Something is rotten

As the utterly gruesome murders of as many as 30 children in Noida (neighbouring the capital) show, horrors never cease in India. Even if one argues that the occasional outrage is inevitable in a country of a billion and more people, and that the scandals will get full airing in an open society with a free media, the question remains: what were the police doing? Nothing at all, is what all reports suggest. Although the people whose children had gone missing complained repeatedly""mind, their children, not their shoes or even dogs, were missing""the police seem not to have paid the slightest attention. The result is that, over a year, children regularly disappeared. In any other country such a high incidence of missing children would have led to the police shaking off their normal "oh, go away, don't bother me" lethargy and getting down to some purposeful investigation. Not, however, in this corner of Noida. The kids continued to disappear, to be sexually brutalised before being murdered. So, along with the actual abductors, rapists and murderers, the police must share the blame.

That most of these children were below the age of six makes the police negligence doubly appalling. It suggests not just a systemic rot but also an attitude to citizens that should make everyone worry. After all, just a month earlier, the same police in another (more well-heeled) corner of Noida, had acted with lightning speed to rescue the son of an affluent employee of an international company. The kidnapped boy was recovered intact and in good health in just four days. The difference is that he lived in Sector 15A, where the rich and influential live, and the others in Sector 31, where ordinary people live.

If it were needed, here is more evidence that in India the question of whether the state comes to your assistance depends on who you are and not what your problem is. Thus, in spite of going on and on about our wonderful democracy and other such cosmic achievements, at the operating level the country remains rooted in the 4,000-year-old age of Hammurabi, where how you would be treated depended on your status. The lower your status, the worse the treatment you received. The notion of equality had not even occurred to those folks, and for most of our police it remains as far away as it was then.

What needs to be done? There is obviously no one remedy for an attidudinal problem but better training in fundamental civics (equality before the law) is an obvious answer. The measure of accountability also needs to be raised. What action will be taken against the policemen who were in charge of the area? Experience suggests that nothing more than a transfer will happen, but even Hammurabi's code thousands of years ago prescribed severe penalties for people failing to perform their duty. In the final analysis, the government needs to recognise that the aam aadmi has multi-dimensional needs. If the state fails on a basic issue such as law and order, its credibility is eroded. The rise of the underworld don, who delivers 'justice' because the legitimate system will not, is a direct result of such a situation""and everyone knows that western UP (in which Noida sits) has its share of such dons, some of whom even get elected. The line between legitimate and illegitimate systems then gets blurred, and law and order becomes a matter of private contract. Is that what India wants in the 21st century?