Rising crime graph of India

Chapter 1
Introduction

Chapter 2
Crime Against women

Chapter 3
Illegal drug trade

Chapter 4
Arms trafficking

Chapter 5
Cyber crime

Chapter 6
Corruption and police misconduct

Chapter 7
Conclusion

Chapter 1
Introduction

Every living society has its share of renegade and violent elements that disrupt its functioning
and throw up a serious challenge to its law and order system. The ubiquitous nature of crimes,
today, makes it very easy to assume that the present times are reflective of a world having gone
violently and irretrievably on the path of imminent destruction. While it may not be wrong to say
that there has been evident degeneration in societal and moral values, still it has come of a course
of events and human actions that could not have logically led to any other outcome. The media
has also played its role in the magnification of events and the creation of a perpetual sense of
terror and doom. But, this is not to discount the obvious facts and figures regarding increasing
crime rates that stare us in the face. Yet, the fact that steady rise in crime graph is a result of
social pathologies born out of mans preoccupation with a twisted logic of civilizational progress
has to be acknowledged before we go on to prescribe the remedies.
Crime, today, in India and the world for that matter, has come to be treated with a serious sense
of indifference and in a subtle way, and therein lies the very root of the problem. With our lives
controlled by the singular influence of materialistic pursuits, which have wrecked and ravaged all
primordial ties essential for a meaningful existence, we have come to be deprived of the moral
compass that would enable us to stand against this raging blight on our society. In our obsession
with our vulgar ambitions and consequent stoicism towards the happenings around us, we have
been instruments in the disfiguration of our society. It is only when things get out of control and
the spillover starts to visibly affect us that we learn of the monstrosity that we ourselves have let
enter our lives.
Crimes of passion and of a momentary loss of rationality are but an element of the human self,
which cannot be prevented through precautionary measures. The killing of a man, no doubt
howsoever abominable, sometimes finds vindication in arguments, like say the victim had been
a cruel tyrant in life and deserved to die, or often it is a case of a man, temporarily bereft of
reason on account of some terrible emotional upheaval who commits this crime. But it is
appalling to discover that murder has become an act more of a rational mind than that of an
irrational one. The NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) reported the incidence of 34,305

cases of murder in 2011. The rising trend obviously relates to spread of the crime where it no
longer was confined to acts of passion, treachery or sheer insanity.
Murder is an instrument of self-propagation, be it for an individual, a group or even the state.
The nexus among politics, business and the instruments of the government has undoubtedly been
a key in the orchestration of these organized crimes. Business houses, in collusion with
politicians, assume control over natural resources of the country, either through a manipulated
process of allotment or through mafias who usurp resources. Such a system requires a
methodical cleansing of all obstructions, and we have, time and again, been made cognizant
about such cases where the perpetrators have not been apprehended despite incriminating
evidence.
The recent incident of sexual crime in Delhi that shook the country to its core, came in
succession of years of such aggression against women and continued to be followed by such acts
even as the country was going through the trauma of the tragedy. The NCRB, in its data for 2011,
reports the incidence of 24,206 rape cases. And it is for common sense to discern that the actual
incidence would be in multiples of this figure, given that most of the rape cases go unreported
because of the stigma they attach to the victim and very often, a certain collusion of forces that
we are all too aware of. The growing incidences of crime against women, not just sexual assault,
but also domestic violence, dowry tortures, female feticide, come as a result of significant
transformations that have taken place in the last couple of decades. Emancipation of women has
been a real process, and its implications for a staunchly patriarchal society have been disastrous.
Patriarchal mindsets find it hard to accept this change in the society that suddenly expects from
them a change in their traditional attitude towards women, and the result is a violent backlasha
desperate attempt to assert manhood. All around us, we have been flooded with a culture of
instant gratification and assuaging a primeval instinct seems, in some perverse way, also to be a
legitimate cause.