Bogota, the capital of Colombia, is a long way off from New Delhi — a distance of over 15,000 kms and the quickest air trip could take well over 30 hours with a stop or two en route. It’s also not an inexpensive journey, about Rs 32,000 at the minimum for a round trip. Yet, in a curious catch last week, the Delhi police rounded up a gang of four burglars from Bogota, including a woman, who were on a spree of committing house breaks and thefts in south Delhi homes. They were caught with jewellery totalling about Rs 16 lakh, not a vast sum, given the expense and trouble the trip entailed plus the language hassles and their surreptitious moves from hotel to hotel. A few days later a Peruvian farmer was nabbed at Delhi airport, divesting a wheelchair-bound woman passenger of her luggage with valuables.
Clearly, India’s image abroad is undergoing a dramatic change. Delhi, too, has recovered some of its reputation as a city of riches since Nadir Shah’s notorious sack and pillage in 1739 when he carted off the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor. (The Persian emperor’s plunder was so extensive, it is said that he gave all Iranians a tax amnesty for three years after his return.)
By comparison, the Latin Americans’ heists may seem like small change. But, it has to be said, that an amount of forethought and planning went into their long haul expedition. One of the Colombian thieves admitted to have studied Indian penal law; another confessed that his gang was drawn by images of Delhi’s prosperity such as its shopping malls. It must be sobering for local criminals to face up to competition from overseas — they just have to hop into the Metro to rob retired school teachers of a few gold ornaments.
It used to be said that the south of France was the peerless pickpocket capital of Europe. The joke at the annual Cannes film festival went that the real reason why the world’s most alluring starlets paraded topless on the waterfront was because they had nowhere to hide their cash except in G-strings. From Los Angeles to Hong Kong, sophisticated, well-groomed cardsharps and sleight-of-hand experts jetted in during festival week to divest the rich of their wallets. The most slickly daring thefts occurred in tandem with local mafias.
Is Delhi becoming south Asia’s south of France? It might be saved from such a fate if it stopped showing off. India’s national capital has got into the bad habit (like the erstwhile occupants of the Red Fort) of letting its riches hang out for all to see. At an industrialist’s birthday celebration recently, there were fountains of French champagne, caviar stations and more serious jewels on display than the unseen bank vaults of Monte Carlo.
A quick Google search for comparative crime in Bogota and Delhi shows the Colombian capital to be worse off: 1,401 murders as compared to 467 in Delhi in 2007. Although Bogota was better off than Delhi for basic amenities like electricity, water and sanitation, it had more people living below the poverty line (32.6 per cent of the population) than Delhi (8.23 per cent) and its rural-urban migration rate was much higher.
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Dry statistics, however, cannot fill up the picture of impressions vividly conveyed in our instantly visual, web-driven age. What the Latinos gleaned was an idea of a wealthy (and perhaps poorly-policed) Asian capital to fuel their imaginative get-rich-quick scheme. It was worth their investment in effort and expenditure to fly half way round the world to rob a few south Delhi homes. They came armed with house-breaking equipment but were driven by the same impulse as filmmaker Oliver Stone fictional character Gordon Gekko who coined the phrase “Greed is good” as a rubric for the globalised world.
Will it be only a matter of time before the south American gangs team up with Delhi’s criminals to embark on a new wave of pillage in India’s richest metropolis after Mumbai?