Sanjoy Sachdev based the Dehli-based Love Commandos.

Lauren Frayer

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Lauren Frayer

Sanjoy Sachdev based the Dehli-based Love Commandos.

Lauren Frayer

All over the world, Sanjoy Sachdev was lauded as India’s cupid.

Sachdev shelters {couples} on the run who defy the nation’s norm of organized marriage. But someday, a few of these {couples} determined they needed to take him down. Why?

NPR’s new podcast sequence Love Commandos from Rough Translation examines how Sachdev and his group turned villains within the eyes of most of the folks they promised to assist.

Who is he? Sachdev based the Love Commandos, a Delhi-based group that, for practically a decade, ran a safehouse for younger lovers fleeing threats of violence.

But in 2019, Sachdev and the opposite Commandos have been arrested on fees of wrongful confinement and extortion – allegations from the very {couples} they promised to assist.

What’s the massive deal? In India, round 95% of marriages are organized by households, often throughout the similar caste or faith.

People who marry for love, with out their mother and father’ permission, problem these boundaries. As a end result, many have been ostracized, kidnapped and even killed by their households or communities.

And a few of them attain out to the Love Commandos, desperately looking for the providers the group has marketed for a few decade:

• Help navigating the Indian marriage registration system to acquire paperwork that may validate their union within the eyes of the legislation.
• Advice about the right way to begin their new lives when their very own households have rejected them, or when folks of their lives nonetheless pose a risk to their security.
• A promise of safety, freed from cost, and a spot to remain, typically for months on finish.

NPR reporter Lauren Frayer and Love Commandos sequence co-host Mansi Choksi have spoken to greater than 30 individuals who took up the Commandos’ supply of safety. For a lot of them, their time within the safehouse was something however secure. They allege that the Commandos:

• Pressured them for cash, at occasions demanding all the things they’d of their pockets or within the financial institution.
• Withheld their cellphones, IDs, and different vital paperwork, in an try to maintain them on the shelter so long as attainable.
• Forced them to carry out free labor, together with cooking and cleansing, not only for themselves, however for different {couples} within the shelter, and within the non-public houses of Love Commandos volunteers.
• Fostered an environment of manipulation and abuse, by threatening to disclose their location to their households, making casteist and Islamaphobic remarks, and tormenting them with canines after they refused to do as they have been informed.

In 2019, a few of these {couples} alerted native authorities. Sanjoy Sachdev and different Love Commandos volunteers deny their accusations, and another {couples} who handed by means of the shelter say they did not witness this sort of conduct.

Want the complete story? Listen to NPR’s new podcast series Love Commandos from Rough Translation.

What are folks saying?

On how Sachdev might have missed the discontent brewing within the shelter:

• Rough Translation podcast host Gregory Warner: “One thing we know about Sachdev, from his friends and his enemies, is that Sachev was always a man in need of an audience. [It’s not hard to imagine] that Sachdev might also be someone who liked to play the role of revolutionary under the captive gaze of young onlookers…. It may have served his image of himself to steadily ignore the fact that so many couples wanted so desperately to leave.”

On the results of the Commandos’ arrest in India:

• Journalist Mansi Choksi, who co-hosts the Love Commandos sequence: “It reinforces the fact that once you cross the invisible lines of the caste system, you are going to fall into trouble. So if it’s not an honor killing, you’re going to be trapped in [a] scam…. Here, you have someone who was promising to protect you for challenging the caste system, but the real thing is that he is going to defraud you.”

On the challenges that {couples} face after leaving the Love Commandos shelter:

• NPR reporter and former India correspondent Lauren Frayer: “Almost every couple I’ve talked to has reconciled with part of their family, but not all. [One couple] left the country, put an ocean between themselves and both families. But not one couple that I’ve talked to has concluded, ‘That’s it, I’m not going to talk to my family anymore.’ None of these couples have abandoned their families, even though their families have abandoned them.”

Sachdev fields calls at his desk contained in the Commandos’ shelter in Delhi.

Lauren Frayer

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Lauren Frayer

So what now?

• The prison trial of Sanjoy Sachdev and different members of the Love Commandos is ongoing, 4 years after their arrest. Some {couples} from the shelter have testified. Sachdev has appeared in courtroom, however legal professionals say it might be one other few years earlier than a verdict is reached, if in any respect. 

Other organizations present related providers to the Love Commandos in India: Dhanak of Humanity runs a assist group for interfaith and inter-caste {couples}, the India Love Project highlights the love tales of {couples} from all stripes, and as of 2021, the Delhi municipal authorities was working a co-ed safehouse for {couples} in want. None of them, although, cowl the entire providers the Love Commandos offered.

Learn extra:

• Listen to all 5 episodes of Love Commandos from NPR’s Rough Translation, wherever you get your podcasts.
• Read correspondent Lauren Frayer’s companion article about one couple who handed by means of the Love Commandos shelter.
• Read host Gregory Warner’s conversation with a girl who mentors interfaith {couples} to assist them mitigate the danger of turning into victims of violence. 
• Check out “The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India” by Mansi Choksi, which chronicles the harrowing love tales of {couples} throughout the nation.

Luis Trelles, Mansi Choksi and Raksha Kumar contributed to this report.