On 29 July, this year, I published an 11,350-word story in Outlook magazine called 'Operation Babylift,' a story that took three long months of painstaking reportage. It exposed how 31 tribal girls, between three and eleven years of age, from five border districts of Assam in Northeast India, were illegally taken to Punjab and Gujarat by three Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS) affiliated outfits, namely the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, Sewa Bharati and Vidya Bharti. The girls, all from remote villages, were taken away from their parents in June 2015 with the promise that they would be educated for free. But since they left their parents have not heard from them. They, ironically, wouldn't have been able to participate in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's #SelfieWithDaughter Twitter campaign.
Various government statutory bodies like the Child Welfare Committee, the Assam State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, Childline India Foundation, under the Ministry of Women and Child Development, had written several letters to various RSS outfits, and also the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights under the Central government, in a bid to return the girls to their parents. The letters cited the violation of several Indian and international child-rights laws and they officially termed the episode as "child trafficking".
Like any reporter, when I was first informed of this incident, I approached Outlook as an independent journalist with the story idea. After a thorough verification of the incident, the story was commissioned and I set out to report it. In Assam, I spoke to the parents, the RSS cadre and the associated government bodies to corroborate the incident. I obtained several official documents from government authorities in Assam demanding action against the RSS-affiliates accused of child trafficking. The parents, on record, also accused the RSS cadre of taking away all the identity cards and photos of the girls who had been spirited away. As a result, they had no way of proving that the girls even existed. The RSS cadre involved in illegally transporting the girls told me that the children had been taken away to save the "Hindus from the Christian missionaries" in the area. After finishing the ground work in Assam, I went to Punjab and Gujarat to try and find the girls. I found them.
I also found out that the girls were not being enrolled in any formalised education institution. Instead, they were learning 'bhajans' and 'sanskaars' patterned on upper-caste Hindutva ideology. In an extended conversation with the girls and their caretakers at the RSS hostels, it was clear that tribal girls were being brought on a periodic and frequent basis from the Northeast with the express purpose of indoctrinating them with Hindutva 'values' and preparing them to become the next generation of RSS' cadre. The final article I wrote had a series of interviews with RSS members, the parents, the girls and government officials. It clearly drew a timeline of the episode, cited the violations of Indian and international child-rights laws, referenced all the government documents related to the events in public domain and established the sheer criminality involved.