Faultlines of a burglary

It was on the night of Monday 27^th April that robbers broke into my parents’ home in Guwahati, in the northeastern state of Assam in India. These days the rooms are used as a Senior Citizens’ Club, which had remained closed for the last several weeks because of the Covid 19-induced complete lockdown that was still in force in India at that point. So no one came to any bodily harm but they ransacked the whole house, opened each cupboard, each drawer and each box and left with what they could find – some cash and a huge amount of bell-metal and copper articles – most of them priceless family heirlooms belonging to my parents, many over a century old. The caretaker’s family was asleep in the adjacent room, I was also in the flat on the first floor directly above, but we heard nothing. So they must have had some idea about which rooms to avoid and must have also worked out a time-interval when everybody would be asleep.

We called the Police in the morning soon after we discovered the broken locks on the entry doors. They took their time in coming and initially did not bother too much. But while waiting for them to arrive, I took some photos of the mess in the house and posted them on Facebook; I also took to Twitter to inform the Police, some high ups in the civil administration and some politicians. I do not know who did what but very quickly I could sense that the Police was beginning to take the matter more seriously. They called around 9 a.m. to say that they were bringing a sniffer dog and were also sending a forensic team to look for fingerprints. I was asked to submit a FIR at the Police station, once we had assessed what items were actually missing. The sniffer dog came around 11 a.m. and showed the way the thieves had taken in and out of the house. But he could track their movements only till the main road. The fingerprint experts came soon after and did their job.

Before they could leave however, we got news that the Police had found a large plastic sack filled with metal items next to the railway track very close to our house; I was asked to go to the Police station to identify the items. Most of the stolen articles were in that sack, but most of them had been severely damaged – broken into bits, crushed and beaten flat in order to be able to pack more into the sack. Apparently they would have been sold by weight later. I was not sure how to react on seeing the lost items – although I was happy that they had been found so quickly, my heart was crying because these ancient heirlooms had been damaged beyond recognition; in the process the last signs of my parents had been removed from the house.

Later that night the Police managed to nab four of the six young men who were involved in the robbery. A fifth was nabbed early the next morning. I was really surprised at the speed at which everything was happening. The Police, when asked, told me that they had a good idea who the culprits could be and where to look for them and hence it had not been very difficult for them to find the thieves and recover most of the stolen items. I thanked the Police (and my stars) for this rather swift and successful ending of the case. However all this made me realize my position of privilege which made such a swift action possible. Would the Police have reacted as swiftly unless someone from higher up in the administration had directed them to do so in response to my tweets or FB post? Would they have bothered as much if my parents were not as well known as they are?

The stories I have heard from many people since have made me feel that it is my position of privilege in society, my parents’ reputation, and my network of powerful friends in the top positions in the administration that had made the difference in how this case was handled. I had the right religion, the right class, the right connections, and the right pedigree.  Strangely, this knowledge only upset me further, for it make it clear to me that the Police and the law enforcement agencies don’t treat everyone equally and that as a normal citizen with no backing from anyone, the Police would perhaps have not been so forthcoming. What is more, some people actually advised me against going to the Police – ‘If you have not lost very much, then don’t report it to the Police,’ they advised me, ‘the Police might just turn the whole case around and harass you instead.’ I have still not understood what this was supposed to mean.

Meanwhile, my FB posts had been flooded with responses from my friends from all over the world -- messages of concern and outrage. And I replied with the following post:

As many of you have rightly pointed out, more than the material value of the items stolen, it is the sentiment and memories attached to each of those items that has made the theft hard to bear. Even harder is accepting the idea that total strangers can just enter my parents' home (or anyone's home), violating the privacy of the place, completely ransack it, take what they wish to and then make their getaway; the idea that we are not safe, that no one is safe, that tomorrow they can enter our homes too is a frightening prospect. Thefts and burglaries will increase in the days and weeks ahead as hungry and starving people get more and more desperate.... We live in very strange times...and the old certainties are gone... be safe all of you... do think of ways of improving the security of your main doors and gates,...and thank you for being with me all through this crazy day...

I was lucky to have got off so lightly, but nonetheless, the whole incident left me rattled. Unable to come to grips with my fears, and after hearing sounds and having to sit up imagining the worst the next couple of nights, I took the advice many of my friends had given me of employing a night watchman. I live alone in my flat, there is nobody living downstairs and we have a large compound with more than one exit point. Many of my friends, both in India and abroad, who were directly or indirectly hinting at just that, were relieved. I had thought about employing a guard even earlier, but somehow I had told myself that we were not that rich to be needing guards. What this robbery had made clear, however, was that the question was not how rich one was, but how much one valued one’s personal safety and security, given the knowledge that there were plenty of desperately poor young men very close by, who could steal, rob and kill for little money.

But how did I know so much about these young men? When the boys nabbed were questioned by the police, they gave further details of who else was involved and of their modus operandi, besides admitting to being involved in the burglary. Their ring-leader had succeeded in giving the police the slip. The police sent me a photo of the four boys and their details. The fellows are all named Ali, and were all camping/living in a row of completely run-down shacks along the railway line, very close to our house; they were between 12 -22 years of age. These boys were apparently all drug addicts who would stop at nothing, even kill if necessary, to get their 20 rupees (about 20 pence) every day to buy their next 'tablet'. They had come to the city from various parts of the state and were mostly unskilled and uneducated migrants, coming from very depressed backgrounds, who had moved to the city in search of a better life. In normal times they would somehow earn their keep my doing small menial jobs as porters or labourers. But the sudden total lockdown had caught them unawares. And by the end of April, almost six weeks had gone by of the nationwide total lockdown. They were without work. And in India there is no state support for floating populations to which these fellows belonged, groups that are largely undocumented and do not exist, as it were, for the state. But their hunger was increasing. So was their desperation to get their daily ‘shot’. Having run out of money, and they had been resorting to thefts and robberies – stealing mobile phones, breaking into cash boxes of closed shops or donation boxes of small temples, or even breaking into (empty) homes as in our case.

The Police told me that the entire stretch of railway land along the train tracks is home to many such petty criminals and drug addicts but that they could not do anything about clearing the area unless the railways, to whom the land belongs, and the civil administration directed them to. The question of course was, would just evicting those people solve the problem? And even if they were evicted, where could they go? They had to live somewhere. If the state cannot provide them with shelter, and they do not have the means to be able to afford anything better, they will continue to live like that, if not here, then somewhere else.

The Police Officer also told me that although they would present the culprits to the court within the next 24 hours, and the young men would be remanded to judicial custody for a week or so, all of them would be released by the court very quickly, because three of them were minors, and anyway, in these corona times even hardcore thieves were being released. So the problem would recur, very soon. Therefore, the police had very little interest or incentive to follow up such cases, he confided, and understandably so. I did not understand why instead of being released and being allowed to return to their bad old ways, they were not sent to de-addiction centres or to juvenile remand homes, corona or no-corona? Yes, we have all those institutions, on paper at least, I was informed. Why was it then that those institutions did not complement each other and work together to produce the desired result that these boys (like the ones who had broken in) stopped being drug addicts and thieves and could be rehabilitated back into our society? No one had a satisfactory answer to that, except stating the obvious – that the system was not working in the way it should.

And was it not significant that all of those young men belong to one particular community? The instant response of many of my upper class, caste Hindu friends when they heard about the Ali-brigade who had broken in, was full-scale xenophobia: ‘What else can you expect from that lot of Bangladeshi Mias? They are worse than vermin, and are all set to destroy our land. They should be deported or put in camps before they become a majority in our state. That we are in this sorry condition today that these illegal immigrants dare to break into our homes and that we are not even safe in our own homes is because nothing was done to stop them from coming into Assam in the last decades! It is good that we have such a strong PM at the helm of things, he is the only one who understands the threat posed by these criminals and has promised to send them back.’

They could have gone on forever. The ferocity and vehemence of the response bothered me. I knew that there was widespread mistrust and ill feeling among most of the Assamese Hindu population towards anyone who is called Ali or Ahmed, who most Hindu Assamese will club together into the category of bideshis (foreigners) who have entered Assam illegally over time from Bangladesh. It is a fact that the Muslim population in Assam in certain pockets are really poor and uneducated and belong to the most depressed sections of society. But how could one make such gross generalizations like this? Surely that 12 year old Ali boy who had broken in was born in India and had not come from anywhere. Did he not have a right to education, to going to school, just like all our sons and daughters? But most of my friends were not listening.

This story does not end there. A few days after the burglary, two young boys came begging to our main gate. They looked very much like the Alis in the photo so I started talking to them.  I showed them the photo. They recognized two of the boys and told me that they lived close by. These two were also Muslim but they swore that they were not thieves, nor were they drug addicts. Normally, they were not even beggars, they told me, they had worked for a living. But because of the lockdown there was no work to be found. And they were very hungry. And they had sickly parents and younger siblings who were also starving with them. So they had no option but to beg. They told me to give them work to do – they didn’t want me to give them money for nothing. But there was no work that I could give them. I sent them away after giving them some money, on condition that they would not steal or use it for buying drugs.

When I recounted this incident to my friends many of them made fun of me – ‘Yes, trust you to give money to the very thieves who broke into your house. Good that you stopped before inviting them in.  Don’t you see that by talking to that lot you are inviting trouble upon yourself? What if they had snatched your smart phone while you were showing them the photo or your purse when you were giving them the money and run away? It does look as if many years of living outside India has made you forget how dangerous things can be here. Just forget about those Alis. They don’t deserve our pity or our consideration. They are criminals and drug addicts, and they will die of their addiction in a couple of years, with or without our help.’

But that was precisely the point. I was aghast. Even if we cared only for ourselves, if we only wanted safety and security of our lives and property, even then we could not afford to continue to ignore these young Alis. We cannot have the cake and eat it too.  Looking away and not facing up to these uncomfortable questions would not make the problems go away...That was the other problem I had noticed in my friends – most of them were very uneasy or unwilling to face up to the harsh reality, or address difficult questions – perhaps this is part of the so called Assamese mildness, but not speaking up allows a tiny vocal few rapid Muslim-haters, to sabotage the whole picture.

But even if we left the question of religion out, we still needed to ask ourselves:  if we as a society do not know how to stop a bunch of kids (for they really are a bunch of kids) from mending their ways, and how to give them a decent place to live and enough to eat and make it possible for them to earn a honest living, how were we going to solve any of the much bigger problems afflicting our world at present? And in corona times one didn’t need to think too hard about bigger problems…

But with or without Corona, the burglary had thrown up one serious question we would do well to ask ourselves before it is too late:  Have we, as a society, failed one section of our population more than others?

But nobody was willing to engage with me on any of this.