Are We Raising a Generation of Vulnerable Cultural Orphans?

Deepali/Amina was so far down the path that she posted a photograph with an AK-47 rifle on her social media and when questioned about it allegedly said that this 'is work for religion'.

- ADVAITA KALA

In March this year, two Hindu sisters from Agra disappeared. What initially appeared to be a routine missing persons case soon unravelled into something far deeper, darker, and disturbingly modern.

The girls, one a PhD scholar and the younger sister only 18 years old, were tracked down in Kolkata. The UP Police's Mission Asmita, kicked into gear and cracked this case, and revealed an alarming conversion operation which spans multiple states with international links.

Mission Asmita is a strategic campaign initiated by the Yogi Adityanath government to target syndicates that prey on vulnerable Hindu girls and take them down the path of radicalisation.

Deepali/Amina was so far down the path that she posted a photograph with an AK-47 rifle on her social media and when questioned about it allegedly said that this "is work for religion".

This is not fiction. This is India in 2025.

But how did we get here?

An educated young woman, pursuing her Masters in Zoology and her 19-year-old sister from an average middle-class Hindu family, are not the first people who come to mind when thinking of such situations. They lack the financial need and instability to be lured by such syndicates. But that is only a surface level analysis of the situation and the answer may have been provided to us already by the devastated father of the two girls as he tearfully warns other parents to inculcate the right dharmic values in their children.