My friend Anil Chowdhary's take in Rediff.Com on the East Delhi Rape case....
Another incident of rape and bestiality in the capital
this time in East District, perhaps even more shocking than the gang rape in a
bus in South Delhi on December 16, 2012. The victim was a five year old girl
child. One more round of public outcry and demonstrations against the Delhi
Police over poor response to the horrible crime, despite prompt action against
the officers alleged to have delayed action on the complaint by the child’s
parents and misbehaved against a woman demonstrator. They were placed under
suspension and an enquiry instituted the very next day. The success of the
Delhi Police in quickly apprehending the culprit from across states, as in the
case of the apprehension of accused in the gang rape case, as also the basic
issue of checking the depravity which appears to have overtaken Indian society
got buried under the weight of the public/ media attacks, even calling for the
scalp of the Police Commissioner
Whoever, from
the police told the parents to be happy that the child was alive and offered Rs
2,000 to hush up the case deserves to be severely punished The manhandling of a
young girl demonstrator also needs to be
strongly condemned and punished. If the enquiry establishes their culpability,
they should be given exemplary punishment. But let us be a little more patient
and balanced. Whether the owner of the one room tenement which was taken on
rent by the culprit just one week back had taken the requisite steps to get his
antecedents verified also needs to be gone into. Each one of us needs to play a
role in making our society safer instead of leaving it to the police to do
everything.
My attempt is
to focus attention on some core issues thrown up by this horrible incident and
the need to address them collectively. The extent to which Indian society has
sunk in the area of commission of crimes against women and the apparent
impunity with which such crimes continue to be reported from all parts of the
country. Much more media attention is naturally received when such cases occur
in the capital. The basic issue of decline in family and social checks over
deviant behavior, parenting, schooling or lack of it deserve attention. A
serious debate needs to be started at every available forum by including not
only the intelligentsia and the political leadership but also representatives
of the underprivileged living in our villages and slums of our cities who bear
the brunt of sexual abuse of children and other forms of sexual crimes. We must
try to find out what is going wrong and try to check this social malady before
it acquires demonic proportions and puts our entire country to shame in the
civilized world.
While on the subject of rising crimes against women, I
can’t but help drawing attention to a general climate of disorder and disregard
for law which is visible to all of us on roads and public places in Delhi.
Multiple factors responsible for this very undesirable phenomenon need to be
gone into in depth and remedial action set afoot. For this I suggest zero
tolerance for public nuisance offences based on the “broken windows” theory of
criminal psychology. If petty crimes are checked, the more serious ones will
automatically decline. This has been applied successfully in New York which was
considered the world’s crime capital in the eighties, but witnessed a sharp
decline in the nineties when the NYPD Commissioner applied the “broken windows”
technique.
Now about improving policing in our country to make it
people friendly and service oriented, based on my own experience from within,
we need to attract persons of higher caliber, education, and better orientation
to our civil police manning Stations and Posts at the level of Constables and
subordinate police officers, especially in our metropolitan cities. They are
the most visible functionaries of the Government with maximum public interface.
The minimum qualification for constables should immediately be made graduation
and their compensation packets doubled. Their recruitment should be entrusted
to the State Public Commissions through open competitive examinations. Many of
my friends belonging to the elitist sections of Delhi often compare Delhi
Police Constables with the London Bobby who incidentally became the highest
paid civil servants in the UK a country following a wide strike by policemen
all over England in the early eighties.
India being a poor country we cannot afford this, the
opponents of police reforms might argue. The solution I suggest is to
drastically curtail expansion of the paramilitary forces and spend the money on
civil police manning PSs and Posts both in term of quality and quantity. If the
there is a price for peace and better protection of the life and property of
the Aam Aadmi, let us pay it.
---------- Anil Chowdhry IPS ( Retd), former Secretary
Internal security Union Home Ministry.
