In Delhi, a woman is raped every six hours while the national figure is one rape every 36 minutes. Delhi police data states that from January to March 31, 2013, 393 rapes have been reported. These may not represent the exact picture as many rapes go unreported. Last year, 706 rape cases were reported in Delhi as against 24,206 all over India in 2011. The police claims that the rise in figures this year is because of the order issued by police commissioner Neeraj Kumar that FIRs be registered on all rape complaints. Kumar told The Sunday Standard: “At least 96% of rapes reported are committed by persons known to the victims and it is impossible for law enforcers to prevent such crimes happening inside a house. Even then when we get to know about them, police act swiftly.” The National Crime Records Bureau puts Delhi as the state where highest number of crimes against children were committed in 2011—33,098 cases of crime against children were reported nationwide in 2011 as compared to 26,694 cases in 2010, suggesting an increase of 24 per cent. Kamei Aphun, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, holds a deep rooted patriarchal attitude responsible for child rape and crimes against women. He says, “As far as the protests are concerned, as long as they are apolitical and spearheaded by ‘common people’, they can be successful and lead to a fruitful result.”
IMMIGRATION AND RAPE: Violence against women, immigration patterns, expanding slums and an apathetic and insensitive police force has turned Delhi into a horror capital. In the latest incident of the five year old in Gandhi Nagar, accused Manoj Kumar, a 22 year-old labourer was from Muzaffarnagar in Bihar. According to the Indian Institute of Human Settlement (IIHS), most migrants to Delhi are from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, over 3 lakh people a year. The current Delhi migrant population stands at 38.2 lakh.
Cases interlocking immigration and rape in Delhi are nothing new. On 16 December 2012, a 23 year-old girl was raped and brutally assaulted with an iron rod in a moving bus in the national capital. The main accused were bus driver Ram Singh and his brother Mukesh Singh from Rajasthan who were living in a slum where they had come seeking fame and fortune. Another accused, Akshay Thakur was arrested from Aurangabad in Bihar. The 17-year-old juvenile accused—the most brutal of the four—hailed from Badaun in UP.
The body of a 25-year-old woman was found in Nehru Place. Police established that two migrants from Ropar, Punjab were responsible. They had picked up the woman and taken her to Lodhi Institutional Area where they first raped and then strangulated her. The accused, Sikander Singh alias Soni and Pradeep Singh, had come to Delhi seven years ago from Punjab to work as a taxi driver.
French national Laurine was murdered in Paharganj by a Kashmiri migrant, Manzoor Ahmed, who plied the trade of a handicrafts dealer. His parents, wife and two children live in Srinagar. Sangeeta, who worked as a maid in a Rajindra Nagar house was murdered by Dharmendra from Bilaspur in May 2012. Women are not the only victims of migrant criminals in search of a quick buck. When migrants come to Delhi in search of a better life, many find that reality is harsh and the tenements they call home are breeding grounds for poverty and crime. Two slum dwellers from Trilokpuri were arrested for murdering 79-year-old Anna Mammen after robbing her. Statistics show that 21 of the reported rapes in Delhi were from Govindpuri slums, India’s largest resettlement colony; 17 from Sangam Vihar, Asia’s largest unauthorised colony. “Holding migrants responsible for the increasing crime incidents in the capital is done to make people from the weaker sections an easy prey of social bias and profiling. The media fuels this bias by highlighting crime cases involving migrants,” says Sandeep Singh, activist, All India Students’ Association.
POLITICAL ISSUE: The migrant-crime problem has been raised by political leaders frequently. Last year, Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit blamed migrants for the rise of crime and rape in the capital. She said, “The reasons that we understand, it is the huge migratory populations and very porous borders. You can come into Delhi, commit a crime and just run back again; I suppose it is very difficult also to check.” Former home minister P. Chidambaram said on December 13, 2010 that “crime takes place because Delhi attracts a large number of migrants. There are a large number of unauthorised colonies. And these migrants who settle in city’s north-west colonies carry a kind of behaviour which is unacceptable in any modern city.” After a huge public outcry following the December 16 gang rape, migrant basher Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray blamed ‘Bihari’ migrants for the incident, saying “all are talking about the Delhi gang-rape, but no one is asking who did this. Nobody’s asking from where these men came. I have been slapped with so many cases, but nobody is saying the fact that all these rapists are from Bihar.”
Most social activists don’t agree. “Blaming poor migrants for crime in Delhi and branding them as criminals is apartheid. Who is not a migrant? The Police Commissioner is a migrant. The Home Minister is a migrant. CM is a migrant. The Congress President is a migrant,” says Prakash K Ray, social activist and scholar.
According to Vandana Shiva, the fault lies in our policy making and a growth-based economy that’s pushing people to crime. Hence, blaming the migrants for the problems in our society is an unfortunate trend.
The incidents of crimes committed by migrants became so high that Delhi Police named immigrants from the Mewat region that straddles Haryana and Rajasthan as part of the problem. Gangs from these areas were involved in murder, robbery, loot, and more than 100 incidents of kidnapping. Delhi police constable Naresh was mowed down in Bharat Nagar when he tried to chase and stop a gang of cattle thieves. In its annual report for the year 2012, the Delhi police said that Mewat gangs were traditionally cattle thieves, and came to Delhi to pick stray livestock; but now have graduated to bigger crimes.
The annual report of Delhi police states that a considerable number of rapes were reported from slums located in Kapashera, Vasant Kunj South, Jaitpur. Other areas from where cases were reported were Govindpuri and Shahbad Dairy. In Delhi, law and order does not report to the elected representative, the chief minister, but instead to the Home Minister and the Lieutenant Governor.
The Sunday Standard