Ritu Jha-
The Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), a religious organization, has been accused of human trafficking and wage law violations, including bringing hundreds of workers from India and forcing them to work at several temple sites for wages as low as $1.
A lawsuit filed by a group of Indian workers in this regard in May, filed an amended version last month when more former BAPS employees joined the suit.
A case filed in a New Jersey federal court said that the organization confined and forced them to work for about $1 to construct the massive Swaminarayan temple in New Jersey.
BAPS was accused “of luring laborers from India to work on temples near Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles, as well as in Robbinsville, New Jersey, paying them just the US $450 a month.”
BAPS officials have denied any wrongdoing on their part.
Paul Fishman, the counsel for the organization told indica in an email, “U.S. government officials have authorized the use of R-1 visas for stone artisans for 20 years, and federal, state, and local government agencies have regularly visited and inspected all of the construction projects on which those artisans volunteered.”
He declined to comment on the workers’ claims that they were paid $1.20 per hour.
Lenin Joshi, the BAPS spokesperson based in New Jersey, told indica, “It was shocking for all of us because of the fact the allegations are not true.”
The report named six men who were among over 200 Indian nationals brought to the US, starting in around 2018 on religious ‘R-1’ visas.
According to the claim, some plaintiffs and other R-1 workers performed at temples in Los Angeles temple, Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta worked fewer hours than those in the Robbinsville temple in New Jersey. The former group worked at least eight hours per day, seven days a week, with only about one day off per month, the suit asserted, adding that though they worked fewer hours than the workers in New Jersey, their hourly wages still fell well short of the federal and state minimums.
The amended complaint accused BAPS officials of “violating state labor laws and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, which was created to go after organized crime,” the report said.
The lawsuit alleges that temple authorities confiscated the workers’ passports immediately after the workers left JFK airport. It claimed that security guards in BAPS uniforms were stationed at the Robbinsville temple premises where the workers lived and worked, and that cameras around the temple monitored and recorded their activities.
It claimed that the R-1 workers generally slept in a large hall or other buildings in the temple compounds in Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Workers at the Los Angeles temple who were required to live in a hotel at a walking distance from the temple allegedly had supervisors escort them between the temple and the hotel.
The complaint lists allegations that include “forced labor, trafficking with respect to forced labor, document servitude, conspiracy, and confiscation of immigration documents with the intent to engage in fraud in foreign labor contracting” as well as “failure to pay minimum wage.”
It said the workers did manual labor on the site, “working nearly 13 hours a day lifting large stones, operating cranes and other heavy machinery, building roads and storm sewers, digging ditches and shoveling snow, all for the equivalent of about US $450 per month. They were paid US $50 in cash, with the rest deposited in accounts in India.”
The lawsuit states that at the Robbinsville temple and elsewhere, workers were prohibited from speaking with visitors to the temple, failure to obey this rule resulted in workers’ meager pay being reduced even further, the workers being sent back to India, or other disciplinary action. At times, supervisors told the workers that the police would arrest them if they left.
The lawsuit asserted that Mohan Lal, an R-1 worker, died after being subjected to forced labor at the Robbinsville temple, and that those overseeing the Robbinsville temple construction retaliated against workers who organized to demand that Mohan Lal’s remains to be treated according to his — and not the authorities’ — religious rituals and that their own living conditions be improved.
[Photo courtesy: www.baps.org]
