Children missing in Ghaziabad

Ghaziabad, June 7: Watching the children skip around the narrow village by-lanes, it’s impossible to escape a chilling thought.

What if one of them disappears tomorrow?

The near-idyllic scene, of boisterous kids playing on the streets, hides Ghaziabad’s deepest tragedy and fear: of children vanishing mysteriously, never to return.

Almost 300 have gone missing from this Uttar Pradesh district’s villages since January 2007 — and nearly one a day this year. Most were from this cluster of villages just across the Delhi border.

Jagratan Arya of Vijaynagar even remembers that his son Harinder, 12, wore a pair of torn slippers on February 8 when he last saw the boy. “I had given Hari Rs 10 and sent him to buy tomatoes. He never came back,” Arya sobs.

Himanshu, 5, was playing in front of his grandfather’s PCO. “I didn’t look away for a moment — don’t know how he disappeared,” says his father Purushottam, a home guard.

In every lane here, some families pass their days struggling to cope with their loss. The rest live in constant fear that it could be their children’s turn next.

Nithari is fresh on everyone’s minds. The Noida village where children kept vanishing, till one day in December 2006 a drain threw up skeletons, is about 15km away.

As in Nithari, the police refuse to help — or even acknowledge there is a problem, residents say.

Yet the figures come from the police themselves: 177 children missing in 2007; another 121 in the last five months. Forty-six in April and May. The police were forced to reveal the data in reply to a Right to Information Act application filed by a social organisation, Nawjawan Bharat Sabha.

But face to face, Deepak Rattan, senior superintendent of police, is dismissive: “Only 24 kids are missing. They run away before exams and then come back.”

In the absence of leads, the parents’ fearful imagination runs wild: perhaps it’s a pornography ring? Or cannibalism, as was alleged in the Nithari case? Some believe it’s an organ racket. Or maybe they are taken away to have their blood extracted and sold?

Arjun, 8, is the only one who came back but he is too traumatised to say much. His mother says he has spoken of being “carried in a sack” and how, during his eight months in captivity, “they used to take our blood”.

The boy was taken to Gujarat, where he had run away and was spotted loitering by workers of an NGO, Bal Niketan. Arjun claims he saw other kids “being whacked with a hammer”, his mother says.

SSP Rattan says he never heard of Arjun’s disappearance or return. Parents allege the police refuse to accept their complaints. “My daughters, Sushma and Savita, disappeared together on May 5. When I went to the police, they threatened me and drove me away,” says Satish.

Harinder’s father Arya somehow got the police to file a case, but that was all. “When I told the SP that children were being kidnapped and sold to the organ trade, he said, ‘You talk too much, that’s why you lost your son’.”

“I’m astonished — the police have learnt nothing from Nithari,” says Kapil of Nawjawan Bharat Sabha, who has been listing the missing children for over a year now.