Opinion Stolen fruit is sweetest

Two jackfruit. Ten police officers. That computes to a policing ratio of five officers per jackfruit —  five specialists from the crime and fingerprints departments, at that. It happened like this: Mahendra Prasad, JD(U) MP, dialled 100 and when the police arrived, they were directed to rescue two jackfruit stolen from the garden of his New Delhi bungalow. With five policemen on the spoor of each jackfruit, these must be the most privileged to have dangled enticingly before a jackfruit thief.

Five cops is two more than VIPs get, on average. According to data released last autumn by the Bureau of Police Research and Development, India offers each VIP the attentions of only three policemen. The figure for the citizenry is 171 per lakh, making India one of the world’s worst policed countries. But let us not trivialise the situation. What is under discussion is no common or garden fruit but Luty­ens zone jackfruit. Let us not discuss what the fingerprint specialists found at the scene of the crime, either — small footprints, made by small humans. The neighbourhood boys must be laughing fit to burst, but let us not dwell on such negativities either.

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The year 2014 may go down in pol­ice history for its absurd quests. Four months before the jackfruit hunt in Lutyens’ Delhi, the police had turned out in force in the cold, misty dawn of Rampur, fanning out across field and farm. At stake were seven VIP buffaloes which had been led astray from SP leader Azam Khan’s barnyard. The BJP had been most scornful, scoffing that no one cared about th­o­u­sand­s of cattle being smuggled ac­ross the border to slaughterhouses in Bangladesh. It remains to be seen who will make political capital out of the stolen jackfruit. Is there much capital in there? But peace, we must not underestimate Delhi’s political creativity.