Law’s Labour Lost
Nitish Kumar’s first promise on becoming CM was to bring crime to heel, but the ordinary Bihari is as insecure as ever. ON THE evening of March 1, Sanjay Singh, project manager with a company building roads in Bihar’s Sasaram town, was at work when the local BJP legislator’s son arrived with six men. Santosh Kumar, son of Sasaram MLA Jawahar Prasad, asked for Rs 1.25 lakh as rangdari (extortion money), but Singh refused to pay. An angry Santosh and his men then forcibly took away the company’s project files and other documents from Singh, assaulted him and snatched his mobile phone. Singh was rushed to a nursing home. He later registered an FIR against the MLA’s son and the police are investigating.--Anand St Das
ANAND ST DAS
Patna Tehelka
In the “new, improved Bihar†of the JD(U)-BJP government of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, such lawlessness is becoming increasingly difficult to blame on the RJD’s 15-year “misruleâ€. The Nitish regime has been tom-tomming its success in achieving a “remarkable†decline in the state’s crime rate, and the bureaucracy and the police brass seem to have played along by juggling the statistics. But the relentless reports and images from the ground, especially a spurt in mob lynchings, show just how difficult the task remains of restoring the rule of law in Bihar. Consider some recent incidents:
• An FIR was lodged against JD(U) MP Prabhunath Singh’s nephew for attacking State Bank of India officials inside the branch’s premises in Saran district on February 27. Armed criminals looted Rs 7.10 lakh from a Bank of India branch in the same district on March 6.
• A case of abduction was registered against RJD MP Sitaram Yadav, his son and six of his bodyguards in Sitamarhi on February 27. Armed men abducted two farmers in Rohtas district on March 4 but the police refused to lodge a case of abduction.
• An engineer and a supervisor of a construction company engaged in road-laying work in Sasaram were abducted for ransom on February 26. Three days later, officials of another company at Dalsinghsarai were threatened over rangdari. On March 1, a company building a bridge in Aurangabad refused to pay Rs 2 lakh as extortion money and its labourers were bashed up.
• In Patna’s posh Srikrishnapuri area, a man was robbed in broad daylight of Rs 1 lakh on February 27, within hours of another incident of robbery in the area. Later in the day, a man and his son were grievously hurt in an attack near a police station because they had saved a man from being robbed three days ago.
• A rich landlord’s henchmen in East Champaran district gunned down three CPI(ML) activists on February 21 because they were supporting villagers who had been tilling 170 acres of land captured from the landlord 20 years ago. On March 6, a gang of armed robbers gunned down a Dalit farmer on his farm at Barh near Patna.
• In increasing incidents of people attacking the police, owners of an illegal brewery in Bhojpur district beat up a policeman in public on March 2. Three days later, Patna SP (Rural) Upendra Kumar Sinha was dragged out of his Gypsy and beaten up by a mob in Barh.
• In the latest instance of mob violence, a youth arrested for violent assault was dragged out of a government hospital by an angry mob in thw presence of the police and mercilessly beaten up in Hajipur on February 23.
• On March 3, even as Nitish Kumar was speaking in the Assembly about the decline in crime in the state, a mob in his hometown of Bakhtiyarpur lynched two men. About 40 cases of lynching were reported across Bihar in 2007, the most shocking being the beating to death of 10 suspected thieves from a denotified community in Vaishali.
When TEHELKA sought the latest crime figures from the Bihar Police headquarters, officials took two days to provide them. Once the figures came to the table of ADG (Law & Order) Anil Sinha, he asked the IG (CID) to provide a fresh list with “only the relevant figuresâ€. So, in the “relevant†figures that came, cases of abduction were removed and only cases of “kidnapping for ransom†retained. Abductions, on which Prakash Jha made his film Apaharan, remain the scourge of Bihar. What has changed is that the targets have become less high-profile, and therefore receive lesser media attention. The total kidnapping figures tabled in the Assembly by Energy Minister Brijendra Yadav (who handles the Home department in the Assembly) on March 3 are: 2,566 cases in 2004, 2,226 in 2005, 2,301 in 2006 and 2,092 in 2007.
According to the government, 2,068 children were kidnapped between 2003 and 2007. The figures for murders also do little to encourage a sense of safety. From 3,861 murders in 2004, the figures came down to 3,423 in 2005, 3,225 in 2006 and 2,963 in 2007. In just the month of January this year, 216 people were murdered across the state.
The only saving grace has been the speedy trials in which a total of 18,344 criminals, including politicians, have been convicted — 66 of them awarded capital punishment, 3,994 sentenced to life, and 13,080 sent to jail for terms less than 10 years.
Opposition parties have dismissed the government’s claims of increased safety. “Only paperwork and smart media management by the government cannot bring peace to Bihar. The people still remember Nitish’s promise that he would make the state crime-free in just three months,†says RJD state president Abdul Bari Siddiqui.
WRITER’S E-MAIL:
anandstdas@gmail.com