Criminal intent

The gruesome killing of Ramchanphy Hongray, young girl allegedly by her neighbour Pushpam Sinha, a 34-year-old PhD scholar working at IIT, Delhi is the latest in a series of crimes involving middle-class Indians. The crime demographics appear to be changing as a new India — urban, better off, aware — comes into its own.

In Mumbai, a wannabe actress, Maria Susairaj and her boyfriend Emile Jerome are under trial for conspiring to kill Neeraj Grover last year, a young man she befriended to further her career. Two years ago, Avinash Patnaik drove all the way from Orissa to Mumbai to kill his former girlfriend, model Moon Das, could not find her and killed her mother and uncle and then himself. There are other instances too.

These are no longer stray incidents. These are our new reality, where the crime reflects  a “all or nothing” approach by those who are otherwise well educated and far from criminal in their normal life. It could be even called a sense of entitlement — I want it and I want it now. The social fabric which once managed to control all these impulses either through established practice or social taboos is tearing.

 Crimes of passion are not a new phenomenon, but they seem to be increasing. Yet as a society we have not yet come to terms with these changes and do not seem to be equipped to understand where this new type of crime comes from.

We are, in a sense, used to thinking of ourselves as largely crime-free, except for pockets in North India and even then we imagine that it is professional criminals and the “poor” who are the main perpetrators. Even the police will by instinct mistrust a “domestic” if someone from the middle class is murdered or attacked, before spreading the net further to look at the victim’s own social group.

More and more we find that it is us and our neighbours who are the criminals. Love unfortunately appears to be the main motive followed closely by money. The brutal killing of the young Hongray — recently moved to the capital from Manipur — was confessed to by a man not only much older, but also well-educated and with good career prospects ahead of him. But his immense frustration and apparent expressed desire for a girlfriend became an obsession. That was visible in other cases too.

Our social networks and our crime investigators have to look deeply at what is going wrong and equip themselves to deal with this new crime wave. Older ideas may not work in a changing social structure.