Stories like Bulandshahr gang rape are cutting India's story short
Coincidence can be scarily spooky.
The closing days of the Samajwadi Party (Socialist Party) government in Uttar Pradesh in 2006-07 witnessed the unfolding of a grisly crime that exposed the lawlessness prevailing in India’s largest and most populous province.
The chance spotting of the skeletal remains of a child in the backyard of a semi-detached house at Nithari in Noida, barely 20km from Delhi, led to a hideous discovery.
Children from poor immigrant families were routinely lured into the house, sexually abused, killed, bits of their flesh feasted upon and their remains buried in the narrow yard.
Police and forensic investigations revealed that at least 18 children and a young adult had entered that house, inhabited by a businessman and his domestic help, not to emerge again.
The number of children who had gone missing from the nearby immigrants’ shanties was twice that number.
Barbaric perversities are not unique to either Uttar Pradesh or India.
Such stomach-churning crimes are reported from all corners of the world.
What set the "Nithari Horror", as this crime came to be known, was the sheer callousness of the district authorities and the police, and the cynical response of those in power.
Lethargic
Like the bureaucracy anywhere else in India, the officials at Noida couldn’t be bothered about the nuts and bolts of civil administration.
That tedious task was left to clerks and peons, mostly corrupt and largely lethargic. So no senior official was even remotely aware that a large number of children had gone missing in one particular area under their watch.
Similarly, senior police officers, like their compatriots in uniform in other provinces, had outsourced policing to colleagues way down the pecking order.
Problem was they were busy recovering the money they had invested to get posted in a cash-rich industrial zone where pickings are good.
So they had no time to either register or pursue missing children reports.
All the glaring lapses that came to the fore at Nithari could have been explained away.
Police and bureaucratic indifference no longer shocks and awes India, least of all Indians living in Uttar Pradesh.
But that option was foreclosed by the then chief minister’s brother and the current chief minister’s uncle who brushed aside popular anger with the most uncaring of statements: "Small things happen in a big state."
At the first available opportunity, people booted out the "socialists" and voted in a party that primarily represents the Dalits, or the "oppressed outcastes".
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| UP CM Akhilesh Yadav (right), with father Mulayam Singh Yadav. |
Their leader, perceived to have a rather elastic attitude towards white collar corruption, had the reputation of being tough on criminals.
In the event, Mayawati failed to live up to expectations. Within months of her return to power in 2007, a government engineer was beaten to death for not making a "contribution" to the leader’s birthday party.
Through the next five years, her much touted administrative skills were nowhere to be seen as law-breakers acted with increasing impunity.
In 2012, she got booted out, like Mulayam Singh Yadav five years ago.
Baggage
Akhilesh Yadav, son of Mulayam and inheritor of his Luddite "socialist" politics, came to power with a huge majority and little else other than baggage his father had lugged for years.
As his term in the chief minister’s office draws to an end, a ghastly crime, the gang-rape of a young woman and her teenaged daughter, has left people angry and afraid.
Angry that a car can be stopped on the highway by thugs, and women and children raped, that the police failed to respond to repeated and desperate SOS messages (apparently the "100" distress call facility is maintained by the state-owned telecom firm BSNL and has been on the blink for ages), that between Nithari and Bulandshahr, where the outrage occurred a week ago, little or nothing has changed.
Afraid because the nightmarish ordeal of the victims could have been, indeed could be, anybody else’s.
You may despise thugs, but you are also scared of them, especially when the police abandon you to their not so tender mercies.
Conspiracy
Worse, another "uncle" of the chief minister, a Muslim lawmaker and home minister of Uttar Pradesh, has crudely suggested that the gang-rape in Bulandshahr is "a political conspiracy" to defame the provincial government.
In the past, an entire contingent of policemen was deployed to find the missing buffaloes of this man.
Anybody who has made bold to protest against him through so much as a Facebook post has landed in jail. Writing from the twilight zone where rudimentary urban order ends and the badlands of Western Uttar Pradesh begin, I can only worry about what the future holds — for me, and others like me.
How soon before the bubble of assumed security bursts?
The rotten state of affairs in India’s biggest province, which also elects the largest contingent of Members of Parliament to deliberate and decide policies for India and govern the country, is symptomatic of the decay that has corroded the police, bureaucracy and even the lower judiciary across states, rendering them virtually worthless, while identity politics decides who gets to rule the roost.
India’s economic growth paints a bright picture. The chrome and glass malls spouting like mushrooms present a shining facade. Streets brimming with cars make India appear like a country on the move. Deceptively worded speeches by politicians would make us believe India is changing.
All that’s far from the truth.
The ugly underbelly of India renders the country’s success story utterly, horribly meaningless.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)