Public apathy to individual misery is dangerously rising. And if
police jobs are auctioned, which is indeed the gruesome reality of
India, it is time that policemen are written off as guardians of public
safety As one French diplomat said, a country gets the government it
deserves, yet another French scholar commented that a society gets the
criminals it deserves. Both are correct. The poignancy of the latter, in
particular, is evident from the spate of brutal attacks on women and
children, unparalleled in barbarity, that is unfolding now, and the
business-as-usual fashion in which these incidents are being treated by
all the concerned parties—particularly police, politicians and
witnesses. It seems that our fellow Indians, far from being rattled by
so much inherent cruelty and violence in the society, is busy devising
ways for turning it into opportunity—a TV opportunity for the
politician, an occasion for the cop to show his "effectiveness" by
shooing off the protesters with kicks and blows, and the moment for the
witness to look the other way as though his neck is sculpted from stone.
I can't help resorting to the cliché that there is a conspiracy of
silence, one which is guaranteed for the safety of the violent
psychopaths on the loose. In the process, it is lowering the cost of
crime against women and children, and giving the country a permanent
stigma for being unsafe to live in. It is worse than the reputation of
being dangerous for terrorism or foreign aggression, like living in
Syria or Afghanistan.
A test case is the recent Delhi incident of a
five-year-old's captivity for two days, in course of which the girl
child was not only serially raped but, in a bout of depravity that calls
for cure in eternal hellfire, a plastic bottle and some candlesticks
were inserted into her genitals. Apparently the little girl was playing
somewhere around her house when the very devil, the tenant on the ground
floor named Manoj in this case, called her inside his room, and nobody
knew what happened in the next 72 hours. Long after the beast had fled,
locking his room, that the child's relatives heard a groan from there.
They broke open the door and found the child lying in a pool of blood,
barely alive. When her father approached the local police, the officer
offered him two thousand rupees and ordered him to thank his lucky stars
for having got his child back, and get lost. When some protesters
gathered near the hospital, a policeman was seen punching an agitator,
thus adding a new element to the plot, that of police apathy and
culture.
The question that comes first to mind is, what were the
child's relatives doing in the 72 hours of her kidnap? Were the police
informed? If so, how much effort did the men in uniform make to trace
the missing child? One need not be a Sherlock Holmes to guess that the
police investigation ought to have begun from a place no other than the
child's residence, and, if a room was seen locked, the first thing the
police would have done was to knock it down with a practiced shoulder
blow and thereafter save the child and handcuff the criminal. It seems
nothing of that sort happened and it is doubtful if the police would
have taken even the preliminary measure to trace the child until the
news hit the television news channels, and that got the police their
goat for having to face the unpleasant task of facing questions from
equally nonchalant superiors. The political parties, on the other hand,
were playing their own games. Shiela Dixit wanting control over Delhi
Police and Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde asking for a report. The
young women protesters who were roughed up badly by cops were meat for
the 24X7 and forgot the story after the ACP was suspended. The sequence
of failures/apathy relating to this incident is as follows: (a) When
Manoj, the dangerous child molester, was let in as tenant, the landlord
never kept the police informed, as it was his duty under the law, (b)
the victim's parents were obviously not careful about their child's
security, particularly in a city notorious for its crimes against women
and children, (c) the police have no system of regular patrolling of
areas within their beat; if they had, they'd have got the news of a
child missing long before the complaint arrived, (d) police are
interested in extortion, not service, and (e) the public are ready to
shout as long as there is an OB van in sight, (f) a scared government
offers all help to the victim and her family after the gory incident
with VIPs lining up at the hospital and her home but nobody has thought
about an NGO, or an effective organization, to help trace missing
children.
Public apathy to individual misery is dangerously rising.
In Aligarh, a woman is gang raped and when women protest, the police
batter them with canes. In Nagpur, a girl is targeted by molesters, and
when her friend comes forward to protect her, their forceful ire leaves
him dead on the street; others pass by without any show of sympathy or
offer to help. In Jaipur, in a traffic accident in a tunnel, a woman
dies on the spot and two others are gravely injured, but not a soul
comes forward to help. In fact, this is the n
