Crime fiction

Exhaustive data compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau of the Union Home Ministry establish that crime levels in Bihar, though undoubtedly high, are far lower than those in some other States where the BJP or its allies are in power.

PRAVEEN SWAMI

PRIME MINISTER Atal Behari Vajpayee, Union Home Minister L.K. Advani and other luminaries of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition Government who rail against the supposed breakdown of law and order in Bihar might do well to peep out from behind the layers of armed guards who protect them and get a better understanding of what the situation really is. Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra, as well as Delhi, are all ruled by the BJP and its allies, and the levels of cognisable crimes under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) recorded in these States are far higher than those in Bihar.

Curiously enough, Advani's Ministry is the source of the information that debunks Bihar Governor Sunder Singh Bhandari's claims of a dramatic deterioration in the law and order situation in the State. This May, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which functions under the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, released the latest of its authoritative Crime in India reports, containing data up to 1996. The report, a clinically dispassionate analysis of national crime patterns, lists Rajasthan, Mizoram, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Goa, Maharashtra, Jammu and Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, in that order, as "'more crime prone' States as the crime rate prevalent in these States was higher than the national average". Bihar is listed as among the less crime-prone areas, with only Punjab, Meghalaya, West Bengal, Nagaland, Uttar Pradesh and Tripura being safer for their citizens.

DEEPAK KUMAR
Governor Sunder Singh Bhandari.

Media reports on Bihar have referred to the NCRB data in passing but have for reasons best understood by their authors omitted to report just what Crime in India 1996 in fact contains. One national magazine accepted Advani's explanation that he was "yet to see" that document at its face value. It did not challenge even his subsequent suggestion that "perhaps they have stopped registering crimes in Bihar for a long time". In point of fact, data for every year since 1953 have been systematically compiled by the NCRB, and the trend patterns that emerge show no sign of systematic concealment or manipulation. Although non-registration of crime is a common, nationwide phenomenon, it is most prevalent to conceal the incidence of minor offences, or charges against the rich and the influential.

Consider Governor Bhandari's report to President K.R. Narayanan recommending dismissal of the Bihar Government. Well advertised through Bhandari's controversial press conferences in New Delhi, the report suggests that law and order has deteriorated dramatically in the past year since Rabri Devi took over as Chief Minister. Bhandari asserts that 5,237 people were murdered during this period, 2,472 abducted and a further 342 kidnapped for ransom. The Governor suggested that other crimes, including contract killings and violence against women, have also become commonplace. To illustrate his point that the State administrative machinery had collapsed, Bhandari cited the inability of the Bihar Police to arrest M. Shahabuddin, member of Parliament from Siwan against whom arrest warrants were pending. And according to Bhandari, agents of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) were entering freely through the porous Nepal border and turning Bihar into one large terrorist safehouse.

The most interesting point about Bhandari's facts is that most of them do not mean anything. In 1996, 8,500 murders were recorded in Uttar Pradesh, compared to 5,264 in Bihar. That is of little relevance, since Uttar Pradesh's population is far larger than Bihar's. What is pertinent is how many murders take place in a given population. That is why although Jammu and Kashmir records far fewer absolute numbers of killings than many other Indian States, it remains a more dangerous place. Bihar does indeed have a staggering rate of murders each year. It recorded 5.4 murders per 1,00,000 population in 1996, the highest except for Nagaland, with a murder rate of 14.2, and Jammu and Kashmir, with a murder rate of 12. The State capital, Patna, with a murder rate of 18.8, was the single most unsafe city in India. The State also recorded some of the highest rates for attempted murders and culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

However, the key claim in Bhandari's report is not the mere fact that there are a large number of murders in Bihar, but that there has been a dramatic increase in their incidence. On the face of it, this claim seems absurd. Accepting the Governor's claim that there have been 5,237 murders in the past year would suggest that the Rabri Devi Government has actually succeeded in containing this crime at marginally below its 1996 level. Given the increase in population over the period, this achievement would be even more significant. Growth in the rate of murders, at 4.2 per cent between 1995 and 1996, was well above the national average of 0.6 per cent, but considerably lower than that in Bhairon Singh Sekhawat's Rajasthan, where a 17 per cent increase was recorded in the number of murders.

Bhandari's other claims are no less disingenuous. His report to the President asserts that 2,472 persons were abducted in Bihar during the past one year; in 1996, a total of 2,378 persons were abducted. Bihar's record in this respect is considerably better than that of many other States. Its abduction rate of 2.5 was only marginally above the national average, and well under those of Rajasthan, with a rate of 5.8, and the BJP's own Delhi, with a colossal rate of 11. Interestingly, women and girls were considerably less likely to be abducted in Bihar than in most other parts of India. Rajasthan, Delhi, Gujarat and Haryana - States were the BJP is in power either singly or in a coalition - led the way in the number of abductions of women and girls in 1996.

Indeed, Bhandari's report appears to have a curiously skewed view of just where women are most at threat. Acco-rding to Crime in India 1996, rape cases nationwide "have almost doubled during the decade 1986-96". "Madhya Pradesh," it records, "as in the previous few years, recorded the highest number of incidents which accounted for 22 per cent of all the rape cases reported in the country... Uttar Pradesh also reported a significant number of such cases, accounting for 12.5 per cent at (sic) national share." With a rape rate of 1.5, about 0.1 below the national average, Bihar's record was better. Barring some northeastern States, women were most vulnerable to rape in Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. What figures Bhandari cited in his report to the President have not been made public, but the reason why he mentioned none in his press conferences is evident.

NCRB data are obviously affected by the problems of the Indian police system. Under-reporting of some categories of crime is endemic in the country. In semi-feudal contexts such as those in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Dalits and other categories of oppressed citizens may have limited access to police redress. Women - whichever section of society they belong to - may be reluctant to report rape, sexual abuse and harassment or abduction to the authorities. But these problems exist not only in Bihar. Bhandari's well-publicised claims that 51,000 people have been killed in Bihar since Laloo Prasad Yadav came to power, or that 7,000 women have been raped in this period, merely restate the records. As the Crime in India 1996 data show, those records illustrate that the situation in several BJP-ruled States is far worse than in Bihar.

On some issues, there is no empirical way of testing Bhandari's claims. His report, sources told Frontline, cites the General Officer Commanding of the Army's Central Command, Surjit Singh Bangra, warning of deep ISI infiltration in Bihar. Bangra's statement, which according to the Governor's report was made at a liaison meeting in Patna, might well be true. But Bihar is not the only State that is affected by ISI activity. In recent times, the largest arms hauls from ISI-linked terrorists were made in Batala (in Punjab) and in New Delhi. The recoveries were made after intercepting communications between terrorists held inside New Delhi's Tihar Jail and smugglers and traffickers who are active in Punjab. Military intelligence officials arrested ISI agent Salim on September 27 from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh; this was the most recent evidence of such activity in that State. Such examples are rife, but none has been seen as a valid reason for dismissing State governments. Indeed, Bhandari's note merely begs the question of what the Intelligence Bureau, over which Advani presides, has done to address ISI activity in the State.

UNCONCEALED bias is also evident in Bhandari's attacks on the Bihar Government for its inability to check political crime. The Governor's report states that there have been 425 political murders, although the basis on which he arrived at this figure is not known. What is, however, evident is that several Bihar politicians, including members of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), have been involved in violent crimes. Shahabuddin's alleged involvement in the murder of student leader Chandrasekhar Prasad (Frontline, May 2, 1997), and the assassination of a Communist Party of India (Marxist) legislator three months ago (Frontline, July 17, 1998), are just two of the more obvious illustrations of the infiltration of the RJD by criminals.

But are such crimes unique to Bihar? Consider the death of Uttar Pradesh mafia lord Sri Prakash Shukla in a police encounter near Ghaziabad recently. Shukla had allegedly taken out a contract on Chief Minister Kalyan Singh's life; his connections with upper-caste members of the BJP were widely reported. State police officials were reported to have said that many of those who were suspected to have sheltered Shukla were State Ministers. In fact, the Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh Yadav has demanded an inquiry by a High Court judge into this issue. It was Sachidanand Hari Sakshi, a BJP MP, who first levelled charges that Shukla had been hired by Kalyan Singh's rivals within the BJP to kill the Chief Minister. That the charges are serious are evident; just as evident is the fact that the Vajpayee Government would under no circumstances dismiss the Kalyan Singh Government if Sakshi's allegations were proved.

Other examples of BJP doublespeak are only too easy to find. The sexual assault at the J.C. Bose Hostel in Jaipur in September 1997 was followed by allegations that the Rajasthan Government was making no serious effort to arrest those involved in the offence. It was reported that the assailants had powerful police and political connections. This inability of police officials to act against powerful political figures is not new; nor is this linked to just one political party. Central Bureau of Investigation officials investigating the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in New Delhi failed to arrest former MP Sajjan Kumar after they were surrounded by a violent mob. Delhi Police officials failed to act on that occasion.

GOPAL SUNGER
A sit-in in front of the Rajasthan Assembly building in June 1998 in protest against the increasing instances of atrocities against women.

Middle-class audiences delight in reviling the RJD as a symbol of all that is wrong in India's political system; suave, English-speaking members of the BJP and the Congress(I) are clearly not very different.

Crime in Bihar has clearly assumed disgraceful proportions. In this, Bhandari is correct. Yet his report to the President failed to point out one crucial point: crime levels are even more disgraceful elsewhere, and often in BJP-ruled States. Of this, neither Advani nor Bhandari could have been unaware, whatever their protestations. When Bhandari points to the creation of zones of naxalite control in Bihar, he ignores similar problems in Andhra Pradesh, or the even more serious crisis in Jammu and Kashmir. If the Bihar Government deserved to be dismissed, Bhandari ought to have made out a plausible case for just what was uniquely horrible about the law and order situation there. He did not, quite possibly because there was none to be made.

Table of Contents

Home | The Hindu | Business Line | Sportstar