Techie's murder in Chennai: Corrupt police service, rapid urbanisation behind rise in crime

A madman packed a sickle in his backpack and slashed a young woman to death at 6:45 am in Nungambakkam railway station, Chennai.

He murdered and fled in the morning rush hour, dropping the bloodstained billhook, checking his hands for injuries as he ran. He is still on the loose, a CCTV camera from a neighbouring building that miraculously captured this butcher, the only grainy link to what he looks like.

Another madman walked into a nightclub and shot 50 people dead in Orlando a week ago.

In America, it’s a gun; here, an aruvaal, elsewhere, bombs in airport check-in counters.

Alongwith their boiling rage — these crazies all carry mobile phones — most likely smartphones.

S Swathi is the fifth person to be murdered in June in Chennai. Swathi was a techie at Infosys, the others were three advocates and an RTI activist. Personal animosity is a common thread in the murders before Swathi’s, the digital rectangles of mobile telephony leaving no space for silences where an argument may find room to pause.

“Chennai, where I worked and lived for more than four decades, is fast losing the earlier image of a safe city, especially for women,” writes Former CBI director and current chairman of SIT, Gujarat RK Raghavan in The Times of India .

“If we have not seen enough evidence of police-citizen partnership in India, it is the fault on both sides. The craving for despicable publicity of a number of senior police officers without tightening protective measures and the lack of sustained commitment by citizen groups are twin factors which account for galloping levels of fear of crime in our urban centres,” says Raghavan.

Social media platforms are raging with questions on the police, policing, railway police, local police, state government. Rival politicians are rushing to pin blame.

But the Indian Police Service itself is well past its expiry date, says Deepak Sinha , a specialist in strategic studies from Madras University.

“Suggestions for transforming policing will never emerge from within the establishment, as the status quo suits all stake-holders, other than the public, which bears the brunt of its inability to provide a civilised society based on the rule of law,” says Sinha.

“The Indian Police Service (IPS) is broken down. It is eviscerated and wholly corrupt, barring a few, and acts as the hand-maiden of the criminal-business-politician nexus that values power and pelf above everything else,” says Sinha.

That’s one view. The other, more palpable one is this: Megacities are experiencing massive and rapid urbanisation, fueled by the inflow of immigrants and rural youth. Fifty-four percent of the world’s population lives in cities, and that number is expected to rise to 80 percent in the developing world by 2030. Under the pressures of such dramatic societal shifts, administrating megacities is an increasingly demanding task for local governments.

“While technological advances can improve the effectiveness of law enforcement agencies, the latest surge of attacks in public spaces suggests a need for heightened vigilance among the citizenry and a citizen-friendly police force to ensure effectiveness,” says Bharat Gopalaswamy of Atlantic Council, one of America’s top think tanks.

Three days after Swathi’s murder, the police is still rather clueless — clutching at two pieces of CCTV footage and a latest photo sent by an eye witness in which the killer’s face is not visible.

Decode that and map it to what today’s megacities look like — Chennai alone is home to more than 8 million people so that’s about 26,000 people per square kilometre.

The killer is one of them, his aruvaal is with us, we search for him among the 26,000, with a picture that will now go to a forensic lab in Hyderabad so we can see his face more clearly.

Where will he be by then?

In another city, maybe?

Where will you be at 6:40 am in your city?

At the train station? At the bus stop?

Alive?

You are Swathi. Me too.

Has Chennai changed? Yes, it has more people in the same space, jampacked, sweaty, more angry, more connected, more rural in urban, aruvaals in backpacks.

But that’s not Chennai alone, it’s the dark side of the most wooed market in the world — 1.3 billion plus.