Most Wanted: Delhi

EVER since Phoolan Devi was gunned down last week just down the road from Parliament, Delhi has been the subject of cruel jibes. The particularly uncharitable have started comparing it with the Chambal ravines and the Wild West. Now this I won’t stand for, because it amounts to grossly undermining the peculiar genius of this city-of-eight-cities with its three Ashokan lions roaring ‘Satyameva Jayate’ — only truth triumphs. Quite.

The truth is simply this: Delhi, on a good day, can make the Chambal ravines and the Wild West seem like a nursery school picnic and some of the personalities who grace the Capital could, at their best, make the Most Wanted of the Chambal appear like Mother Teresa.

I have long tried to chronicle, in these columns, the great saga of this shooting range called Delhi; attempted to capture the multilayered ethical universe of India’s Capital, where we pull out a gun when denied a drink or use the ubiquitous tandoor to roast someone we love fiercely. Therefore, to hear this gibble-gabble about Delhi being like the Chambal is not just plain infuriating, it is an insult to my intelligence. We are streets ahead of any old, dacoit-ridden region and it’s time people realised this.

Other cities classify their elite in terms of the neighbourhoods they live in. We measure personal worth by the light arms we carry, whether it is a Webley, a Mauser, a Kalashnikov, and so on. Other cities give their children toy cars to play with, so that they can pretend that they are knocking down people as they go ‘‘zoom-zoom’’. In Delhi, we give our children real cars, preferably big, flashy ones, so that they could get to drive ‘‘zoom, zoom’’ down real roads and knock down real people. Other cities classify their garments in sizes L, Xl, or XXL, we classify our monkey caps in sizes L, XL, and XXL (for those greenhorns who imagine that monkey caps are protective gear against the winter chill, think again, monkey caps are to us what nylon stockings are to the mafia dons of Manhattan — an item of clothing to underplay one’s personality).

And in keeping with our rough and tough neighbourhood, we have a rough and tough police force. Over the years, I have observed that there is no situation of terror so terrible that our armed constabulary can’t make worse. They do it in the two ways officially mandated: by omission and by commission. Either they are clueless about a crime or they’d have trouble tacking down an elephant walking through slush. The first rule of the Delhi police, which has the rather nice slogan — With you. For you. Always — is that they are always with you after a crime has been committed. Once word is out that someone has been done to death, or robbed dry, armies of the khaki-clad descend at the scene of the crime and prowl around with rifles at the ready and a menacing grimace on their faces.

Of course, one should not be fooled by this lot. They are only dud policemen maintained at great expense to the exchequer to keep up the facade of public policing. The real cops are at cocktail parties, dressed like Sunny Deol in Border, tailing the big shots they are hired to protect, although their real function is to impress the hostess and her invitees about the status of her guest.

The first thing the dud policemen do when they reach the scene of crime is to break themselves up into three batches. One lot, as we saw, looks tough and prowls around, the other carefully notes the number of the getaway vehicle — but only if it is abandoned within a radius of a furlong from the scene of the crime. A third lot is asked to arrest any ‘‘suspicious looking’’ vehicle.

The group asked to track down the ‘‘suspicious vehicle’’ swings immediately into action and erects barriers on all the main arterial roads of the city, so that all traffic — which is anyway moving at the rate of a couple of millimetres per hour — now comes to a complete standstill. Miraculously, only the getaway vehicle seems to get away in this scenario of frozen metal.

If the assassins, as sometimes happens, leave their address behind as a special note at the scene of the crime, or give themselves up, our cops get to crack the case very quickly. There is then a great frisson of excitement over ‘‘the breakthrough’’. Until the matter comes up in court, that is. Then the police promptly fails to cite the requisite evidence, witnesses inexplicably turn hostile, testimonies are mysteriously revoked and the judge is forced to rule that the guilty is innocent.

These, in short, are some of the reasons for Delhi is well on the way to robbing Sicily, the home of the original mafia, of its brand equity.

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