What protects us from being stabbed in our own homes?

If film star Saif Ali Khan can be stabbed by an intruder in his home, that too in a Bandra flat, what does it say about our safety and those whom we love? 

Hours after the attack, there was a familiar sight outside the hospital where he was recovering. 

His family and friends emerged from cars. 

There was a glow about them and their clothes looked unusual as they walked through a parted crowd of onlookers who looked like the rest of India, poorer and more provincial, and with no glow. 

This India is also what protects India’s elite from criminal dangers that lurk not far from where they live. 

Like Saif Ali Khan, many of us live in secure buildings, with cameras that probably work and guards in fancy-dress paramilitary costumes. 

They do protect us, but our primary protection, the thing that really guards us, is something else, something fundamentally Indian.

The attack on Khan is an aberration. 

Generally, India is safe for its urban middle class and the affluent. 

Safe as in safe from criminal danger. You could end up dead on the road because of Indian road design or how Indians drive, or lose your life to lax enforcement of safety protocols in buildings, but the middle class and rich do not usually need to worry about criminals.

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In some aspects, we are safe not only compared to middle-income countries in Africa and Latin America, but also in comparison with the West. 

And that is because of an Indian quality that is not exactly noble, which is also why it works.

India’s rich live in a way that is more risky than they would like to accept. 

We depend on people rather than systems. Home security here is more cheap labour on stools than hard tech. 

Also, we are served by a whole little crowd of maids, cooks, gardeners and drivers; we live with strangers in our homes, who have access to its every inch, who have their own lives, their own mobile phones and their own acquaintances with whom they probably discuss us. 

And a police verification can be procured for ₹500. Even if the house help is of sterling character, we have no idea about her boyfriend, or brother, or someone she met on Instagram. 

Yet, we are safe. 

We face more dangers from our peers than India’s poor. 

And in some inner recess of the mind, we are aware of a force that protects us.

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What protects us, to the extent it can, is the brutal side of India. 

If at all there is anything worse than poverty, it is an Indian jail and to be caught in the Indian judicial system for criminal activity. It is a deadly deterrent. 

India exacts a very heavy price for hurting its elite. 

Even Mumbai’s organized crime, which extorted the city’s rich, had to go.

Gangsters flourished when they gamed the judicial system. 

Professional lawyers would get them bail. Even if they were jailed, they would run their operations from inside. 

So, a section of the police decided to kill them, at least those who were useless to them. 

Organized extortion ended in Mumbai because of a suspension of human rights for those the cops marked as criminals. 

It was generally popular, and greatly encouraged by powerful people. 

The daughter of a businessman who was once abducted by the underworld and who had to pay a lot of money in ransom for his life told me about her vehement joy at the elimination of the gangsters and how much she despised films that glorified them.

The same brutality, or its potential, raises the stakes for all criminals. 

Not just in cities, but even in dangerous places, there appears to be a line that criminals should not cross for they would be eliminated if they did. 

Now and then, we hear of rapists of minors who are shot dead by the police, and society is not interested in investigating the circumstances that led to their “encounters."

What India cannot do with competent legal systems, it accomplishes in informal ways. 

But this way of keeping us safe has a flaw. 

It is a flaw that all security systems have, including clean official systems and even technological systems. They are rational. 

They are meant to protect us from a rational criminal who has common sense. 

But there are people who are not rational. They might be mentally disturbed, or they might be desperate drug addicts who do not think rationally. 

Often, the guy who manages to breach security and walk into a building does so in the most irrational way. He just walks in. 

Most of the time, irrational criminals get caught, but it is of little consequence to the victims.

Even in this regard, India’s roughness protects the upper class. 

Indian life is a natural filtering process. People who are dangerous, especially if they are poor, do not survive too long. They are killed or apprehended soon after they become a danger. Or, they just die alone of neglect and disease. 

In comparison, more just societies like the United States and Europe appear to have more empowered dangerous people.

A few weeks ago, a man walked into a New York subway train and burned a woman alive, a woman he had never known. A few days after that in New York, a man pushed another onto the subway platform. 

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It’s not as though these things cannot happen here, but for a nation of this size, Indian cities appear to witness far less mindless crimes.

But I wonder how long Indian cities can maintain their relative safety in a changing world where there is more compassion for the poor and the unlucky and the dangerous among them can survive far longer than before.

And India will find it hard to be as brutal as before in those unseen rooms where parallel justice is dealt.

The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’.