Serial reminder

It is fruitless to ponder why it is that men like Moninder Singh and Surendra choose to do what they did in that Noida Sector 31 house. To know what allowed them to go unchecked and undetected for almost two years, however, listen to a father8217;s account. Nand Lal, living on the unprivileged edges of the middle class suburb, suspected the now notorious duo immediately after his daughter, Payal, went missing in May. She had talked of getting a factory job with their assistance, and last heard she was headed to their house. When he went to file a missing person complaint at the police station, however, he got more than the predictable welcome of inaction and apathy. He was detained for a night, and made to brook insinuations about his daughter. Other parents are reliving similar nightmares, of visits made to the police to tell of missing girls, only to be turned away unattended to.

Given the scale of the criminalities at the Noida house, current outrage will not subside with simple handouts of compensations and promises of a CBI inquiry. It will also not be quelled by the process of Moninder Singh and Surendra meeting their punishment, as they must at the earliest. The activities in that Noida house have made too much less invisible. In a suburb in which the police swung into action so expeditiously upon the kidnapping of a prominent CEO8217;s son, how was it that dozens of children were being reported to be missing, but no action was taken? Can it be inferred that the established processes of policing 8212; registry of FIRs, consequent investigation, and so on 8212; do not obtain beyond the colony gates of middle class India? Is, for the poor, individual victimhood not to be considered significant enough? Must there be collective injury inflicted on them for the country8217;s revulsion to be captured?

It8217;s almost election time in Uttar Pradesh. In that state8217;s identity politics, votes are routinely sought with promises of protection along community, caste and class lines. But the fearfulness, the Noida killings have made evident, that roams free draws sustenance from the lethargy 8212; and possibly even complicity 8212; at the thana. Curiosity about how perversion gripped the killers will not get us far. At the heart of this crime is a systemic problem.