(Top) The girl being taken away by police; (below) A scene from Water, which the Maithil Sewa Samiti had stopped from being shot in Varanasi. Picture by Rakesh Singh

Lucknow, July 1: A saffron outfit that had helped disrupt the shooting of Deepa Mehta’s Water tried to push a 14-year-old into prostitution today.

The Maithil Sewa Samiti tonsured the girl and paraded her on Varanasi’s streets to “punish and reform” her because she had resisted her parents’ orders to sleep with clients.

The organisation, a body of Maithil Brahmins, caters to pilgrims from Bihar, organising their pujas and showing them around Varanasi. Seven years ago, it had joined Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Shiv Sena and Bajrang Dal hooligans in forcing the Water crew to leave the temple town because the film portrayed the sexual exploitation of young widows.

In both instances, the offence was the same, Samiti office-bearer Rajendra Thakur explained. Just as Mehta had “denigrated” Indian culture, so had the teenage girl by disobeying her parents.

“I am being punished for not listening to my parents and uncle. They want me to earn money by sleeping with men,” the girl screamed into the cameras of a stunned TV crew that had spotted her being paraded.

In Water, a girl abused by a lecherous zamindar is put on a train full of Satyagrahis.

The tonsured girl was sent to a home run by an NGO, Child Line, after the journalists took her to Chowk police station.

The Class VII student told police her father Chandra Mohan Jha, a sari seller fallen on hard times, wanted her to start earning by selling her body and her mother Vibha agreed.

“Last night, my maternal uncle, Mohan Jha, brought two men home and asked me to go out with them. I said I wanted to go to the loo and escaped,” she said.

The parents and the uncle, who happens to be a Samiti official, disappeared after the TV crew arrived and have been untraced since.

The girl’s other relatives said she had been showing signs of “unwomanly behaviour” (by resisting her parents) and so the family had written to the Samiti for help.

This morning, the girl was brought to a Samiti ashram near the Neelkanth ghats from her home in Garhwasi Tola, close to the Kashi Vishwanath temple. She was tonsured in public under her uncle’s supervision.

“Tonsuring is part of a ritual to rid a girl of her bad habits,” Samiti official Thakur said. The police have neither detained nor interrogated anyone from the outfit.

The girl wants to go back home. “But we had to send her to the NGO as her parents can’t be found,” an officer said.