“When we heard about the work opportunity, we thought it would be great – a good job outside when came to power.
Read more of forced labour, abuse, trafficking and violations of . Since he arrived in the US eight years ago, the 35-year-old father of three has not been able to hold or play with his children in India. For his kids, “Dad” has turned into a virtual figure on video calls, the one who is working hard abroad, and often against the odds, to provide them with a better life. ‘Just stones, stones, stones’
Rajeev’s American nightmare began shortly after he arrived at a massive BAPS temple construction site in Robbinsville, New Jersey.
“First, they took our passports. Then they told us that if we ever try to go out of the compound, and if we get in trouble, without our passports the police will take us away and put us in prison,” he said in Hindi during a phone interview from the US.
The temple site, though, was a “central prison” for the workers, said Rajeev, using the term in English. “The life in America looked very nice. But not for us. Our work was within the temple, no going out, no talking to people. We had no freedom – only do the stonework, just stones, stones, stones.”
The state of Rajasthan is renowned for its skilled stone carvers. Its sandstone hills in varying shades of ochre ranging from salmon pink to deep red provide colour and grace to some of India’s most iconic landmarks. The capital, Jaipur, also called “the Pink City”, is a walled city on the
Health problems, many of them undiagnosed, chronically plague these workers. It was a health crisis on the New Jersey temple construction site that caught the attention of US authorities, according to rights groups.
A death and an FBI raid
In October 2020, a stone worker named Mohan Lal died in the temple premises. Rajeev, now a member of the Indian Stone Workers Alliance of America (ISWAA), remembers those dark days clearly.“He was already sick, you know, but he was never admitted in a proper hospital or anywhere outside the construction site,” recounted Rajeev. “He was kept in a trailer that they used for sick people. They used to give us Indian medicines, but the medicines were not working. Mohan Lal kept saying, ‘I need treatment, put me in hospital’. But they never did that,” he said.
The workers – who spoke little or no English and were confined to a work site in an unfamiliar new country – watched with growing anxiety as Lal’s condition deteriorated.
When Lal passed away, “everyone got very scared. We were all thinking, what’s happening here? What if something like this happens to us?” said Rajeev.
BAPS’ attempts to downplay the incident fueled worker unrest, ultimately leading to a May 2021 in a New Jersey court accusing BAPS of luring them from India, confining them to the temple grounds and paying them the equivalent of about $1 an hour to perform grueling labour in near servitude.
The 42-page class action suit took particular note of the workers’ low caste status. BAPS “recruited workers from the Scheduled Caste, also known as Dalit, and other marginalized communities in India”, it reported. “At the temple in New Jersey, temple leadership did what they could to remind these marginalized workers of their place in the social hierarchy.” The workers were paid the equivalent of around $450 per month in Indian rupees. But they were only paid $50 in cash, with the rest deposited in accounts in India, the complaint said.
BAPS officials denied the charges. “I respectfully disagree with the wage claim,” Kanu Patel, the chief executive of BAPS, told with the New Jersey federal court increasing the number of plaintiffs and expanding the scope from the Robbinsville site to other temples near Atlanta, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles. ‘We don’t follow their god’
Following the FBI raid, the workers rescued from the New Jersey site were housed in hotels for a month before their cases were assigned to various service provider agencies and social welfare agencies across the US.
“It was 100 times better than what we were facing at the temple,” said Rajeev. “Back home in India, we had to work hard, but we had our families, we could see them. We earned money and we could spend it. Here we were stuck, with no freedom.”
The lawsuit claimed the temple workers were presented to US immigration officials as religious volunteers trained to do specialised work, qualifying them for religious, or R-1, visas.
Rajeev scoffs when asked about his “volunteering” for BAPS. Like most of the workers, he had signed forms and documents in English that he didn’t understand.
“My passport says I’m Hindu. But I follow Bodh dharm,” he said emphatically, using the Hindi words for ’s second inauguration, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) closed the workers’ criminal case.
BAPS North America welcomed the move, noting in a last year, sparking the resignations of Manhattan's top federal prosecutor and six other Justice officials. “We don't believe that the dismissal of this case means that the BAPS temple is exonerated. They haven't made any kind of statement that apologises for their treatment of the workers,” Viswanath noted.
But Rajeev and a few other workers remain in the US for a cause. “We want justice, that’s what we want,” he said simply.
When asked if he and his fellow stone workers had heard about the Eiffel Tower controversy surrounding BAPS, Rajeev was vague about the news, but clear about the interests of his loved ones.
“I don’t pay much attention, we did hear about the news in France. But no one from my family and my village worked on that site,” he said. “Those are other workers, they need to earn a livelihood, they have no other option,” he said. “But me, I will never work for BAPS.”
*Name changed
