The gang-rape of a 23 years old has outraged the conscience of India. Jaya Bachchan was full of tears the other day in the Rajya Sabha. Sonia Gandhi shot off an angry letter to Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit. The Parliament too has been shocked.
But Gandhi does not know that the poor Dikshit could be of little help; Delhi police is not under city government, but the ministry of home affairs; and she should have rather addressed her letter to Sushilkumar Shinde.
The young girl is battling for her life, with her helpless relatives in attendance. Women overnight have become scared of their safety. Capital punishment and chemical castration have become demands of the day. Ironically, most people are ignorant of the fact, that Delhi has been an anti-women city for decades; a city where policing is reactive and lethargic, a city, which thrives on ill-gotten money.
A constable had told this blogger very sanely a year ago, that restraining others from doing wrong or giving sane advice to others in Delhi is akin to jumping into a well. Delhi is a city of beast and it has been nurtured to become so by its leaders, administrators and its snobbish residents.
Despite being a place of over two crore people, Delhi is least a democratic place. The reason for this is that the twin issues, which address basic demands of the people -- land and police -- are not with the elected government. Land is with DDA under Central government, which functions more as a commercial enterprise than solving the housing woes of the city.
Delhi Assembly has passed dozens of resolutions in the last five years to make the city police accountable to the people. All these resolutions have ended up in the dustbin of the Home Ministry.
An unaccountable police manufactures excuses to wriggle out of serious law and order failure by attributing crimes to passion, friendly entries and so on.
However, Delhi police is crippled for following reasons for which it would continue to be an incompetent organisation:
A) Thirty per cent of its work force are on VIP duty; B) Another 20 per cent of its work force work like peon carrying files to various courts each day; C) policing is top heavy, that is beat policing is ignored; D) Delhi police is bureaucratic and unprofessional; E) The focus of the police is in solving the crime and not preventing, and, lastly, F) Delhi police is rank corrupt and physically unfit.
Ninety per cent of the police personnel in Delhi will fail a 100 meter run test. A huge number of them are patients of blood pressure. Most of the time they are sleepy. Given a choice they would like to quit the job if assured of income post retirement. A large number of them are in side business of property dealers. They work for more than 12 hours a day and a good number of them even sleep in police stations, which incidentally have cots in their rooms.
The above mentioned six main reasons suggest a systemic failure of Delhi police. This organisation can not avert crime but only respond. So, this organisation will most likely wake up after crimes of the scale of the horrific gangrape is committed.
Dikshit has to take the blame for making Delhi an open bar and consequently giving the licenses to people to get drunk and indulge in violence against each other. Delhi government's revenue is increasing every year due to liberal liquor culture. Wine and beer shop and takeaway eateries nearby are Delhi's crime underbelly. The police takes cuts and system continues.
The city courts are loaded with some many cases of drunken violence, that an individual case takes more than two years to get its first hearing. So, the lampoons of the city invariably have free run in the city to rampage the law abiding citizens.
The curse of the people of Delhi is that they live in the national capital of the country where the key concern of the police is to ensure VIP safety. Delhi and its neighbourhoods have exploded with population beyond their capacities. But the expansion is not matched by the corresponding response in the policing.
In the study of psychology, a study is very popular wherein a large number of rats are put in a small cage and their behavioural changes are monitored. After some days, all the rats start behaving abnormally with instances of overeating (weight gain), violence against each other (anger on short fuse), hightened sexual urges, increased fatality and so on. Delhi has become that small cage and people appear not better than those rats.
With this system, the unfortunate girl who breathed her last in Singapore may not be the last to become victim to a society, which is rotten from its core.
