Uttar Pradesh in the bag, the BJP has the tough task of tackling the state's lawlessness

The Bharatiya Janata Party swept the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election on Saturday, winning 312 of the state’s 403 seats. The massive victory may just have been the easy part, considering the task that awaits the party in India’s most populous state – fighting rising crime and reviving the law and order machinery.

Lawlessness in Uttar Pradesh featured prominently in the BJP’s election campaign. At a poll rally in Fatehpur city in February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had lamented that “goondaraj” had taken over the state and alleged that police stations had become the offices of the ruling Samajwadi Party.

A close look at crime records in Uttar Pradesh and the state of the police apparatus suggests that ending this lawlessness is easier said than done. At least for now, it would be the BJP’s first big challenge.

Topping crime charts

According to Crime in India 2015, the latest report of the National Crime Records Bureau, Uttar Pradesh accounts for 8.2% of all cases registered under the Indian Penal Code and 12.1% of all violent crimes, which include murder, attempt to murder, rape, and dowry death. But if one were to take cases reported under the Special and Local Laws – such as the Control of Goondas Act, Arms Act, and Excise Act among others – into consideration, the state’s contribution to the all-India total is a little over 58%.

This discrepancy in the proportion of crimes punishable under the Indian Penal Code and the Special and Local Laws has in itself become a subject of scrutiny. According to a report in The Indian Express, the Bureau suspects that the state police may be compiling data in a manner that tends to show fewer Indian Penal Code cases even though the number of registered cases may be higher.

A closer look at crime heads in the report shows that Uttar Pradesh tops the list of murders with 4,732 registered cases, with Bihar coming in second at 3,178 cases. Uttar Pradesh also has the highest number of cases of culpable homicide (causing death with the intention or knowledge of causing death).

In 2015, 1,617 cases of murder with firearms were registered in Uttar Pradesh, again the highest number for any state. Crude pistols and locally manufactured guns were the murder weapon in 1,445 of these cases.

This is a reflection on the easy availability of illegal weapons in the state. For years now, certain pockets in western Uttar Pradesh have been known to supply illegal firearms to criminals not only in the state but also in neighbouring Delhi and Gurgaon.

As for motives in the murder cases, personal enmity topped the list, followed by class conflict, according to the report.

The Bureau records also show that Uttar Pradesh accounts for 14.5% of all kidnapping and abduction cases in India, the highest for any state or Union territory. There were nearly 12,000 cases registered in the state under this crime head in 2015.

This could be a result of the presence of various mafia in the state, according to Prakash Singh, former director general of the Border Security Force and former police chief of Uttar Pradesh and Assam. “The mafia in UP are significant contributors in the crime statistics,” he said. “In UP, there is mafia involved in land-grabbing, construction, mining and every possible area where they see gain. And such mafia draw support from political groups. The members and close associates of such mafia frequently carry out killings and abductions across the state.”

Singh, who writes on police reforms and counter-terrorism, went on to say that Uttar Pradesh has seen very little in the name of police reforms in the past decade. “The state government did acknowledge that there has to be more police personnel in the state and so they increased the sanctioned strength, but it has not been very helpful because the positions are still vacant,” he said.

State of police force

The Data on Police Organisations for 2016, published and released by the Bureau of Police Research and Development in January this year, points to this deficiency. According to it, Uttar Pradesh has a police-population ratio of 167.8 – which means there are 167.8 police officials for every one lakh people – against a national average of 180.59, which in itself is considered one of the lowest in the world.

However, these figures pertain to sanctioned police strength. At the ground level, the situation is worse. If the actual police strength in the state is taken into account, this ratio plunges to 83.9.

The vacancy rate in the Uttar Pradesh Police hovers around 50% – the highest in the country – against a sanctioned strength of 363,785 personnel, which is also the highest in India. Bihar, Jharkhand, Gujarat, Karnataka and West Bengal, the states with the highest police vacancy rates after Uttar Pradesh, are way behind at around the 35% mark.

“The already grim affair of the police system is made worse by the ruling political party controlling the entire apparatus,” Singh said. “During the last two regimes [the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party before it] we have witnessed that the police turned helpless when it came to registering a case against anyone with the slightest political influence. Such cases set a bad example and lead to more lawlessness.”

The officer pointed to another worrying factor in the state’s crime graph. “In the past few years, the communal divide in UP too has sharpened,” he said. “The state has witnessed communal clashes – while those like the Muzaffarnagar violence went out of the state’s control, the police managed to handle the others entirely on the basis of strength, which does not work in the long term. And the mafia in the state do their best to fan such tensions for their own gains.”

The Muzaffarnagar riots between Jats and Muslims in August-September 2013 left over 60 people dead, several more injured and displaced at least 50,000 people.

The BJP, when it takes charge in Uttar Pradesh, surely knows that to end this goondaraj, it will have to get rid of the mafia and cut their political support, Singh added.