In 2016, a Class 5 Hindu boy named Vivek Kumar went missing while going to school.
His father, Virendra Kumar, searched for him everywhere. He went to the police station again and again. He asked Vivek’s friends if they knew anything. He followed every possible lead.
But there was no trace of the child.
Years passed. The family slowly began to lose hope.
Then, one day in October 2023, Virendra received a phone call from a police station in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh – almost 500 kilometres away from his home in UP’s Hardoi district.
The officer asked him, “Do you have a son named Vivek?”
Virendra broke down. He did not know whether the police had found his son alive or dead.
Then came the news he had waited eight years to hear: Vivek was alive.
But the boy was no longer living as Vivek. He had been renamed Mohammed Umar. He was a residential madrassa student.
Vivek had disappeared in March 2016 when his family was living in Chandigarh, where his father worked in a factory. He had left for school in the morning but never reached there.
Years later, the family came to know that Vivek had gone towards a railway station, met a group of older boys, and boarded a train to Saharanpur. From there, the group took him to a madrassa.
At the madrassa, Vivek was renamed Mohammed Umar and ritually circumcised. Despite knowing his real name, his father’s name, and his native village, no effort was made to reunite him with his family.
The truth came out only because of Aadhaar biometrics.
When the madrassa-linked people tried to get an Aadhaar card made for him as Mohammed Umar, the biometric system showed his real identity – Vivek Kumar, son of Virendra Kumar, from Gauswa village in Hardoi.
An official at the passport centre informed a Hindu activist who in turn alerted the police. The police then contacted Virendra.
When Vivek finally returned home, he was 18.
He had lost eight years of childhood.
The family still does not know the full truth of what happened to him during those years. Vivek speaks very little about his past. When asked, he gets angry and avoids the subject, his father told this author.
The father got an FIR filed at Charthawal police station in Muzaffarnagar against four people, including a former village pradhan, two madrassa-linked maulvis, and an Aadhaar centre clerk. The FIR (filed on 14 October 2023, number 347) included charges of cheating under IPC Section 420 and provisions of the Uttar Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act.
The case also drew the attention of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights.
Then NCPCR chairman Priyank Kanoongo visited the madrassa, but found it locked and deserted, with the children and management gone.
The incident became part of a larger debate on why Hindu and other non-Muslim children were studying in madrassas, which are centres for Islamic religious education.
A few months later, Kanoongo issued advisories to all states to transfer non-Muslim students from government-aided and recognised madrassas to regular schools.
The Uttar Pradesh government adopted the directive, and asked all district magistrates to comply.
Non-Muslim students attending government-funded madrassas were asked to be transferred to Basic Education Council schools to receive formal education, and children attending madrassas not recognised by the Uttar Pradesh Madrasa Education Council were ordered to be enrolled in council schools..
The order faced strong opposition from Islamic organisations.
Note: This report was originally published as a different version here.
