Beggar Mafias!

By Maxwell Pereira :
From: MaxOpinion@googlegroups.com : 15.08.2006

The Delhi Government under chief secretary Shailaja Chandra was the
only time when some serious effort was made to tackle effectively the
beggar menace in the national capital. The social welfare department
whose baby it is to manage beggars had utterly failed despite a law on
anti-beggary and adequate beggar homes in position for incarceration
and rehabilitation, and police backup available at the drop of a hat
when sought. No amount of court interventions and High Court directives
had helped either.

Then on 24 September 2002, the Delhi High Court again directed Delhi
administration to clear the capital city of beggars and hawkers as they
`obstruct the smooth flow of traffic'. The order came in response to a
public interest litigation (PIL) petition that described beggars and
homeless people as the `ugly face of the nation's capital' and as
people who, among other things, caused `road rage'.

Taking cue from the High Court, Ms Chandra latched on to me as the
city's then traffic chief to come up with a workable plan that could
rid our road junctions of beggars. While I had nothing in the
'traffic' arsenal to target beggars, the traffic police could
definitely target those vehicle owners and drivers who patronized
begging and vending on the road - and that's what we did by
invoking the powers to issue direction to regulate road traffic etc -
to ban giving of alms and vending activity at road junctions under pain
of fine. The Traffic Police notification provided for the imposition of
a fine on motorists who gave money to beggars or bought things from
vendors at road junctions.

This was seen as an aggressive approach against beggary. And I was
quoted critically as how beggary is a menace that "flourishes with
impunity in the streets of Delhi much to the disgust, distaste and
horror of the community at large. The first thing every tourist learns
about India is that it is a land of beggars."

I am an avid supporter of the NGO movement and find laudable the work
they do in varied areas of deprivation and discrimination. But the
effective enforcement of the new rule was pinching and not palatable to
the NGOs working in the field of street children. The entire NGO world
descended on me like a ton of bricks. I was constrained to pick up the
gauntlet to face the tirade against the traffic police move, and face
the NGO music in different fora - panel discussions, conferences and
jan-sunwaiis. The plight of those deprived of their livelihood by my
merciless act of sweeping them off the road with a draconian law was
thrashed threadbare - under intense media scrutiny.

The people of Delhi though, strongly approved our move and stood by us.
The result, within days Delhi's roads were clean of beggars, enough
even to attract the international media to carry India's this step
against beggars to their own distant lands across continents and
oceans.

As part of the debate while facing the NGO onslaught, when I insisted
that there was a vested interest commercialising beggary through
maiming and dismemberment of victims kidnapped or recruited for the
purpose, an old Delhi Police crime branch study was waved in my face
claiming that the study did not find any role of criminals or mafia
operating behind begging in Delhi. Delhi Police's inability to expose
the mafia content behind beggary was used by Indu Prakash Singh, the
director of Ashray Adhikaar Abhiyan to defend beggar community as a
"distressed people" and that the police should decriminalize
begging - especially since "people do not beg out of choice, but
out of compulsion. How can the government say it is an organized
crime?"

I am sure there is a vast segment of beggars who fall in the category
described by the NGOs as "distressed people". But I firmly believed
in the existence of beggar mafias that exploit and commercialise the
Indians' tendency to gain punya by giving alms. That crime syndicates
working behind begging do exist. And no doubt a large number of people
are brought into Delhi for begging. I also remember reading how
Professor BB Pande of Delhi University's Law Faculty was then quoted
saying there were seven gangs who controlled organized begging in the
city.

True, the criminal mafia character behind beggary needed more attention
of the police, even while the infrastructure created within social
welfare department needed to have been put to adequate and effective
use to fight the beggar menace sincerely. Given the pressures and list
of priorities the police are saddled with, that beggars do not come
anywhere near the top priority should not surprise anyone.

Even so, the gory expose over the weekend by the CNN-IBN TV channel of
a beggar-doctor mafia is incomprehensible. That a beggar mafia exists
and it tortures and maims people to make them beg. And there are
doctors too who help the mafia by amputating the limbs of healthy
people. The channel claimed there are more than 12,000 handicapped
beggars in Delhi alone. And it is doctors like the ones they captured
on sting camera that help the beggar mafia to mutilate, terrorise and
live off the beggars of the city - a fact, confirmed by beggars
themselves.

In the absence of an aggrieved complainant and "an act in furtherance
of the stated intention" it is unfortunate that the 'exposed'
doctors are likely to go scot free... infuriating even further and
shocking people's conscience more. Much sensation, that is all the
channel has achieved. Had it consulted its own legal advisors how to go
about it so the perpetrators could be effectively punished, perhaps the
expose could have been better handled. But then the channel has
achieved its objective of ratings. The rest of course, they expect, is
up to the police - with or without evidence!

By Maxwell Pereira
From: MaxOpinion@googlegroups.com : 15.08.2006

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