Indian state won’t ease crackdown on crime despite Apple manager’s death
LUCKNOW, India: Private security guard Ajit Singh Rana says he supports a police crackdown on gangsters in India’s most populous state, even after cops gunned down an Apple executive at a road stop in what human rights activists say was the latest in a series of extrajudicial killings.
Police have said the shooting was an accident, but are adamant there will be no let-up in the anticrime campaign, which is popular with many people in India’s most politically important state.
“Goons and criminals have held back the state for years,” said Rana, 31, who guards a river-front park in Uttar Pradesh’s capital Lucknow in the evening and is the supervisor of a group of street cleaners in the morning.
“The government is right in killing them and everyone here appreciates it,” he said.
Uttar Pradesh, in India’s north, is home to 220 million people and sends more lawmakers to the lower house of parliament than any other state.
It is run by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP), and state Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a saffron robe-wearing Hindu priest, launched a ‘zero- tolerance’ fight against criminals months after taking office in March last year.
Since then police have killed 67 suspected criminals in more than 2,700 ‘engagements’, wounded 700 and arrested 6,500, according to the draft of a government report reviewed by Reuters.
Four policemen died and about 500 officers were injured in the incidents. Adityanath’s state government has been boasting about the success of the crackdown and claims it has reduced major crimes significantly.
In the first nine months of this year, reported cases of murder fell 4 per cent, rape 8 per cent, burglary 11 per cent, extortion 35 percent and robbery 40 per cent compared with the same period a year earlier, according to a government document reviewed by Reuters.
Damodar Singh, 34, said he also approved of the tough stance but added crime won’t end as long as there’s a big jobless problem. Opposition parties and rights activists say that as farm distress and high unemployment dent the BJP’s popularity in the country, the Adityanath government is playing to the basest fears of the electorate about their safety and security.
The Apple executive, Vivek Tiwari, was stopped by two police constables on motorcycle patrol near Lucknow early on the morning of Sept 29, and shot dead.
One of the constables told reporters he fired accidentally at Tiwari, who was driving back from an iPhone store launch.
In an attempt to defuse the wave of criticism, Uttar Pradesh offered the widow a state government job and compensation for the death of her husband.
Police also issued a rare public apology.
But that hasn’t stopped activists and opposition politicians from demanding the state government rein in ‘trigger-happy’ police.
They say Tiwari’s killing garnered attention because he was a high-caste Hindu and worked for a high-profile company but the deaths of minority Muslims and poor people at the hands of the police rarely get a public airing.