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| Q&A with Reporter Lauren Frayer |
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The series follows the rise and fall of the Love Commandos, a group that pledged to do something few government agencies or police departments in India could promise: protect and shelter young lovers on the run.
In 2018, NPR international correspondent Lauren Frayer set out to answer a deceptively simple question: Are the Love Commandos the caped crusaders for love they vow to be? The search for answers led her on a journey that features one of Embedded’s signature elements: an in-depth investigation told from the ground up.
On this edition of the newsletter, we take a backstage peek at a story that was almost five years in the making, and Frayer tells us about the way she said goodbye to the country where she’d been embedded for years. The conversation has been excerpted from an upcoming episode of The Sunday Story on Up First, hosted by Ayesha Rascoe. It has been edited for length and clarity. |
NPR correspondent Lauren Frayer (center) and former NPR producer Raksha Kumar (right) interview Shabana Khatoon (left) and her infant daughter Adeeba, at their home in Dharavi, in Mumbai. While working together on the Love Commandos series for NPR, Frayer and Kumar also covered news from across the Indian subcontinent, including this 2023 story about a new generation of babies who represent big demographic changes in India. (Photo credit Chandni Gajria for NPR) |
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The thing about investigative stories is that you know when the reporting starts, but you never know where it will lead. What was your starting point for this story?
So when I arrived to take up my post as NPR’s India correspondent in 2018, I was living in Mumbai and I heard about this group called the Love Commandos. I admit the name was catchy. I was intrigued. The Love Commandos are a vigilante group that rescues lovers who are running away from arranged marriages. So while the vast majority of Indians have arranged marriages, there's a small percentage of Indians who don't do that. A minority of them face violence and threats for making that choice. And that’s where this vigilante group comes in.
So I contacted the Love Commandos and they said, ‘Okay, we'll allow you to come visit, but we can't tell you where we are.’ I met the head of the Commandos on a street corner outside of a metro stop in Delhi. I hopped in an auto rickshaw and we wound through these narrow alleyways. It's like a tangle of power lines and narrow alleyways and rickshaws zooming all around. And eventually I was escorted into a secret safe house.
Inside the shelter, I met couples. They had come from every corner of the country to reach this safe house. In India, the feeling is that you should marry within your caste and you should marry the person that your parents arrange for you to marry. The couples had these harrowing escape stories. Some of them [say they] had narrowly escaped threats on their lives.
Back then, the Love Commandos appeared to be saviors of the story. They’d given these couples room and board, and helped them restart married life in safety.
But months later, couples started reaching out to me with very different versions of life in the Love Commandos shelter. They described long days of cleaning and cooking and running the shelter themselves, being asked to fork over large sums of money to the Commandos, and even being asked to give foot massages to some of the Love Commandos.
And then came the biggest shock: In January 2019, the [founders of the] Love Commandos were arrested for allegedly extorting money from the couples in their care.
The story changed. How did you adapt your own reporting process along the way?
I thought I was reporting on a story about love and escape and tradition in India. I ended up reporting a true crime story that became a podcast for NPR. I reported this for five years and it ended up morphing from a love story to a story about broken trust. I spent a lot of time exploring what life was like in this shelter. And whether the Commandos are heroes or villains.
And [the couples] were really divided about how they saw Sanjoy Sachdev and the Love Commandos, because... the love Commandos are a target for a lot of powerful people. Sanjoy Sachdev was helping young people defy their parents and go against deeply held norms in their country. And there's also a political backdrop here, because Indian politics are changing. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a Hindu nationalist, and under him the forces of tradition have been really emboldened. Sanjoy Sachdev has been affiliated with a few different opposition parties, and when he was arrested, he said, ‘This is a political conspiracy against me.’
I've spent years thinking about that, about Sachdev’s motivations, and I think what he would say is that he just believes it's right. He just believes that young people should have a right to marry who they choose. He makes these over the top theatrical statements about love. And the couples in his care, some of them would roll their eyes at these over the top speeches, but others totally loved it.
After five years as NPR’s India correspondent, you left the region earlier this year to become the network’s London correspondent. How do you sign off after spending so much time in a place?
On one of my very last days in the country, I went to the movies to see a classic Bollywood romcom. It was at this iconic theater in Mumbai that's been playing the same 1990s Bollywood romcom every day since 1995. It's called Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge or DDLJ for short. It stars Shah Rukh Khan, who's like the heartthrob of all heartthrobs, and there's dancing and singing in the movie. In this theater, the whole audience dances and sings and recites the dialogue from memory. And it is just this joyful experience. It was a perfect ending to my time in India and it just reminded me how much a great love story can grip people's imaginations even when it's not even part of their tradition in real life. In the second episode of Love Commandos, Frayer explores what happens in real life when an inter-caste couple chooses their own love story over the wishes of their families. As the tension drives these young lovers to a breaking point, the Love Commandos enter the picture. Available on Wednesday (Aug. 2) in the Embedded feed. |
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