Rising crime graph of India

Chapter 1Introduction

Chapter 2Crime Against women

Chapter 3Illegal drug trade

Chapter 4Arms trafficking

Chapter 5Cyber crime

Chapter 6Corruption and police misconduct

Chapter 7 Conclusion

Chapter 1Introduction

Every living society has its share of renegade and violent elements that disrupt its functioning

and throw up a serious challenge to its law and order system. The ubiquitous nature of crimes,

today, makes it very easy to assume that the present times are reflective of a world having gone

violently and irretrievably on the path of imminent destruction. While it may not be wrong to say

that there has been evident degeneration in societal and moral values, still it has come of a course

of events and human actions that could not have logically led to any other outcome. The media

has also played its role in the magnification of events and the creation of a perpetual sense of

terror and doom. But, this is not to discount the obvious facts and figures regarding increasing

crime rates  that stare us in the face. Yet, the fact that steady rise in crime  graph is a result of

social pathologies born out of man’s preoccupation with a twisted logic of civilizational progress

has to be acknowledged before we go on to prescribe the remedies.

Crime, today, in India and the world for that matter, has come to be treated with a serious sense

of indifference  and in a subtle way, and therein lies the very root of the problem. With our lives

controlled by the singular influence of materialistic pursuits, which have wrecked and ravaged all

primordial ties essential for a meaningful existence, we have come to be deprived of the moral

compass that would enable us to stand against this raging blight on our society. In our obsession

with our vulgar ambitions and consequent stoicism towards the happenings around us, we have

been instruments in the disfiguration of our society. It is only when things get out of control and

the spillover starts to visibly affect us that we learn of the  monstrosity that we ourselves have let

enter our lives.

Crimes of passion and of a momentary loss of rationality are but an element of the human self,

which cannot be prevented through precautionary measures. The killing of a man, no doubt

howsoever  abominable, sometimes finds vindication in arguments, like say the victim had been

a cruel tyrant in life and deserved to die, or often it is a case of a man, temporarily bereft of

reason on account of some terrible emotional upheaval who commits this crime. But it is

appalling to discover that murder has become an act more of a rational mind than that of an

irrational one. The NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) reported the incidence of 34,305

cases of murder in 2011. The rising trend obviously relates to spread of  the crime where it no

longer was confined to acts of passion, treachery or sheer insanity.

Murder is an instrument of self-propagation, be it for an individual, a group or even the state.

The nexus among politics, business and the instruments of the government has undoubtedly been

a key in the orchestration of these organized crimes. Business houses, in collusion with

politicians, assume control over natural resources of the country, either through a manipulated

process of allotment or through mafias who usurp resources. Such a system requires a

methodical cleansing of all obstructions, and we have, time and again, been made cognizant

about such  cases where the perpetrators have not been apprehended despite incriminating

evidence.

The recent incident of sexual crime in Delhi that shook the country to its core, came in

succession of years of such aggression against women and continued to be followed by such acts

even as the country was going through the trauma of the tragedy. The NCRB, in its data for

2011, reports the incidence of 24,206 rape cases. And it is for common sense to discern that the

actual incidence would be in multiples of this figure, given that most of the rape cases go

unreported because of the stigma they attach to the victim and very often, a certain collusion of

forces that we are all too aware of. The growing incidences of crime against women, not just

sexual assault, but also domestic violence, dowry tortures, female feticide, come  as a result of

significant transformations that have taken place in the last couple of decades. Emancipation of

women has been a real process, and its implications for a staunchly patriarchal society have

been  disastrous. Patriarchal mindsets find it hard to accept this change in the society that

suddenly  expects from them a change in their traditional attitude towards women, and the result

is a violent backlash—a desperate attempt to assert manhood. All around us, we  have been

flooded with a culture of instant  gratification and assuaging a primeval instinct seems, in some

perverse way, also to be a legitimate cause.