14 DAY TRIAL // The children who appeared in the Oscar-laden “Slumdog Millionaire” continue to live in poverty, although trust funds have already been set up for them by director Danny Boyle. Still, the money is not enough for their families to leave the slums and lead a decent life, but that does not mean that they would even sell the young stars for illegal adoptions, as it has been claimed over the weekend, says Rafiq Qureshi for BBC.
News of the World broke the story the other day that Quareshi, father of 9-year-old Rubina Ali, who played the young Latika in the film, was trying to sell his daughter for £200,000 so that he would be able to afford a better life. The whole “deal” was orchestrated between Quareshi and a couple of undercover reporters from the tabloid, posing as representatives of a sheik who wanted the girl in Dubai. Yet, it’s all just a media fabrication, the father says.
Although the tab claims the man first asked only for £50,000 for the girl and then upped the demand to four times that amount, Quareshi says he would never part from his daughter. Granted, they hardly made any money off the film that grossed many millions worldwide, but that does not mean that he would ever consider selling her for illegal adoption just to have a better life. Moreover, Quareshi says, it’s the media that’s making up lies and setting traps for him, just to make him look bad.
“They tricked us into this fakery but we came out unscathed.” Quareshi says for BBC about the plot to have his daughter sold without him even knowing it. “In the phone calls they said a wealthy Arab couple had been moved to see the plight of Rubina on al-Jazeera TV. The sheikh and his wife were very upset to see their plight and decided to help them out. And then we agreed to meet them.” the father says about the plot to have the child taken from him.
“It was then it occurred to me they were making a deal on my child. I put the phone down and told them we were leaving the hotel.” Quareshi adds. He would never sell his child for profit, even if that meant spending the rest of his life in the slums in Mumbay – and it’s the media that is always trying to spin the story to give it a bad connotation. However, this is not the real face of Rubina’s father, according to News of the World, which says the man asked for more money on the grounds that this was not “an ordinary child,” but “an Oscar child” who had received many movie offers and would undoubtedly be very famous one day.
Several independent child welfare organizations have already taken a keen interest in the case, and are waiting to see how this story develops.