New Delhi: An updated lawsuit against Hindu sect organization Bochasanvasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) has led to fresh charges for allegedly forcing workers to work for “little pay” at their temple sites in the US.
In May this year, a group of Indian workers filed a legal suit in the US District Court accusing BAPS of violating human trafficking and wage laws.
The workers claimed that they were coerced and forced to work as a USDA at the construction site of the Swaminarayan Temple in New Jersey.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that a suit was filed in New Jersey federal court and was amended last month. The lawsuit accused BAPS of “luring workers from India to work in temples in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles, as well as in Robbinsville, NJ, paying them only US$450 a month.” Was.”
“The amended lawsuit expanded those claims to include temples across the country where some of the men said they were also sent to work. Hundreds of workers were potentially exploited, the lawsuit claimed,” the NYT reports. stated in.
In May, the NYT reported that the complaint referred to six people out of 200 Indian nationals who were brought to the US in 2018 on religious visas, ‘R-1 visas’. The report said the men were asked to work “gruesome hours at the New Jersey site, often in dangerous conditions.”
India Civil Watch International (ICWI) said in May that an FBI-led raid rescued nearly 200 workers, “most of them Dalits, Bahujans and Adivasis”, from the Swaminarayan temple site in Robinsville, New Jersey. Swaminarayan is reportedly the largest Hindu temple in America.
According to the NYT, the amended suit accused BAPS of “violating state labor laws and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, which was modeled after organized crime.”
The charges also include “confiscation of immigration documents with intent to engage in forced labor, trafficking in connection with forced labor, document servitude, conspiracy, and fraud in foreign labor contracts” and non-payment of minimum wages.
ICWI said workers are being paid US$1.2 an hour, while the current US federal minimum wage is US$7.25 an hour. According to the NYT, he was promised “standard working hours and ample vacation time.”
In contrast, they were working “about 13 hours a day, lifting large stones, operating cranes and other heavy machinery, building roads and storm sewers, digging ditches and removing snow, all for about US$450 a month.” Equal. He was given 50 US dollars in cash, the rest deposited in accounts in India.
BAPS denied all the allegations in May, saying that the workers did complex works like adding hand-carved stones from India.
“They have to fit together like a puzzle. In that process, we need specialized craftsmen. We are naturally shaken by this turn of events and are sure that once the full facts are out, we Will be able to respond and show that these allegations and allegations are baseless,” said BAPS spokesperson Lenin Joshi.
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