Rising concern over missing Reang children

The disappearance of about 100 children from camps for displaced Reang tribes people in India’s north-eastern state of Tripura is causing increasing concern. Parents of 47 of these children have lodged formal complaints with the police. But officials say that many others who have lost their children to a trafficking racket have not so far complained.

More than 30,000 Reang tribes people fled from Mizoram state in 1997 complaining of persecution by the dominant Mizos. The displaced Reangs were housed in camps in the Kanchanpur area of northern Tripura district bordering Mizoram.

The Mizoram government refused to take back them back despite heavy pressure from the Tripura government and the central government in Delhi. Police says one former Assam government employee of the Reang tribe - Biradamani Reang - was the alleged kingpin of the trafficking network. He has now disappeared. Parents have formally complained to the police that Mr Reang went to the camps for displaced people in Kanchanpur for the last five years. “He got many of the parents to sign documents that their child was an orphan and that they were only his relatives taking care of him. Then he took away the children with permission from the camp authorities,” says Drao Kumar Reang, a former minister of Tripura who hails from Kanchanpur.

“I am illiterate. I was promised that my child would be put in a good school and given quality education, so I signed the documents this man gave me,” said Tapamuni Reang, after his 11-year-old son was brought back from Shillong. But Biswakumar Reang is worried about his daughter who was taken away by the same man and has not been found since.

“He told me that my daughter would be put in a top class college and I can go and meet her regularly in her college. But now I don’t know where is she and Biradamani has vanished,” he said. Most of the children who have gone missing are between five and 15 years of age . “The girls might have found their way into the sex trade, while the boys might be used as child labour,” another parent, Drao Kumar Reang, said. Biradamani Reang has now officially been declared as absconding, and all that aggrieved parents have been given is the name of an orphanage, the Ananda Marga Children’s Home. But no address has been provided for this institution. The Ananda Marg (Blissful Path) is a deeply secretive Hindu group that promotes occultist practices and are vehemently opposed to the Marxist governments ruling Tripura and the state of West Bengal.

They were named by central police as possible recipients of a huge quantity of weapons air-dropped by a British gunrunner Peter Bleach in West Bengal’s Purulia district in 1995 - a charge that could not be proved in court. The group were also accused of attempting to murder senior Marxist leaders including former West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu as revenge for the massacre of twelve of their monks in Calcutta in 1982.

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