kithore police station in Meerut. "On 2 July we gave a complaint to the police and asked them to register a case, but the police refused," Billu said. The FIR was registered only on 1 September, the very day Babbar returned.

When the FIR was finally lodged, it was, in Gorana's words, gutted. "They have diluted the entire FIR," he said. "They have not used bonded labour or human trafficking sections. They have made it a mere cheating case." The document bears this out. FIR No. 0359, registered at PS Kithore on 1 September 2026, invokes only Sections 318(4) (cheating) and 61(2) (criminal conspiracy) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, not the trafficking or forced-labour provisions the complaint describes.

Babbar says that when he tried to register the case, police demanded proof of a cash payment no trafficker ever documents. "The police officer said, 'Do you have any proof? When did you give the money? Do you have any documents?' But we don't have anything in writing." He says that even while he was trapped in Malaysia, an Indian police officer had brushed him off: "His direct response was, 'I don't know anyone in Malaysia. Whatever you have to discuss, discuss it with your agent.'"

Both Babbar and Gorana say the police leaned on Babbar to settle the matter with Isha rather than pursue the case. Gorana puts it bluntly: "Police is asking Babbar to compromise with the trafficker." Babbar's own account is of officers who told him he had no proof and no chance in court. "They said things like, 'This is not like that. You don't have any proof. What can you do in court?'" he said. He came to believe the police were protecting Isha: two months on, he said, "they had neither picked up Isha nor made him speak face-to-face with me."

The Probe put these allegations to the officer in charge of Kithore police station, SHO Subodh Kumar Saxena. He denied them, calling the claim that police sought a compromise or a recanted video "baseless allegations." On the two-month delay, he said the police had to investigate before registering the FIR. Asked why the main accused, Isha, had not been arrested, he said the FIR had been lodged and the investigation was continuing, and that action would follow "as soon as evidence is found." Isha, he noted, was not in Meerut but in Muzaffarnagar. Of the recruiters, he said there were many such "agents" sending people abroad for work. A chargesheet, he said, would be filed once the investigation was complete. He gave no date.

Sameer, Trafficked by the Same Cartel, Is Now in a Malaysian Jail

Sameer, son of Vakeel, is from Nasirpur village in Muzaffarnagar. He was recruited by the same network, and left Delhi with Babbar. "They both went together on 9 March," his wife, Shehnaz, told The Probe.

His family paid more, ₹2,00,000, and went into debt to do it. "We gave it all in cash," Shehnaz said. "We took a loan." The loan is documented: a ₹2,00,000 advance from Ujjivan Small Finance Bank in Vakeel's name, with Sameer as co-borrower.

Sameer went for the same reason Babbar did. His elder brother, Sohail, explained: "There are three unmarried sisters who are grown up, and he has a son. We had to get the girls married. That is why we sent Sameer there."

The traffickers from the Indian side who belonged to the cartel, Shehnaz said, were "Isha, Nadeem, Talib, Tayyab and Dilshad", the same names in the family's written complaint to the Muzaffarnagar authorities, all from Sikhreda and Nasirpur, two villages in Muzaffarnagar district. When the family grew suspicious during Sameer's long stay in Thailand and asked for him to be brought home, they were refused. "Isha and Nadeem said, 'He will not come back now. He will work there. We will make him cross the border into Malaysia,'" Shehnaz said. 

In Malaysia, Sameer's story mirrored Babbar's. Promised an eight-hour day, he was made to work 17 to 18 hours. His passport was taken. He was not paid. "He kept telling us, 'Bring me back. They are troubling me a lot. They are making me do terrible work,'" Shehnaz said. "But they neither gave him his passport nor any salary." The only money that ever reached the family was two early remittances, ₹38,000 and ₹20,000, sent from Sameer's own wages before they stopped entirely.

Then, on 20 July, the call the family dreads. "The day he was arrested, I spoke to him for a few minutes," Shehnaz said. "He said, 'The immigration authorities in Malaysia have picked me up.' After that, I have not spoken to him." Sameer had been detained for overstaying, arrested for the very tourist-visa status his traffickers had imposed on him. He had told his wife a fine would have to be paid, and that Isha would pay it. Isha never did. "As of today, Isha is not even answering our phone," Shehnaz said.

Gorana confirmed the cruel logic of the arrest. "His tourist visa was over and he was overstaying," he said. "They asked him, 'Why are you here?' He said, 'I'm here to work.' They said, 'You don't have a work permit, then how are you working?' These poor people don't know anything about work permits. They just trusted the trafficker completely."

Also Read:  Moga Bonded Labour Scandal: Officials Shield Slave Masters

The Bail Document That Wasn't Even Sameer's

There is one piece of paper the family clung to. Isha handed it to them, Gorana said, claiming it was proof that Sameer had been granted bail and was on his way out. It was a document in Malay, a language the family cannot read, any more than they can read English. Gorana obtained it and had it examined. It had nothing to do with Sameer. The paper was a Malaysian police bail bond for a man named Tiew Chin Hong, the owner of a house that had been raided, on information from Sameer, and found full of bonded labourers. It was the house owner who had been granted bail. Sameer remained in jail. In other words, Isha had taken a stranger's bail document and passed it off to a desperate family as evidence that their own son was free. "This is how the trafficker Isha has been fooling people," Gorana said.

Three Complaints, No FIR, and No Acknowledgement

While Babbar's case at least produced a diluted FIR, Sameer's has produced nothing. As of publication, no FIR has been registered, despite complaints stretching back to July.

Sohail, Sameer's brother, and the activist Nirmal Gorana say the family began seeking help almost immediately after Sameer's arrest by the Malaysian police in July. They first approached the Gandhi Colony police check-post, where officers stalled, gave them no acknowledgement of their complaint, and told them not to go to any other station, that they would handle it themselves. The family then approached the Station House Officer at Nai Mandi police station in Muzaffarnagar, and got no further. They filed again in the first week of September. Again, they say, they were given no acknowledgement.

Then came the round of offices Shehnaz describes, tossed from one authority to the next. "We went to the District Collector," she said. "He said, 'Now go to the SSP.' Then we went to the SSP. He sent us to New Mandi police station." At every office, she says, she asked for a receiving, an acknowledgement that her complaint had been accepted, which is her right. "They said there is no such system here."

The Probe attempted to reach the officers involved. Repeated calls to the Gandhi Colony police check-post, where the family had first gone, went unanswered. At Nai Mandi police station, Sub-Inspector Hariom Singh said he had no knowledge of Sameer's case and would need to speak to the SHO before he could say anything, including why no FIR had been registered. The office of the Muzaffarnagar SSP, Sanjay Kumar Verma, was no better informed: his public relations officer, Karan, said the SSP was in a meeting, that he himself had no details of the case, and that he too would need to obtain them from the SHO of Nai Mandi. On the question of why the family had received no acknowledgement of their complaints, he again said he needed to contact the SHO. The SHO, however, has not been available for comment.

A Network Hiding in Plain Sight

What happened to Babbar and Sameer is not, on the evidence, the work of a lone fixer. It is an organised operation with a fixed method: identify the poorest, promise ₹70,000-a-month jobs, extract ₹1.6 to ₹2 lakh, issue tourist visas rather than work permits, route the men through Thailand and across a land border into Malaysia, confiscate their passports, and sell them from company to company for little or no pay while their wages are siphoned to the traffickers. The same names, Isha, Nadeem, Talib, Tayyab, Dilshad, recur across the complaints of families in two different districts.

The network also takes advantage of a gap in the very system meant to protect workers like these. Malaysia is one of 18 countries India lists as "Emigration Check Required." In simple terms, this means a worker with little formal schooling cannot legally be sent there for a job unless the government's Protector of Emigrants clears it first, and unless the job comes through a licensed recruiting agent and a registered employer. None of the men accused here is a licensed agent. By sending the workers out as tourists, through Thailand and across a land border on foot, the traffickers skip that check completely. No such clearance was ever sought for Sameer or the others.

Babbar believes the scale is far larger than his own case. He describes a room of 18 men in Malaysia and a steady traffic of Indians moving through it. Gorana calls it what the documents suggest it is: "a huge international case of labour trafficking and international bonded labour."

The Unanswered Questions

Two men left Delhi on the same day, sold the same lie by the same man. One made it home, only to find nothing waiting but debt, a house with no food in it, and two daughters pulled out of school, and now spends his days tying sugarcane for the same daily wage he left to escape. The other has been in a Malaysian jail for nearly two months; his family does not know how he is, and has not heard his voice since the day he called to say he had been taken. In neither case has the trafficker, Isha, named in police complaints in two districts, been arrested. He is, in Sohail's words, still roaming free. "I don't understand how he could do this with so many people and still be roaming freely," Sohail said.

The families' demand is simple. "Our demand is that these people should be put in jail, those who are trapping people in this way," Shehnaz said. "And my husband should be released and brought back to India. He is not a criminal, he is a victim. When will the authorities on both sides understand this?"

That leaves the questions the authorities have not answered. When will an FIR be registered in Sameer's case, nearly two months after his arrest and after complaints to four different offices? Why, in Babbar's case, was the FIR delayed two months and then filed without trafficking or bonded labour charges? Why, in either district, has the main accused not been arrested when his address is known? Why did the Indian mission in Malaysia, by the returned victim's own account, do nothing? And why were two families whose men were trafficked to Malaysia repeatedly denied even an acknowledgement of their complaints, told there was "no such system"?

Every week those questions go unanswered, the families and Gorana warn, is another week in which men like Isha send more people abroad. Babbar knows the scale first-hand: he saw hundreds of trapped Indian workers during his months in Malaysia. Thousands more, he believes, are being trafficked to Malaysia the same way he was, and Isha is only one of many running the trade. "There are thousands like me out there," he said, "and many more like Isha." Isha is only the tip of the cartel, the part the police can see, and still have not touched.

The Probe will update this report as soon as we get more details from the Meerut and Muzaffarnagar police. Sameer remains in detention in Malaysia.