Organised crime takes a breather in Vadodara

August 25. A car driver halts outside Vadodara on his way to Ahmedabad and is immediately relieved of his cash and wristwatch by four unidentified people.

August 19, Octogenarian Vijaya Bhatt is strangled to death in the J P Road area and robbed of jewellery worth Rs 22,000.

Crime has finally come home to rest in Vadodara. But, assure sociologists and police officials, there is no cause for worry, since these incidents are isolated and unrelated, and in no way indicate a return to the mafia age, given a quiet burial some five years ago alongwith Raju Risaldar, the alleged don of organised crime.

The pattern of crime has undergone a complete turnaround in Vadodara in the intervening years. The murders, robberies and assaults today are more reflective of industrial unrest, rising prices and social and economic upheaval than premeditation and conspiracy. So, according to the police, crime in Vadodara is no longer a law and order issue, but one of personal vigilance.

It is Vadodara’s strategic locational factor, which provides desperados escape routes to Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Delhi, that partly fuelled a rise in criminal activity in the eighties and early nineties. It was during these years that Congress leader Ashok Bhogilal Patel was killed in full public view by suspected Shiv Sena goons outside the Vadodara railway station, or Gokak Mills personnel manager Arun Rawal murdered outside the M S University main gate.

No recent incident measures up to those in the sensation scale. Even the episodes that have made headlines — the ransacking of the Vadodara railway station offices by EME recruits, for instance, or unrest in the university commerce — appear tame when juxtaposed with the Risaldar era.

From sensational to sedate, the change in crime has seen a switch in police tactics as well. In the Risaldar age, the police were said to be totally under Risaldar’s thumb; in the recent Dipak Chauhan case, however, arrests were made within a week.

The explanation for the turnaround lies not in increased police effectiveness or the leadership of commissioners like Hiralal, Nampoothiri, R M S Brar and Kuldip Sharma or even stepped-up vigilance. Says N Rajaram, head of the Department of Sociology, MSU, “All the sensational crime in the city traced their origins to political patronage. The political ambience in the city has changed; politicians, too, have withdrawn support to criminals, triggering a change in the crime profile”.

His views are bolstered by a senior police official posted in Vadodara during the Risaldar era echoes Rajaram’s views on condition of anonymity.

Alongside serious crime, communal conflicts, too, have faded out in Vadodara. Rajaram and social activist Haji Hassan Khatri both attribute this to a drop in the strength of Muslim bootleggers and their diversion to other trades. “This has weakened the economic rivalry between bootleggers, which often triggered communal riots”, they say.

Inspector I D Upadhyaya, who has spent a long time policing communally sensitive areas of the city, holds the educational awakening’ among Muslims and the liberalisation-influenced price rise — necessitating a steady income — responsible for the drop in communal incidents.

Besides, Rajaram points out, the city’s demographic profile, too, has changed with the migration of residents of sensitive areas to new housing colonies on the outskirts.