The runaway train of crime in India

Among them was journalist Nidhi Suresh who filed an FIR in Delhi, determined to get justice for everyone who had been scammed. Suresh later wrote, that two weeks after that FIR, “the Delhi police arrested four men from Bihar—apparently part of a larger group of people—who reportedly confessed to scamming more than 300 people for over ₹1.25 crore". I gleefully told this rare story of comeuppance to a friend who looked jittery. With some hesitation she told me that her brother had earlier been involved with the oxygen scam gang. Back when they were a mobile phone scam gang, she said. Being an extremely determined older sister, she had redirected her unemployed younger brother into a completely different life.

Also read: Heatwaves are a sneak peak into a future of climate breakdown

I was stunned—less about the family connection and more about the nature of organised crime. It was an epiphany for me—obvious for other people, I am sure— this idea of the free-floating, generalist criminal adapting his skills and schemes to the zeitgeist aka whatever is trending.

Why have those dark, teeth-gritting days of wanting Sachin Agarwal to drop dead returned to me lately? It’s hard not to! Not when we are left to weep over the results of large-scale crimes when they could have been prevented back when they were a cottage industry crime. Or let’s be honest, perhaps we would not have to deal with the second round of large-scale crime if even the first round of large-scale crime was prosecuted. If Kannada film star Darshan had been punished for his alleged domestic violence and attempt to murder his wife, would a troll from Chitradurga be dead today? If the very first alleged sexual assault by a second-generation politician had led to his imprisonment, would dozens and dozens of women have been allegedly assaulted by the family? If the monstrous Vyapam scam in Madhya Pradesh of the last decade had been resolved, if it had not left a trail of suspicious deaths, if justice was served, would we have the NEET situation that we have now?

A certain variety of Indian is always talking with a sexual frisson about their longing for an authoritarian state—a country where daddy knows best but also daddy loves them best. The aura of this kind of daddy is always one of efficiency. Famously, fascism lovers of the 1930s gushed about Mussolini making the trains run on time in “irascible" Italy. To paraphrase history professor Victoria de Grazia, who wrote about this phenomenon in The New York Times in 1994, all that was just for likes. “His regime built magnificent central stations and upgraded the main lines on which businessmen, politicians and comfort-minded tourists sped between Milan and Rome." Not so much for regular Italians who were stuck in creaky, old trains.

In our era, trains plainly do not run on time but reels do. Wannabe dictators show their devotees their ability to appear sweatless, poreless in an image, of course. However, the real promise is to bestow devotees the ability to create, trade in and worship shiny images—the sped-up reel of a white “bullet" train, the borrowed image of a clean and fancy street to rival Singapore, the façade that gleams even if there are leaks inside. The promise of authoritarian regimes to populations tired of mess and confusion is “leave it to me, the streets will be safe". Except as we see around the world, what authoritarian regimes are actually saying is “leave the crimes to me".

Political scientists Ireneusz Karolewski and Viktoria Kaina recently labelled Russia a criminocracy. As names go, it could do with a make-over but it is immediately obvious what the word implies—that Russia is a nation state shaped by crime. Karolewski and Kaina wrote in a London School of Economics blog, “Corruption is the fuel of criminocracies, rather than a pathological development." Or if you want me to translate the tech talk, corruption is a feature in a criminocracy not a bug. These regimes are run by polished criminals who work hard to extract the last drop of maal from government institutions and national resources. Meanwhile, their prisons are full of sharp-eyed people who had the potential to connect the dots and interrupt the looting. Mussolini, for instance, had 50,000 railway workers jailed for “political reasons".

Also read: How the Constitution played a pivotal role in the election

The efficient nation of China had its Pune Porsche equivalent back in 2009. A wealthy 20-year-old recklessly sped through Hangzhou and killed a pedestrian. The public was enraged by the images of the killer smoking and laughing while waiting for the police. As in the Pune Porsche case, the developments showed everyone watching how justice works when a tiny speck of the population owns most of the country. One of the developments was the accusation (and not for the first time!) that the remarkably light three-year sentence was going to be served not by the rich boy but by a Ding Zhu, a replacement criminal. Dingzhu-cracy—a place where you do the crime and someone else does the time, where we admire bullet trains on odd days and on even days train drivers take the bullet.

Meanwhile, I think of “Sachin Agarwal" and what exams he took, didn’t take or wanted to take.

Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot To Invent Facebook And Other Stories. She posts @chasingiamb.