The petty Capital

On a Tuesday evening in February this year, Gole Market, a relatively quiet, residential neighbourhood in the heart of the city was rattled by a gunshot.

Thirty-five-year-old Satender Singh, a waiter at a sweet shop in the area was gunned down by a customer, after Singh, according to news reports, “Had taken a long time to deliver the jalebis he had ordered.” The 9mm bullet that pierced through Singh’s head left him in a critical state, and he succumbed to his injury the following day.

While it appears to be a ‘freak’ case of one man losing his composure and committing a crime in the heat of the moment, it is by no account an isolated incident. In 2014 alone, there have been at least 10 cases in the Capital where seemingly trivial affairs have led to murder or violence. Statistics reveal that from 1953 to 2011, the number of murders in Delhi has gone up by 250 per cent. The numbers also indicate that 20.5 per cent of all murders in the city in 2012 were motivated by what the police call ‘sudden provocation or minor issues’.

“It is difficult to pre-empt or prevent such incidents,” says SBS Tyagi, DCP, Delhi, in whose precinct the murder over the jalebis occurred. “As policemen we try to prevent as many such situations as we can but, at the end of the day, this is not just a law-and-order problem, or a criminal issue. It’s a larger, sociological issue.”

In theory and practice

A cursory look at the city pages of national dailies reveals a host of similar incidents. On Wednesday last, for instance, two teenagers were stabbed to death in Pitampura by another boy over an argument on who would use the public toilet first.

Earlier, on April 21, at an eatery in Janakpuri, a young man was shot at because “he was talking too loudly”. Trigger-happy Nitesh Yadav pulled out a gun (issued to his army-man father), ‘provoked’ by the high-decibel spat between the eatery’s owner and the victim. Luckily, Yadav missed his target. On the same day, elsewhere in east Delhi’s Sunlight Colony, a customer poured hot oil on a momo-seller when asked to pay up. Four days before that, yet another man was stabbed to death over ₹200 at a food stall in Okhla.

Sociologist Renuka Singh of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) believes ideas such as the Strain theory — where social structures may pressure individuals to commit crimes — could help understand such situations better. “We have to look at the apparent causes and the real causes,” says Singh, “Okay, maybe the person didn’t get the jalebi but you know the real reason could be tension... family tension, something to do with his neighbours, tension at work or other similar strains. And then, inevitably, a tipping point is reached.” However, she also believes that while sociological ideas, such as the Strain theory and the Labelling theory — where the self-identity and behaviour of individuals may be determined or influenced by the terms used to describe or classify them — might be helpful in decoding such petty crimes, a case-by-case analysis is required to reach an informed conclusion.

The Capital itself, with its particular set of dynamics — from traffic congestion to the trite ‘janta hai mera baap kaun hai’ refrain — can be a trigger in so many ways. “These incidents are actually a culmination of the personal, social, economic and political circumstances in which the individual is embedded,” says Ruchi Sinha, criminologist at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. “All societies have their checks and balances, and when society at large is in transition, any context can become the trigger for aggression and violence.” Sinha says these kinds of violent crimes should not be casually dismissed as stray instances — “But be clearly identified as a central issue for the security and development agenda. It is associated with processes of rapid social change that are magnified in the current context of globalisation, and which lead to exacerbation of levels of insecurity and fear in society.”

Questioning an individual’s or a group’s honour is also perceived as a key reason for ‘pulling the trigger’. Sumit Kumar, a former Delhiite, and now a criminologist at the University of Maryland, US, says, “I’m curious to know if there’s something more to these incidents than just something minor. For instance, insults to honour or even a perception of such an insult can lead to minor incidents escalating into violence, especially when people are forced to rely on themselves for protection rather than on the police, and a high value is placed on honour.” He also draws attention to the fact that most of the perpetrators tend to have low self-control.

Of guns and numbers

While the experts BLink spoke to differed in their responses to the questions of ‘why’ and ‘what next’, the one thing they agreed on was the direct correlation of the growing gun culture in the city to the spurt in such crimes.

“The chances of a petty criminal like a chain-snatcher walking around with a gun in Delhi is quite high. See, even the use of knives has decreased,” says Ram Singh, SHO, Safdarjung Police Station, who has spent a quarter of a century with the city’s police department. That neighbouring towns, like Meerut, Rampur and Muzaffarnagar have practically turned gun-making into a cottage industry, has only made access to firearms easier in the Capital. “What used to be a simple fight before is now turning violent because guns are getting added to the mix.”

The numbers reflect this trend too. According to statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Delhi consistently trumps the list when it comes to murder. While the maximum number of murders in any other major metro in 2012 was 266 (in Bangalore), 408 cases of murder were registered in Delhi. That this is 20 less than the 438 cases reported in 2011 is cold comfort, really. While attempt to murder cases, which fall under IPC 307, are more in Bangalore with 454 registered cases, Delhi is not far behind at 369. In terms of the total number of crimes committed though, Delhi trumps all other cities by a large margin. In 2012, the total number of crimes committed in Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore and Mumbai added up to a little more than a lakh — in the same year, Delhi alone accounted for a whopping 47,982 cases.

A collective psyche

On a bright February morning this year at Bawana, in the northwest district of Delhi, a scuffle over parking space led to two brothers being shot at. Both of them were declared dead on arrival at the hospital. Although fights over parking space are commonplace across India, there are few cities where they lead to murder at such frequent intervals.

“A simple hypothetical structure to explain incidents such as these would neither be valid nor very good,” says Alok Sarin, a leading Delhi-based psychiatrist, who is a visiting consultant at the Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research. “Psychiatry is a medical construct that deals with mental illnesses, but if its tools are used wisely, it can help offer broader perspectives to deal with such situations.” A situational case study helps explain things better. “Let me put it this way. If in a campus, a few cases of eve-teasing occur, the likelihood of more such instances is high, unless it’s clearly recognised or discouraged,” says Sarin.

An important caveat, adds Sarin, is the manner of crime coverage in the media. “If you’re only looking at news reports of such cases, then it should be recognised that it is a kind of biased sampling, a sampling of sensation, so to speak. You also have to balance this with the fact that there are enough and more evidences of restraint and courtesy, but they are not going to make news or get reported, so in a sense they are invisible.”

Nimesh Desai of the Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences (IHBAS), Delhi, probes deeper into the psyche of the perpetrators of such crimes. “Factors such as socio-political changes, rural-urban migration and other explanations are all valid. That urban landscapes are alienating is a fact,” he says, “But an individual’s perception of the success of the policing system, and the feeling that he or she can get away with it, certainly plays at a subconscious level. I’m not saying a person who guns someone down realises this, but subliminally it could be a factor.”

So what sort of a person pulls the trigger at the smallest slight? The answer lies in the ubiquity of the situation. As Vijay Raghavan, Sinha’s colleague at TISS, says, “The criminologist David Garland argues that the culture of high-crime societies has led to viewing crime as an outcome of a normal social interaction and a risk to be calculated, both by the offender and the victim rather than as the violation of a norm. In such a society, it is futile to look for a typical offender with a particular psycho-social background. In such a society, almost anyone can become a violator of law.”

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