Crime with a capital C8217;

Statistics reveal as much as they hide. For this very reason the figures of crime given by the latest report of the National Crime Record Bureau have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Particularly when the Bureau itself admits it has no control over the figures supplied to it by the state police bodies. What8217;s worse, some states have not provided any data at all to the Bureau. All this defeats the very purpose of the exercise the Bureau undertakes every year. Notwithstanding all these constraints, some of the findings which pertain to 1998 are disconcerting. Delhi, for instance, continues to be the crime capital of India with 22 per cent of all crime reported nationally having taken place there. The figures of crime in Delhi are 2.7 times the national average. The question is this: is Delhi8217;s crime situation really as bad as these figures seem to indicate? Of course, there is no denying that crime has been increasingly manifesting itself in this city, thanks to a galloping population growth and othersocio-economic factors like growing unemployment. Even so, why does it fare worse than the badlands of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where in certain areas criminals have always ruled the roost?

Perhaps the answer to the question lies in the fact that in Delhi, incidents of crime are widely reported and registered unlike in some other states where the natural tendency of the police is not to register cases except those which can be described as heinous. The number of cases reported, therefore, cannot be a clear indication of the incidents of crime that take place in a particular region. What follows from this is that even at the risk of being called crime-prone, the states should encourage the registration of all incidents of crime. Had this happened, Delhi, perhaps, may not have been at the top. But the more important question is 8212; how does Delhi perform when it comes to ensuring that the guilty are punished? After all, it is the certainty of punishment, rather than the severity of it, that deters crime. Unfortunately, in Delhi as indeed in other parts of the country, the conviction rate in criminal cases is abysmally low. Only a small fraction of the cases registered end up in conviction. Mostcases are not cracked or they are so shoddily investigated that they fall flat the moment they are placed before the court. The manner in which the 1984 riot cases are dismissed one by one is a case in point. This trend is actually more worrisome than the increase in the number of cases registered.

In Delhi, there are quite a few sensational murder cases which the police have not been able to solve despite years of so-called investigation. If this is the fate of the well-publicised cases, one can easily imagine what happens to hundreds of routine cases that are registered every day. Investigative practices in India are primitive; there is no system to reward the hard-working and punish the negligent. Central to fighting crime is to instill in the minds of the criminals and potential criminals fear of the law. It is in this regard that Delhi8217;s failure is more conspicuous.