The numbers, reported from a conference in India on human trafficking, literally defy belief: more than 1.2 million children in India are caught up in human trafficking as child prostitutes. Worse, as many as 100 million people in India — soon to be the world’s most populous country — are involved in trafficking-related activities.

The shocking statistics confirm what many human rights activists long have contended: that if there’s a “ground zero” for contemporary slavery, it is the Indian sub-continent. Grinding poverty, ancient tradition, and a religious caste system that divides society into “haves” and “have nots,” are all contributing factors.

Why so many child sex slaves? According to a report three years ago by Save the Children India, business is booming for male clients who prefer 10- to 12-year-old girls. The soaring number of prostitutes believed to have contracted HIV in India’s brothels has helped give India the second-largest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world, just behind South Africa. Yet the trafficking of women from Nepal, Bangladesh and from the rural areas of India into the brothels of the big city is a blight that has gone largely unnoticed amongst India’s politicians and police forces, according to a 2006 article in The New Internationalist.

Such a dismal human rights record poses an awkward dilemma for the United States, which desperately needs to court India as a bulwark of democracy in a region increasingly under threat by extremist groups such as the Taliban.  Yet a democracy that either condones trafficking or turns its back on contemporary slavery is hardly a model to emulate, and American policy advisers continue to struggle as they attempt to forge stronger ties to India and, simultaneously, condemn India’s inability to control trafficking within its borders.