NCRB data hides more than it reveals

The recently released NCRB report remains quiet on issues like lynchings and agrarian riots, and the statistics require a closer reading. The statistics are meant to hide more than they reveal, argues senior journalist Sanjay Kapoor.

Hyderabad: For the last few years now, media headlines of violent criminal acts do not find space in the National Crime Research Bureau’s (NCRB) report. The ideology of the party in power ends up deciding what should constitute the report and how much importance a particular category of crime should get.

Ideally, the nature of the crime that should have found prominent space in NCRB’s latest 2019 ‘Crime in India’ report, which documents criminality during 2018 should be on the hate crimes like lynching of people belonging to minority community allegedly linked to cow slaughter or beef trade. New generation messaging platforms like WhatsApp that are purveyors of hate news are behind some of these killings.

NCRB report is also quiet on the tension and violence that banning of cow slaughter has brought to the villages of north India. Stray cattle, which were earlier sent to slaughterhouses, now invade farms and households causing disquiet and violence. Fear of religious vigilante people and punitive laws prevent the villagers from taking any action against the unproductive animals, but it leads to serious contestation in these farmlands.

Ideally, confrontation amongst enraged villagers should have been put in the category of rural riots, but this was found inconvenient by the framers of this report. Till 2016, the NCRB had created a sub-category of “agrarian riots”, which had jumped by 327 per cent from 628 cases in 2014 to 2683 in 2015. After this bewildering bounce in the rioting in rural areas, which could be a combination of the collapse of rural employment guarantee scheme or land disputes, this category was done away with in subsequent NCRB reports.

Read: NCRB report, 2018: Cognizable crimes up by 1.35%

The usual explanation for the disappearance of any category is that the incidents weren’t in significant numbers and hence they did not merit special emphasis. With farm distress growing and farmers taking to agitation to force the administrators to take notice of their sorry plight, it is surprising how the report chose to jettison this category.

The agriculture sector is a sensitive area and governments have struggled to explain what drives the farmers to suicide. This phenomenon gained prominence after the country initiated economic reforms in 1991 and began to encourage cash crop cultivation. Heavily indebted farmers, who borrowed from village money lenders at exorbitant interest rates in anticipation of high returns, have been forced to commit suicide when the crop had got spoilt due to pesticide or failed due to poor monsoon or proper irrigation.

2018 figures show that the number of farm suicides has fallen. On the contrary, the suicides by unemployed youth have climbed up to 12,936 even if we compare it with the preceding year- 2017. This figure is unpalatable for most of the governments, but with reports of unemployment up to 42 years high, one shudders to think about how it will show up in the next NCRB report.

Another figure that governments and political parties fear are ones that pertain to the crime against women. In 2018, every 15 minutes a woman was raped in India and 94 per cent of the offenders were known to the victim. A total number of registered cases were 33,356 which is a gross underestimation.

Read: Rapes in India: Every 4th victim a minor, 94% offenders known

As shame is linked to this crime, registered cases may be just the tip of the iceberg. Many victims when they read or hear about the shoddy and insensitive manner in which rape cases are handled in our country, shy away of visiting a police station. This is more a norm in the rural areas where police have a different perspective on why rapes take place.

Some years ago even former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Mulayam Singh Yadav was clearly dismissive about rape charges against some of his party men by suggesting that boys will be boys. The attitude of the political class belonging to feudal India has remained unchanged even after nationwide agitation in 2012.

Look at what Unnao rape victim had to contend with. It was only her tenacity that saw the conviction of a ruling party politician. Incidentally, the politician belongs to UP where there is a spike in violence against women. Lucknow, the city of high culture, is ‘un-safest’ for women, though UP has the third-highest number of rape victims. MP tops the list of infamy with 5,433 victims.

Despite political stability and no visible presence of mafia killings, Patna had the highest murders in all the 19 metropolitan cities of 4.4 killings in every 1 lakh of population. Bihar police, though, claimed that the state had, contrarily, shown improvement in crime rate, which included rapes.

The problem of fake currency, which was to be addressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to demonetize high-value currency notes in November 2016, failed if NCRB data is anything to go by. Post demonetization there was 480 per cent jump in the suspicious transaction, claim a couple of researchers. What has helped counterfeiters is the introduction of Rs 2000/- denomination note by the government in 2016. Though its circulation is being trimmed- fewer new notes are being printed- 56 per cent of all fake currency is that of Rs.2000.

Despite all these failings, the Crime in India report reiterates a trend since 2016 that there has been a dramatic fall in the crime rate. In 2013, the crime was shown to be about 540 odd, but in 2016 it dropped by 35 per cent to 379.3 per cent. In 2018, it is at 388 per cent. As is true with most of the statistics that emanate from the government, these figures need closer reading too. The fall in crime rate has much to do with the changed methodology that ignores multiple crimes of an individual and selects only the most heinous.

Expectedly, these statistics are meant to hide more than they reveal- and they succeed in this purpose.

Read: Sexual Harassment cases almost double in 2018 from 2016