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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India's missing children: The story WhatsApp forwards don't tell you -Divya Gandhi & Julie Merin Varughese

India's missing children: The story WhatsApp forwards don't tell you -Divya Gandhi & Julie Merin Varughese

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published Published on Aug 25, 2018   modified Modified on Aug 25, 2018
-The Hindu

Some 174 children go missing every day. Only about 50% of them are ever found again. But the story behind these statistics is complex

Shehzadi Malik has watched the seven-minute video clip on her phone a few hundred times these past three months. Sometimes she is looking for clues. Sometimes she is just watching it, empty of hope. Sometimes she is simply looking at her nine-year-old boy, Kabir. This CCTV footage was given to Malik by the police, on a pen drive, and it’s the last record she has of her son, who went missing on May 11 this year.

In the video, at 2.25 p.m. that day, Kabir enters the frame; he is walking back from tuitions in Delhi’s Nizamuddin colony — as he has done for two years — carrying a big red-and-black schoolbag on his back. His gait is jaunty but he seems to be in no particular hurry; at one point he appears to mock-bowl with his left hand, at another he stops to pick up something from the pavement, maybe a coin or a pebble. He doesn’t exit the frame, he gets obscured by a row of Ashoka trees, then the video ends. “Can you see him standing behind the tree?” Malik asks, pointing to a corner of the phone screen where a portion of his black trousers is just about visible through the foliage. “ Maybe he is waiting for someone, or talking to someone. He is a friendly child, he spoke to everyone in the area,” she says, the possibilities clearly confounding her.

Door-to-door search

From under a mattress in her single-room home in Sarai Kale Khan village, a few kilometres from where the boy was last seen, Malik a domestic help, pulls out a wad of posters with information about the missing child, and a copy of the FIR. The police helped initially, pasting posters of the boy around the colony, and told her they have looked for him in hospitals, children’s shelters, even in stormwater drains.

“The police say they’re still looking, but I am not sure what they’ve done after the initial search. They keep asking if we have enemies who might have taken the child.” With no headway made by the police, Malik’s husband Aamin, a mechanic, has taken it upon himself to go door to door with the posters. He has distributed them around the neighbourhood and beyond, in Gurugram, Ghaziabad and Noida, and on the instruction of astrologers, even travelled as far as Aligarh and Mathura looking for his son in orphanages. He hasn’t found answers, but continues his search, however far it may take him, if for nothing else, then “bas dil ki tasalli ke liye (at least for my peace of mind),” he says.

Helping neither the investigation nor Aamin’s peace of mind is a WhatsApp forward that has landed on his phone featuring a purported ‘child lifter’. In the video — a professionally directed one with fades and percussion to boot — a woman in dark glasses physically carries away children from bus stops and sidewalks after rendering them unconscious with drugged toffees or chloroform.

We may never know Kabir’s story. But for now, he is part of a staggering statistic of missing children in India: 63,407 children went missing in 2016, according to the latest data from National Crime Records Bureau, which translates to an average of 174 every day. More disquietingly, 50% of the children who have gone missing until 2016 have stayed untraced.

But the stories behind the statistics are complex, sometimes counterintuitive, and vastly different from what ‘child lifting’ rumours on social media will have us believe about ‘gangs with weapons’ or ‘travelling vagrants’. It can be a 14-year-old who runs away with a ‘friend’ only to realise she’s actually been trafficked. Or it could be a 17-year-old girl who elopes with her lover, and her family back home reports her as ‘kidnapped’. It could be a neighbour promising a job for a young boy but instead enslaving him in a factory; or a kid who runs away from an abusive father; and sometimes, it could just be a star-struck girl boarding a train to see her favourite actor in a big city and getting lost there.

Salim*, 12, was abducted by his neighbour in Raghunathpur village in Bihar’s Katihar district. In May 2016, the boy left with a man who had promised his parents that he would educate and employ Salim in his jewellery workshop in Old Delhi. Salim’s father Basheer, who works as a mason in Gurugram, realised a few days later that he had lost all trace of Salim and their neighbour, and that’s when he decided it was time to file a police complaint. He gave the police details of the suspect: his name, where he worked. When word got around, his neighbour’s family offered Basheer money to withdraw the case, but he refused. “We just wanted our boy back,” he says. Months later, the police had made no progress. “In fact, they even asked us to take the money and withdraw the case,” says Basheer. So the mason took off from work to go to Delhi and scour the city for clues.

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The Hindu, 11 August, 2018, https://www.thehindu.com/society/indias-missing-children-what-the-whatsapp-rumours-dont-tell-you/article24641527.ece?homepage=true


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