Over the years since independence, India
has developed a strange habit of classifying ‘gruesome crimes’ as - ‘hate-generating’,
‘communal clashes’, ‘religious fanaticism’, ‘class atrocities’, ‘gender
suppression’, ‘reactionary outbursts’, ‘revolutionary unrest’ and recently as ‘media
marketable’. To cover up the governance failures, administrative inefficiencies
and other corrupt practices the administration has found it extremely useful
and easy to play politics on crimes. To their relief, these classifications have
helped the successive governments in setting up a trend where all other kind of
crimes that are left ‘unclassified’ gets considered as ‘simple’ and therefore almost
as ‘acceptable’. The information about the ‘character’ of a crime has become so
important that we have got used to the news headlines such as ‘crime against
minority’, ‘crime against child’, ‘crime against woman’, ‘crime against Dalit’ -
so much so that thinking of headlines as ‘crime against men’, ‘crime against a
majority community’, ‘crime against an adult’ or ‘crime against an upper caste’
are either likely to evoke laughter or no response at all.
Not that the ‘classified’
crimes get any better or the desirable attention, but the government utilizes
this politics only to pass the blame somehow on the majority community entirely.
Being arguably one of the most tolerant and accommodating community existing in
the world, this majority is then expected either to absorb the blame or to
start hating itself. Under this ‘secular formula' we are expected to accept all
the blame as ‘evils’ of our society and at the same time are also left to consider all other ‘unclassified’ crimes as
natural, simple, normal (and therefore desirable??).
As its natural consequence the Indian
administration wastes much of its precious time in ‘discovering’, ‘investigating’
and ‘establishing’ the color and shade of
a crime when it is actually required to act swiftly and efficiently. I am
convinced that until this country stops taking interest in knowing the caste,
gender, religion, faith and ideology of a victim – politics will continue to
sideline our real administrative concerns. Instead of doing a political
comparative analysis, the state must be extremely serious and ruthless in addressing
all crimes and thereby punishing each criminal blindly.
