August 3, 1998

Fear grips the capital as a spate of robberies renders even streets and crowded buses unsafe.

By Sayantan Chakravarty

Beena Desai would be anybody's idea of a gritty woman: 35, an army major's wife, runs her own petrol pump in Narela on the northern fringes of Delhi. Even so, every afternoon when the lady leaves the pump to deposit the previous day's collections at the bank, she breaks into a sweat. It isn't the heat; it's the memory of July 20, black Monday.

That was the afternoon Desai was waylaid on her way to the bank. Four robbers intercepted her car, smashed its windows, bloodied Desai's head with a pistol butt and decamped with Rs 2.87 lakh. Head bludgeoned but unbowed, Desai tried to chase them. She gave up when she realised red streams were flowing incessantly down her face. The money's gone but the trips to the bank are "a daily affair". "We need more security," says Desai. With patrolling police cars a rare species in Narela, she's planning to apply for a gun licence.

Welcome to Delhi, India's political and crime capital -- and fast catching up with Afghanistan when it comes to high-risk zones. It's been a manic mid-summer in Delhi as a crime wave has overwhelmed the city. Monetary losses apart, Delhiites have been rendered numb by a fear psychosis. Buses are ransacked in the middle of the day. Executives are ambushed on their way home. A truck-borne gang empties out showrooms in night-time operations. Finally -- and this is Delhi at its most grotesque -- perversions reach new heights as a 90-year-old woman is raped.

No wonder Union Home Minister L.K. Advani told Parliament this past week that Delhi (not yet a full state) accounted for "90 per cent of heinous offences" in all Union territories in recent months. What has really chilled Delhi is a spate of robberies by young men armed with only knives, cleavers and, occasionally, homemade pistols. Creatures of the dark, these youth prefer to strike between 4 p.m. and midnight. They could pounce on you outside the movie theatre, at busy traffic intersections, in your house, anywhere. Their modus operandi is as reckless as it is ruthless. As Police Commissioner V.N. Singh puts it, "These men display a complete lack of fear of the law."

Initial analysis at the police headquarters links Delhi's tryst with criminality to Haryana lifting prohibition in April. The reason: those involved in bootlegging, which was worth Rs 2 crore a month, are now unemployed and seeking alternative career opportunities. Similarly, the slump in the real-estate business has rendered 40 per cent of casual workers in the sector jobless. Says a police officer, these daily wage-earners are "willing to beg, borrow and even rob" to survive.

However, Delhi crime is no disorganised industry, left to amateurs and mavericks. Harish Kumar's glitzy Videocon Plaza in the city's east was broken open by a gang of 20 men on June 21. They arrived at 4.30 a.m. by truck. The guards never had a chance. The robbers knew exactly what they wanted: large refrigerators, colour television sets, automatic washing machines and music systems worth Rs 10 lakh.

"They took the most expensive stuff," says Kumar, "not touching semi-automatic washing machines or black and white TVS." Despite Madan Lal Khurana, parliamentary affairs minister, for a father, Kumar is no closer to finding his stolen merchandise.

Khurana was Delhi's chief minister till 1996. His successor, Sahib Singh Verma, is the man drawing the flak. Since it faces assembly elections this winter, the BJP Government is worried sick. Verma's response has been to talk of "armies of goons" being exported into Delhi, allegedly by the Yadavs, Laloo Prasad and Mulayam Singh.

Much of the past week was wasted in newspapers quoting Verma as blaming the Yadavs and, the next day, Verma blaming the newspapers for "misquoting" him. The infiltration theory has its logic: of the 200 robbers arrested this summer in Delhi, over a third are residents of contiguous states. The crime branch has its eye on a dozen gangs, mainly from Haryana. Great attention is being given to automobile thefts too: nearly 40 cars are stolen everyday.

Others point fingers at Advani. After all, till Delhi gets full statehood the police force functions under him. There is the allegation that Advani is underplaying the crisis to protect his party from bad publicity. While Lt-Governor V.K. Kapoor exhorts senior police officers to go on patrol duty and Verma insists all will be well the moment the force comes under his control, the problems remain.

Delhi has 60,000 policemen: 20,000 for its 1.3 crore residents and 40,000 for VIP security duty. So marked is the shortage that each investigating officer has 75 IPC cases at any given time. Advani has sanctioned the recruitment of 5,000 more policemen, verbally only so far. The written orders are awaited. For people like Desai, they will come too late.

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