ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Failing Hopes, Rising Crime

The latest issue of India Today examines what most of us already know. That almost 65 per cent of all violent crimes in India are committed by young people. People below 30. In fact, between 16 and 30. These include robbery, rape, kidnapping, dacoity and attempts to murder. The motive in almost all cases, except rape I guess, is to quickly earn some big money and become upwardly mobile. To grab a lifestyle that these young men and women feel would have, otherwise, eluded them if they had stuck to the straight and narrow.

Even the crime of passion is dead. Fewer and fewer people kill because they have been cheated in love. Or let down. They kill, these days, almost entirely for money or inheritance.Or both. Even parents become victims of greed and there is this case in Calcutta where a couple of kids got together with their friends and killed their parents, after torturing them for hours, just to get their hands on some cash and jewellery lying around at home.

This can mean one of three things.

One: Many young people feel today that it is no longer possible to become rich and successful following the traditional ways of earning a livelihood. In any case, jobs are shrinking in the traditional sectors. New technologies demand a completely new different mindset towards work, very different from what they have grown up with. Crime, for them, is an attempt to find a short cut.

Two: In the cut throat world of today's India, many young people from poor and backward families find themselves inadequately armed to face the future. They have no fancy degrees, no networking in the world of business, no cash to start up. What is worse, the biggest road block for them is the rampant corruption that makes it difficult for a new entrant to break in.

Three: For most young people, there is a desperate need to feel equal. To believe that given the same opportunities, the same breaks, they can achieve exactly what the rich kids are achieving. If not more. They are angry when they see these opportunities sidestep them. When they see others of their generation getting a headstart simply because their parents know the ropes.

I do not know which one is correct. Maybe they all are. Maybe those who step out of line deserve to be shot, killed, punished. We are living in times when justice means an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In Mumbai, for instance, people are quite happy (and, in fact, relieved) to read reports of bloody encounters on the streets, where cops blow out the brains of anonymous, alleged criminals. For the upwardly mobile middle classes, it is no longer a violation of human rights. It is instant justice appropriately meted out.

But whatever punishment you give to these misled young people, you cannot detract from the fact that the crimes they commit are symptomatic of a basic malaise in our society. The unequal distribution of opportunity. Which is becoming more and more obvious as mass media reaches more and more homes and shows people how the other half lives.

Politicians have failed to set this right in the past 52 years. An obdurate bureaucracy has, in fact, exacerbated the problem by perpetuating the stranglehold of the ruling elite and making it almost impossible for fresh talent to break in. Except in areas like politics, movies and sports, which is one reason why these professions attract so much of popular excitement. These are windfall professions, where you can come from nowhere and (if you get the right breaks and can capitalise on them) you can well turn out to be an overnight millionaire. Like Sachin Tendulkar or Shah Rukh Khan. Or, for that matter, old Laloo. They did not make it because of networking or family background or lots of cash that launched them. They worked hard and were plain lucky to get the right breaks at the right time and who cares if some of them turned a blind eye to propriety.

But for most of India, it does not happen this way. Ambitious kids find that their parents cannot afford to continue their education. They end up on the mean streets, not knowing what the future holds for them. Brilliant students end up as frustrated clerks in PSUs and government offices, not knowing how to break out of their circle of despair. Some of the traditional jobs have now reached a dead end. School teachers, receptionists, factory workers. None of them know how to break out of their private hells.

That could be another reason why children no longer want to pursue careers that had once attracted their parents. For many of these careers no longer look as exciting, as socially meaningful as they once did. So they are looking for new alternatives. IT jobs. A break in television or movies. Journalism. Modelling. And, now, crime. For these are professions where you start as equals with the next guy and, if you can deliver, nothing stops you from making it to the very top. There is a romance to it also, as Satya showed. The romance of risking your life to get where you want to.

A bit like Che if I may so. The romantic revolutionary battling an unequal system and trying to win. Even in defeat there is glory and the making of history. That is why, cutting across caste and creed and community, young people are migrating towards the criminal underworld. It offers them excitement, a quickening of the pulse, the rush of adrenaline in the blood. It also offers them the opportunity to punish those whom they see as bloodsuckers in a corrupt and unequal world.

What is the solution? It is difficult to say but perhaps the dismantling of the old order will help. As the economy opens up, more and more young people will hopefully move away from jobs and find their own entrepreneurial opportunities. The Internet will almost certainly be the great leveller, offering everyone an equal chance to showcase his genius. You will no longer need expensive real estate to sell your wares. You will be able to access capital from all over the world if the local banks refuse to fund your ideas. Like Kaizad Gustaad did while making Bombay Boys. The hegemony of the old business class is slowly giving way to a newer, freer order where skill will increasingly attract the resources required to make it profitable.

But the State must also act. The blatantly corrupt system that frustrates young people must yield way. The traditional business elite must allow new enterprise to grow and flourish. Banks and financial institutions must respond to the changing marketplace and back new ideas, new talent instead of funding the same, despicable gallery of rogues who cheat them again and again. The initiative for change must come from a younger bureaucracy, a political order that respects enterprise.

If this does not happen, frustrations will only increase. Crime will continue to grow and flourish. Because whatever the society you live in, when everything else fails, the weak and the helpless have only one solution to their problems. And that is violence.

In a tough, unheeding world, they know that is the only way they will be noticed.

In fact, that is the only way they can beat the corrupt system that keeps feeding on itself to stay in power.

How Readers responded to Pritish Nandy's recent columns

Pritish Nandy

Tell us what you think of this column