For the second time since the horrific gangrape of a physiotherapy student in December, the capital city on Saturday witnessed a massive eruption of public anger over the numbing sexual violence perpetrated on a five-year-old girl.
And the fury was targeted at the political establishment, which seems to have done little except repeatedly appoint commissions on the gangrape.
As the capital city seethed with sullen rage, the Centre seemed to be expecting a December protest redux.
Section 144 was hastily imposed as though anticipating the capital’s anger rising in the early summer heat. Soon, the number of protesters swelled at the protected enclaves of the capital -- the homes of Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Sushilkumar Shinde and the Delhi Police headquarters.
Migration and Rape
The violence against women, immigration patterns, expanding slums and an apathetic and insensitive police force have turned the city into the country’s horror capital.
In the rape incident, the accused Manoj Kumar(22) was a labourer from Muzaffarnagar in Bihar. According to the Indian Institute of Human Settlement (IIHS), most of the migrants to the city are from UP and Bihar. And the city’s migrant population now stands at 38.2 lakh.
Though the Delhi we know was created by migrant power post-1947, which boosted wealth creation and growth, recent migration trends reveal a dark underbelly thriving with slums, crime and illegal activities.
Cases interlocking immigration and rape in Delhi are nothing new.The main accused in the December gangrape were bus driver Ram Singh and his brother Mukesh Singh from Rajasthan.
The migrant-crime nexus has been raised by political leaders frequently. Last April, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, blamed migrants for the rising crime graph here.
“The reasons we understand, it is the huge migratory population 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,” she said.
And then Home Minister P Chidambaram had 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. So crimes do take place,” he had said.