Editorial:Crime

Sikkim made it to the pages of the Guinness Book of World Records at one time under the enviable entry of a state with a “zero crime rate.” The data that earned Sikkim this status is obviously suspect, but no one can deny that Sikkim has been a safe place. Of course there have always been crimes committed; that, after all, is something every settlement has to live with. Of late, however, the nature of crimes has been showing a disturbing trend. Not only is violence entering the crime roll in higher numbers, but violence to effect thefts and burglaries are also now not as uncommon as they used to be till some years back. The most recent case was from Uttarey in remote West Sikkim where a lady was brutally attacked at home by a group intent on burglary. It was only recently, after the lady had recovered from her injuries in a Siliguri Nursing Home and returned home, that she identified her assailants and they were taken into custody. The other worrying statistic is the involvement of juveniles in crimes. Although the Uttarey case involved youth in their twenties, as a report in today’s edition reveals, an elaborate burglary was carried out by a group of kids barely in their teens, aged between 13 to 16. It is disconcerting enough that burglars are getting habituated to violence, and now there is the added anxiety of the induction age into crime getting consistently lowered.
For a state already grappling with a host of social challenges ranging from runaway substance abuse to growing number suicides to high school drop-out rate, crime is becoming the latest cause for distress. Although each of these challenges will require individual attention, they should not be seen in isolation because they are essentially interconnected in that they result from the socio-cultural and socioeconomic changes that have visited the State as part of ‘development’, modernity and mainstreaming. None of these are essentially negative influences but have collaborated to change lifestyles in Sikkim and while this change could have been eased with a more responsive society, fact remains that people at large were left to their own devices to ‘adjust’. The spurt in crimes and the involvement of kids too young to be held responsible for their deeds is possibly a product of imitative consumption which is too disquietingly common, especially among the younger generation. The obvious income inequality does not help matters and this situation when catalysed by a largely absent civil society, eases the path leading to crime.
The inference made above is admittedly speculative, and it should be a worrying sign when journalists end up speculating on social trends when these are better handled by professionals trained in making sense of such issues. But that is not happening in Sikkim, is it? And that is where the main problem lies. For all the profusion of NGOs and such in the State, there is none of any consistent commitment to issues of the young. It is important that the people and their representative organisations notice the trend and arrest the slide by first understanding first what it is that drives some of its young to such extreme actions and then setting the aberrations right. The situation demands a collective response, which, if not addressed soon, will snowball into a presence that cannot be erased as easily later. The cops will obviously do their job of rounding up suspects and finding the culprits, but until the root cause is not corrected, the problem will persist. What is worse, disinterest will from a hardened crop of anti-socials, because juveniles in obvious need of compassionate counselling would have received only ‘police action’ and derision. Antisocial tendencies are not fed by economic poverty, it is social bankruptcy that cements it.