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Ever Wonder Why Crime Is On The Rise?

As the train took me home some days ago, I looked out onto a familiar scene, now strangely new. After Mahim station, the space between the tracks and a line of grimy buildings was clear. Flattened. A pall of dust hung heavily in the evening light. Through it, I could see several policemen; beyond them, a large number of ragged people, sitting on piles of their belongings. Here and there lay a few poles, sacks, pots, sundry bits of this and that.

Then we passed on and over the stinking Mahim Creek.

For years, that space I mentioned had been occupied by a number of huts of the variety easily found on Bombay's streets. That day, the municipality, guarded by a gang of policemen, had arrived to demolish the huts and drive their residents out. After all, as we know well in Bombay, they were encroaching on public property, occupying that strip of land illegally. In righteous indignation at this intolerable illegality, the municipality had descended to do its duty. The residents of the grimy buildings lined their balconies, applauding as their very conscientious municipality evicted a few hundred fellow-Bombayites from their homes.

When I passed by, it must have been no more than minutes since the workers had finished the job. All the rest of the way home, I mused over what it would be like to be driven from my home, to watch it being destroyed. Nothing in my experience could give me an adequate idea. So my thoughts began rambling instead. In the end, I found they had wandered all the way over to a 65-year-old lady who was found murdered in her flat on February 17.

Allow me, in this column, to tell you about that ramble.

The lady taught English literature at Elphinstone College in Bombay for many years, retiring in 1989. For five or six years, she was also head of the English department there. Generations of students had passed through her classes and were inspired by her teaching: I am married to one of them.

Though I was never at Elphinstone, I have heard the stories about her and know how she enthralled those who attended her lectures. "She was, to put it mildly, a presence," Amrita Shah writes in an Indian Express tribute.

So when Mehroo Jussawalla was stabbed to death that night, there were tears of shock and grief all over the city. Who might have wanted to murder this spinster who lived by herself? Why do it so brutally, or at all? What valuables could a retired professor have possibly possessed that were worth killing for? Why this defenceless woman?

There are no sensible answers.

Two other deaths, similarly ghastly, had framed Ms Jussawalla's, forming a macabre cantata for February in Bombay. On February 15, a schoolboy called in two of his classmates to help strangle and stab his grandmother, 78-year- old Vijaya Parmar. She had been nagging him over his poor grades. That, he thought and his classmates agreed, was reason enough to do her in. On February 22, another spinster, 75-year-old Maki Master, was found murdered and stuffed into the living room sofa in her Tardeo flat. Her gold bangles had been stolen.

Why these defenceless women?

Murders happen every day in Bombay, and who's to say that one is more or less brutal than another? Still, just the thought of how utterly helpless these three women were to ward off those who attacked them made a lot of us quail in horror. The police issued a bland list of "do"s for the city's residents, particularly those in flats. Install a second door with a grill, read the first of them. Keep a record, with photographs, of whom you employ as watchmen in your building, read another. The basic message: barricade yourselves in even tighter, guard yourselves even more surely, because if you don't, these kinds of things are going to happen.

And I thought: of course they are going to happen. But not because we don't guard ourselves adequately. They will happen even if we do. Perhaps even because we do.

There are many reasons for crime. In Bombay, in India, I offer for your consideration three reasons I believe are at the root of murders like Ms Jussawalla's. One: we put criminals in power, so crime is never really tackled. Two: the disparities in our society are so wide, and growing so rapidly, that violent crime is nearly inevitable. Three: the law is applied so selectively that the most dangerous criminals never are punished.

With those three giving crime in Bombay a context, all the "do"s in the world would not have saved Ms Jussawalla.

Before going any further, I should make it clear that I don't mean to say that because there are such roots, the murderers of these three old women must not be arrested and punished. They must be, swiftly and severely. I hope they will be.

But their deaths raise some questions that need answers, that have needed answering for many years now. Are we to elect criminals to rule us and then wonder about why crime is on the rise? Are we to build a society where the rich wall themselves off from the poor, employ the poor as guards to protect them, and then wonder about why crime is on the rise? Are we to apply the law harshly to some, not at all to others, and then wonder about why crime is on the rise?

Practically every building in Bombay has flouted some rule or the other in the building. Almost everybody who buys flats in those buildings pays some amount of their price in illegal, unaccounted money. Yet I have never, not once, seen the municipality pulling down illegally constructed and sold edifices. As they did the illegal hutments near Mahim Creek. What is the message we in the minuscule middle-class send out by applauding hutment demolitions? That if you are weak enough to live on the streets, your illegality will be held against you. If you are not, it will not.

Practically every building in Bombay also hires watchmen, erects walls and gates; some even maintain elaborate registers of visitors. (That last, incidentally, is another of those police "do"s). Where do these watchmen come from? Generally, the same slum and hutment colonies that we in the buildings want demolished because they are illegal. They live in dingy, filthy, crowded conditions; but they must guard blocks of spacious flats occupied by people infinitely wealthier than they can ever hope to be. Without lessening the gravity of his crime, is it really any wonder that it is her building's watchman who is suspected of murdering Mehroo Jussawalla?

Practically every man we put in elected office has charges against him: ranging from theft to assault to rape to murder. Your particular political predilection, I know, often prevents you from seeing your particular favourite leader in that light. But the truth is, and someday we will all have to recognise it, that the clean politician is the exception rather than the rule. And a pretty occasional exception at that. Crime is what brings them to politics; politics is what perpetuates their crime. That cozy symbiosis is the best reason of all for the increasing insecurity we feel in our daily lives.

In Imperial Power and Popular Politics, Rajnarayan Chandrashekhar, a professor of history at Cambridge University, has an interesting explanation for how the British policed India. "The constraints under which the police functioned meant that they were only likely to be effective if they marginalised and concentrated upon selected targets. They would necessarily have to rely upon a general consensus about which groups in society were especially prone to criminal activity and might constitute, therefore, the proper objects of policing. ... By enacting this principle of selection, the colonial state was able to create criminal tribes and castes. But while it might police them energetically, they were scarcely, by the late 19th century, a potent threat to social order."

He goes on: "While in reality crime went largely unreported and unrecorded, police reports and memoirs identified and described in painstaking detail crimes of savage brutality [by the selected targets]."

The point? That the British felt policing India was easiest done by calling a small section of Indians criminals and taking firm action against them. Even if they were hardly "a potent threat to social order." This was convenient indeed: it gave an impression of firm, efficient policing, yet left the really powerful criminals untouched.

I ask you to think about whether things in the India you care about are so very different today. Vast urban illegality goes unpunished; but huts on the street are swiftly destroyed. Crimes by the middle and upper class, by powerful politicians, are ignored; but these very people have to be surrounded by guards and visitor's books, these very people direct how the police functions. The police kill men in what are called "encounters," then tell us they are efficiently eliminating dreaded gangsters; but crime goes on without pause and nobody in Bombay escapes feeling a growing insecurity.

Indeed: in a climate that thinks little of demolishing the homes of ordinary Bombayites, the brutal murders of lonely old women is no surprise at all.

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Dilip D'Souza