Who will mourn the lost children of Nithari village? Who will cry for them besides their parents? Which part of India Shining will make an appointment with its diary to acknowledge their absence? In whose heart will their tragedy resonate once the case has been tried and the media get on to the next big story?
 
Who will hang their heads in shame for the children of Nithari village? Who will acknowledge the fact that nobody cared that they were missing because they were poor children? After all poor children are children of a lesser God, aren’t they? One or two missing is nothing to get excited about, is it? Not with the Sensex rising and the shopping malls booming and the champagne bottles popping?
 
Who will mourn the fact that the children of Nithari village lost their lives because they were lured by the promise of a few chocolates, and a fifty rupee note? Who will say that there is something very wrong in a society where such things are possible? Who will look at the children of the poor in their own neighbourhood and see that in the triumphalism of our songs, they are the grammar of our failure, the commas and hyphens of our defeat?
 
Who will know the sadness of the parents of the lost children of Nithari village? Who will understand their rage — not only at the authorities but at themselves? Who will see that in many cases they were too afraid to register their missing children with the police? Who will know that when you’re poor you are a suspect in everyone’s eyes — and going to the police only brings you more grief?
 
Who will grieve for the lost children of Nithari village? The children who trusted their murderers enough to follow them home like those who followed the Pied Piper in that childhood fable? Who will know what they saw and heard and felt when the acts of treason against their innocence were carried out?
 
Who will say that on our own streets, in our own cities, there are millions of unaccounted children, urchins, beggars waifs, who perhaps face sins as grave as the children of Nithari village? Who will have the time to investigate if such crimes are being committed against other children in other cities? Who will know that perhaps a graver genocide is being carried out against even more anonymous children in our country? Who will care what happens to the children of poor India as much as they care for what happens to the children of rich India?
 
Who will pause in the middle of their busy lives and say that the children of Nithari village were our weakest link in the chain — and that we are judged by that link and not the Yash Chopra-coffee bar-ATM culture that we think we exist in.
 
Who will mourn the lost children of Nithari village?
 
And who will acknowledge that in some way each one of us was responsible for what happened to the children of Nithari village?