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".