Showing posts with label murder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label murder. Show all posts
Monday 24 January 2022
Monday 6 December 2021
Thursday 14 October 2021
Saturday 27 February 2021
Sunday 24 November 2019
Labour's spending plans aren't especially unusual – just look at Sweden
The US favours small government and low taxes, but many developed countries thrive on the opposite writes Larry Elliot in The Guardian
The gap between the richest and poorest in Sweden is far smaller than in the US. Photograph: Kevincho_Photography/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Labour’s plans for Britain involve a big increase in the size of the state. Government spending as a share of national output would rise to 45%. And apart from brief spikes in the mid-1970s and during the more recent financial crash, it has not reached those levels since the second world war.
To which the mature response should be: so what? A glance around the world shows that there are rich developed countries where the state is relatively small and there are rich developed countries where the state is large. In democracies, voters get the right to choose between the competing models.
Take Sweden and the US as examples of the contrasting approaches. The Scandinavian country, population just over 10 million, has a state that spends 50% of gross domestic product. The United States, population 329 million, operates with a much smaller state that accounts for 38% of national output.
The received wisdom, particularly among free-market economists, is that a small state means economic dynamism while a big state means the opposite: a sclerosis caused by governments burdening their populations with levels of taxation that stifle enterprise.
So how do the US and Sweden stack up against each other?
In terms of growth rates, there’s not been a lot to choose between the two in recent years, with both averaging around 2.5% a year in the half-decade up to 2018. If anything, Sweden’s growth rate was a tad higher.
The US has a slight edge when it comes to living standards. The average American had an income of $59,928 (£46,700) in 2017 while Sweden’s per capita income was $51,405. But the Swedes, as tends to be the way in Europe, are prepared to sacrifice income for leisure time. They work 1,621 hours a year on average compared to 1,781 hours for the average American.
What’s more, the focus on GDP per capita is a bit misleading since it says nothing about the way in which national income is divided up. In some countries, there is a wide gulf in incomes between those at the top and those at the bottom; in others there is a more even split. The US falls into the former category, Sweden into the latter.
One way of assessing income inequality is through the Gini coefficient. If income was distributed evenly in a country it would have a Gini coefficient of zero If, on the other hand, one person had all the income its coefficent would be 1. Obviously, every country is bunched around the middle of this range, but Sweden is closer to the bottom than the US. It has a Gini coefficient of 0.27 while the US’s is 0.41.
Big-state Sweden has a higher unemployment rate than the US – 6.3% against 3.9% – in 2018, but its employment rate is also higher. According to figures from the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development dating back to 2016, 69.4% of Americans aged 15 to 64 are in work, compared to 76.2% of Swedes.
The two countries have very similar inflation rates of around 2%, but there is no evidence that high levels of public spending have impaired Sweden’s export performance. A current account surplus of 1.7% of GDP in 2018 was in contrast to the US’s 2.4% of GDP deficit.
The big economic numbers – income per head, unemployment, inflation and the current account – do not provide a complete picture of how successful a country is. Sweden has a much lower murder rate than the US – 1.1 per 100,000 inhabitants against 5.3 – and has a much lower incarceration rate – 59 per 100,000 people as opposed to 655 per 100,000 in the US. Swedes live more than four years longer than Americans on average.
When it comes to Nobel prize winners, the countries have similar records once their differing populations are taken into account – 383 for the US and 32 for Sweden. Here, though, the US has the edge. Only three of Sweden’s laureates have come since the turn of the millennium while 130 Americans have been awarded during the same period.
The comparison between these two quite different countries helps to illuminate the debate in the UK. Apparently, the size of the state has no bearing on whether a country is successful or not. At a guess, not many Swedes would want to see their country transformed into small-state America.
This is the right time to have just such a debate about the size of the state because there are factors in Britain that are systemically putting upward pressure on spending. Demographic changes mean all parties need to address the rising costs of an ageing population; the bills for the state pension, the NHS and social care are all going to increase. The climate emergency will require hefty state investment to make the transition to a zero-carbon economy.
But a word of warning. Sweden has evolved its model gradually whereas Labour’s plans involve abrupt change. The price for a big state is high levels of taxation – and it is a price the Swedes are prepared to pay. Overall, government revenues are 49.5% of GDP and taxes on the average Swedish citizen are substantially higher than they are in the UK. The Conservative party is going into the election promising both lower taxes and higher spending. The Labour party says a big state can be paid for by rich individuals and the corporate sector with everybody else tucking into a free lunch.
There are politicians who want Britain to be more like the US and some who favour the Swedish approach. Both are possible. What’s not possible is to have Swedish levels of public spending with American levels of tax.
Labour’s plans for Britain involve a big increase in the size of the state. Government spending as a share of national output would rise to 45%. And apart from brief spikes in the mid-1970s and during the more recent financial crash, it has not reached those levels since the second world war.
To which the mature response should be: so what? A glance around the world shows that there are rich developed countries where the state is relatively small and there are rich developed countries where the state is large. In democracies, voters get the right to choose between the competing models.
Take Sweden and the US as examples of the contrasting approaches. The Scandinavian country, population just over 10 million, has a state that spends 50% of gross domestic product. The United States, population 329 million, operates with a much smaller state that accounts for 38% of national output.
The received wisdom, particularly among free-market economists, is that a small state means economic dynamism while a big state means the opposite: a sclerosis caused by governments burdening their populations with levels of taxation that stifle enterprise.
So how do the US and Sweden stack up against each other?
In terms of growth rates, there’s not been a lot to choose between the two in recent years, with both averaging around 2.5% a year in the half-decade up to 2018. If anything, Sweden’s growth rate was a tad higher.
The US has a slight edge when it comes to living standards. The average American had an income of $59,928 (£46,700) in 2017 while Sweden’s per capita income was $51,405. But the Swedes, as tends to be the way in Europe, are prepared to sacrifice income for leisure time. They work 1,621 hours a year on average compared to 1,781 hours for the average American.
What’s more, the focus on GDP per capita is a bit misleading since it says nothing about the way in which national income is divided up. In some countries, there is a wide gulf in incomes between those at the top and those at the bottom; in others there is a more even split. The US falls into the former category, Sweden into the latter.
One way of assessing income inequality is through the Gini coefficient. If income was distributed evenly in a country it would have a Gini coefficient of zero If, on the other hand, one person had all the income its coefficent would be 1. Obviously, every country is bunched around the middle of this range, but Sweden is closer to the bottom than the US. It has a Gini coefficient of 0.27 while the US’s is 0.41.
Big-state Sweden has a higher unemployment rate than the US – 6.3% against 3.9% – in 2018, but its employment rate is also higher. According to figures from the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development dating back to 2016, 69.4% of Americans aged 15 to 64 are in work, compared to 76.2% of Swedes.
The two countries have very similar inflation rates of around 2%, but there is no evidence that high levels of public spending have impaired Sweden’s export performance. A current account surplus of 1.7% of GDP in 2018 was in contrast to the US’s 2.4% of GDP deficit.
The big economic numbers – income per head, unemployment, inflation and the current account – do not provide a complete picture of how successful a country is. Sweden has a much lower murder rate than the US – 1.1 per 100,000 inhabitants against 5.3 – and has a much lower incarceration rate – 59 per 100,000 people as opposed to 655 per 100,000 in the US. Swedes live more than four years longer than Americans on average.
When it comes to Nobel prize winners, the countries have similar records once their differing populations are taken into account – 383 for the US and 32 for Sweden. Here, though, the US has the edge. Only three of Sweden’s laureates have come since the turn of the millennium while 130 Americans have been awarded during the same period.
The comparison between these two quite different countries helps to illuminate the debate in the UK. Apparently, the size of the state has no bearing on whether a country is successful or not. At a guess, not many Swedes would want to see their country transformed into small-state America.
This is the right time to have just such a debate about the size of the state because there are factors in Britain that are systemically putting upward pressure on spending. Demographic changes mean all parties need to address the rising costs of an ageing population; the bills for the state pension, the NHS and social care are all going to increase. The climate emergency will require hefty state investment to make the transition to a zero-carbon economy.
But a word of warning. Sweden has evolved its model gradually whereas Labour’s plans involve abrupt change. The price for a big state is high levels of taxation – and it is a price the Swedes are prepared to pay. Overall, government revenues are 49.5% of GDP and taxes on the average Swedish citizen are substantially higher than they are in the UK. The Conservative party is going into the election promising both lower taxes and higher spending. The Labour party says a big state can be paid for by rich individuals and the corporate sector with everybody else tucking into a free lunch.
There are politicians who want Britain to be more like the US and some who favour the Swedish approach. Both are possible. What’s not possible is to have Swedish levels of public spending with American levels of tax.
Sunday 17 September 2017
Mr. Apologist, excuses are not enough
Tabish Khair in The Hindu
It has been a fortnight of shocking tragedies in India and abroad — and of excuses by you, Mr. Apologist.
You have told me that I should not overreact: journalists get killed all over the world, and sometimes on their own doorsteps; the Rohingya are just suffering from an internal law-and-order problem; the hurricanes ravaging the Caribbean these days and the floods ravaging India are just natural phenomena, and not due to climate change; and as for the Dreamers, poised earlier to be kicked out of U.S., oh well, that’s all politics, you know, and such things happen in politics (you know). Calm down, you tell me.
Let me reassure you, I am calm. So calm that I am willing to accept all your above positions, though I disagree with them either entirely or in part. I am calm enough to concede that in holding these positions you are establishing a certain political perspective. I differ from you, but as long as you do not elaborate into a justification of murder or genocide from your preliminary positions, you have the grounds to think as you do.
Cracks in society, in humanity
But are you calm enough to realise that my main objections arise from other (related) aspects of all these cases, as elaborated by you?
Are you calm enough to concede that a brutal murder shakes the foundations of society, and its perpetrators can be allowed to go scot-free only if you want hairline cracks to develop further in your society? When the murder is that of a besieged public figure and one with whom you (Mr. Apologist) disagree, the cracks run deeper — and you owe it to your own society to hold the culprits accountable. Cracks in a society and a state often seem to remain superficial until it is too late and the entire edifice starts crumbling — as we have seen and are seeing in many countries. Are you calm enough to concede that the least you can do, out of common decency if not patriotism, is to ‘unfollow’ those of your social media ‘friends’ who justify a murder and vilify its victim?
Like you, I know — for I am not what you will call an ‘idealist’ (alas) — that states need to exercise authority, and more so when faced with insurgency and extremism. I am calm enough to say — though many leftists and Muslims will berate me for it — that the Burmese state might have needed to act against some form of Islamist insurgency. But when such actions lead to the killing of children and force more than 300,000 villagers to flee for their lives, then surely we are talking of an extreme abuse of authority, surely we are talking of genocide and ethnic cleansing? Are you calm enough to concede that we cannot justify such horrors without hairline cracks developing in our very humanity, so that one day, it too, like society or state, crumbles into dust?
Hurricane Irma or the devastating floods in Bihar, you tell me, these are natural disasters. You dismiss climate change: calm down, you tell me, Earth was even hotter thousands of years ago, when there were no polluting industries.
Dumping our refuse
But — unlike most people who are fighting to stop climate change — I am willing to concede that I can never convince you of climate change. If I point to an extreme winter this year, you will point to a moderate winter another year. Climate change cannot be proved in a laboratory: there is evidence that it is taking place, but all of it exists at a very high scientific level (for instance, projections of CO2 emissions and their effects) or at a degree of theoretical abstraction. You can always refuse to accept those conclusions. I am calm enough to accept that.
But are you calm enough to acknowledge that you do not dump your refuse — most of it biodegradable — in your own house, but we, as a species, are dumping our refuse (much of it not even biodegradable) in the only house we know, planet Earth? Are you calm enough to concede that if the former is bad for you, the latter must be bad for all of us?
As for the prospective expulsion of the Dreamers — young men and women, almost entirely educated and employed today, who grew up in the U.S. and have often known only that country, these are people whose parents entered the U.S. illegally when the Dreamers were two or ten years old and in no condition to have a say in the matter. These are people who pay extra to society for living there and who came out and disclosed their status in response to a promise by a previous government. Are you calm enough to concede that we cannot punish children for the crimes of their parents, and that people who have grown up, contributed and committed themselves to a nation have earned the right to stay there? Are you calm enough to realise that politicians cannot be allowed to arbitrarily tinker with established governmental policies affecting ordinary thousands for unclear, personal, vindictive or racist reasons?
Are you calm enough to face the fact that we owe our children much more than mere excuses, Mr. Apologist?
It has been a fortnight of shocking tragedies in India and abroad — and of excuses by you, Mr. Apologist.
You have told me that I should not overreact: journalists get killed all over the world, and sometimes on their own doorsteps; the Rohingya are just suffering from an internal law-and-order problem; the hurricanes ravaging the Caribbean these days and the floods ravaging India are just natural phenomena, and not due to climate change; and as for the Dreamers, poised earlier to be kicked out of U.S., oh well, that’s all politics, you know, and such things happen in politics (you know). Calm down, you tell me.
Let me reassure you, I am calm. So calm that I am willing to accept all your above positions, though I disagree with them either entirely or in part. I am calm enough to concede that in holding these positions you are establishing a certain political perspective. I differ from you, but as long as you do not elaborate into a justification of murder or genocide from your preliminary positions, you have the grounds to think as you do.
Cracks in society, in humanity
But are you calm enough to realise that my main objections arise from other (related) aspects of all these cases, as elaborated by you?
Are you calm enough to concede that a brutal murder shakes the foundations of society, and its perpetrators can be allowed to go scot-free only if you want hairline cracks to develop further in your society? When the murder is that of a besieged public figure and one with whom you (Mr. Apologist) disagree, the cracks run deeper — and you owe it to your own society to hold the culprits accountable. Cracks in a society and a state often seem to remain superficial until it is too late and the entire edifice starts crumbling — as we have seen and are seeing in many countries. Are you calm enough to concede that the least you can do, out of common decency if not patriotism, is to ‘unfollow’ those of your social media ‘friends’ who justify a murder and vilify its victim?
Like you, I know — for I am not what you will call an ‘idealist’ (alas) — that states need to exercise authority, and more so when faced with insurgency and extremism. I am calm enough to say — though many leftists and Muslims will berate me for it — that the Burmese state might have needed to act against some form of Islamist insurgency. But when such actions lead to the killing of children and force more than 300,000 villagers to flee for their lives, then surely we are talking of an extreme abuse of authority, surely we are talking of genocide and ethnic cleansing? Are you calm enough to concede that we cannot justify such horrors without hairline cracks developing in our very humanity, so that one day, it too, like society or state, crumbles into dust?
Hurricane Irma or the devastating floods in Bihar, you tell me, these are natural disasters. You dismiss climate change: calm down, you tell me, Earth was even hotter thousands of years ago, when there were no polluting industries.
Dumping our refuse
But — unlike most people who are fighting to stop climate change — I am willing to concede that I can never convince you of climate change. If I point to an extreme winter this year, you will point to a moderate winter another year. Climate change cannot be proved in a laboratory: there is evidence that it is taking place, but all of it exists at a very high scientific level (for instance, projections of CO2 emissions and their effects) or at a degree of theoretical abstraction. You can always refuse to accept those conclusions. I am calm enough to accept that.
But are you calm enough to acknowledge that you do not dump your refuse — most of it biodegradable — in your own house, but we, as a species, are dumping our refuse (much of it not even biodegradable) in the only house we know, planet Earth? Are you calm enough to concede that if the former is bad for you, the latter must be bad for all of us?
As for the prospective expulsion of the Dreamers — young men and women, almost entirely educated and employed today, who grew up in the U.S. and have often known only that country, these are people whose parents entered the U.S. illegally when the Dreamers were two or ten years old and in no condition to have a say in the matter. These are people who pay extra to society for living there and who came out and disclosed their status in response to a promise by a previous government. Are you calm enough to concede that we cannot punish children for the crimes of their parents, and that people who have grown up, contributed and committed themselves to a nation have earned the right to stay there? Are you calm enough to realise that politicians cannot be allowed to arbitrarily tinker with established governmental policies affecting ordinary thousands for unclear, personal, vindictive or racist reasons?
Are you calm enough to face the fact that we owe our children much more than mere excuses, Mr. Apologist?
Thursday 21 January 2016
Deny the British empire's crimes? No, we ignore them
New evidence of British colonial atrocities has not changed our national ability to disregard it.
George Monbiot in The Guardian
George Monbiot in The Guardian
Members of the Devon Regiment round up local people in a search for Mau Mau fighters in Kenya in 1954. Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images
There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain's colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.
The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the rightwing press. But it draws its power from a remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard our past.
Last week's revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects, and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations, is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press. I was unable to find any mention of the secret archive on the Telegraph's website. The Mail's only coverage, as far as I can determine, was an opinion piece by a historian called Lawrence James, who used the occasion to insist that any deficiencies in the management of the colonies were the work of "a sprinkling of misfits, incompetents and bullies", while everyone else was "dedicated, loyal and disciplined".
There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain's colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.
The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the rightwing press. But it draws its power from a remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard our past.
Last week's revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects, and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations, is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press. I was unable to find any mention of the secret archive on the Telegraph's website. The Mail's only coverage, as far as I can determine, was an opinion piece by a historian called Lawrence James, who used the occasion to insist that any deficiencies in the management of the colonies were the work of "a sprinkling of misfits, incompetents and bullies", while everyone else was "dedicated, loyal and disciplined".
----Also read
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The British government's suppression of evidence was scarcely necessary. Even when the documentation of great crimes is abundant, it is not denied but simply ignored. In an article for the Daily Mail in 2010, for example, the historian Dominic Sandbrook announced that "Britain's empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law … Nor did Britain countenance anything like the dreadful tortures committed in French Algeria." Could he really have been unaware of the history he is disavowing?
Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly 10 years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain's Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. She started her research with the belief that the British account of the suppression of the Kikuyu's Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s was largely accurate. Then she discovered that most of the documentation had been destroyed. She worked through the remaining archives, and conducted 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors – rebels and loyalists – and British guards, settlers and officials. Her book is fully and thoroughly documented. It won the Pulitzer prize. But as far as Sandbrook, James and other imperial apologists are concerned, it might as well never have been written.
Elkins reveals that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintain, but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died.
The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as "Labour and freedom" and "He who helps himself will also be helped". Loudspeakers broadcast the national anthem and patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Unless you have a strong stomach I advise you to skip the next paragraph.
Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound.
Elkins provides a wealth of evidence to show that the horrors of the camps were endorsed at the highest levels. The governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, regularly intervened to prevent the perpetrators from being brought to justice. The colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, repeatedly lied to the House of Commons. This is a vast, systematic crime for which there has been no reckoning.
No matter. Even those who acknowledge that something happened write as if Elkins and her work did not exist. In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan maintains that just eleven people were beaten to death. Apart from that, "1,090 terrorists were hanged and as many as 71,000 detained without due process".
The British did not do body counts, and most victims were buried in unmarked graves. But it is clear that tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Kikuyu died in the camps and during the round-ups. Hannan's is one of the most blatant examples of revisionism I have ever encountered.
Without explaining what this means, Lawrence James concedes that "harsh measures" were sometimes used, but he maintains that "while the Mau Mau were terrorising the Kikuyu, veterinary surgeons in the Colonial Service were teaching tribesmen how to deal with cattle plagues." The theft of the Kikuyu's land and livestock, the starvation and killings, the widespread support among the Kikuyu for the Mau Mau's attempt to reclaim their land and freedom: all vanish into thin air. Both men maintain that the British government acted to stop any abuses as soon as they were revealed.
What I find remarkable is not that they write such things, but that these distortions go almost unchallenged. The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told. As evidence from the manufactured Indian famines of the 1870s and from the treatment of other colonies accumulates, British imperialism emerges as no better and in some cases even worse than the imperialism practised by other nations. Yet the myth of the civilising mission remains untroubled by the evidence.
The British government's suppression of evidence was scarcely necessary. Even when the documentation of great crimes is abundant, it is not denied but simply ignored. In an article for the Daily Mail in 2010, for example, the historian Dominic Sandbrook announced that "Britain's empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law … Nor did Britain countenance anything like the dreadful tortures committed in French Algeria." Could he really have been unaware of the history he is disavowing?
Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly 10 years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain's Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. She started her research with the belief that the British account of the suppression of the Kikuyu's Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s was largely accurate. Then she discovered that most of the documentation had been destroyed. She worked through the remaining archives, and conducted 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors – rebels and loyalists – and British guards, settlers and officials. Her book is fully and thoroughly documented. It won the Pulitzer prize. But as far as Sandbrook, James and other imperial apologists are concerned, it might as well never have been written.
Elkins reveals that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintain, but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died.
The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as "Labour and freedom" and "He who helps himself will also be helped". Loudspeakers broadcast the national anthem and patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Unless you have a strong stomach I advise you to skip the next paragraph.
Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound.
Elkins provides a wealth of evidence to show that the horrors of the camps were endorsed at the highest levels. The governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, regularly intervened to prevent the perpetrators from being brought to justice. The colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, repeatedly lied to the House of Commons. This is a vast, systematic crime for which there has been no reckoning.
No matter. Even those who acknowledge that something happened write as if Elkins and her work did not exist. In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan maintains that just eleven people were beaten to death. Apart from that, "1,090 terrorists were hanged and as many as 71,000 detained without due process".
The British did not do body counts, and most victims were buried in unmarked graves. But it is clear that tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Kikuyu died in the camps and during the round-ups. Hannan's is one of the most blatant examples of revisionism I have ever encountered.
Without explaining what this means, Lawrence James concedes that "harsh measures" were sometimes used, but he maintains that "while the Mau Mau were terrorising the Kikuyu, veterinary surgeons in the Colonial Service were teaching tribesmen how to deal with cattle plagues." The theft of the Kikuyu's land and livestock, the starvation and killings, the widespread support among the Kikuyu for the Mau Mau's attempt to reclaim their land and freedom: all vanish into thin air. Both men maintain that the British government acted to stop any abuses as soon as they were revealed.
What I find remarkable is not that they write such things, but that these distortions go almost unchallenged. The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told. As evidence from the manufactured Indian famines of the 1870s and from the treatment of other colonies accumulates, British imperialism emerges as no better and in some cases even worse than the imperialism practised by other nations. Yet the myth of the civilising mission remains untroubled by the evidence.
Saturday 19 December 2015
Vyapam - The mystery of India’s deadly exam scam
Aman Sethi in The Guardian
On the night of 7 January 2012, a stationmaster at a provincial railway station in central India discovered the body of a young woman lying beside the tracks. The corpse, clothed in a red kurta and a violet and grey Puma jacket, was taken to a local morgue, where a postmortem report classified the death as a homicide.
The unidentified body was “a female aged about 21 to 25 years”, according to the postmortem, which described “dried blood present” in the nostrils, and the “tongue found clenched between upper and lower jaw, two upper teeth found missing, lips found bruised”. There was a crescent of scratches on the young woman’s face, as if gouged by the fingernails of a hand forcefully clamped over her mouth. “In our opinion,” the handwritten report concluded, “[the] deceased died of asphyxia (violent asphyxia) as a result of smothering.”
Three weeks later, a retired schoolteacher, Mehtab Singh Damor, identified the body as his 19-year-old daughter Namrata Damor – who had been studying medicine at the Mahatma Gandhi Medical College in Indore before she suddenly vanished one morning in early January 2012. Damor demanded an investigation to find his daughter’s killer, but the police dismissed the findings of the initial postmortem, and labelled her death a suicide.
The case was closed – until this July, more than three years later, when a 38-year-old television reporter named Akshay Singh travelled from Delhi to the small Madhya Pradesh town of Meghnagar to interview Namrata’s father. Singh thought that Namrata’s mysterious death might be connected to an extraordinary public scandal, known as the Vyapam scam, which had roiled the highest echelons of the government of Madhya Pradesh.
For at least five years, thousands of young men and women had paid bribes worth millions of pounds in total to a network of fixers and political operatives to rig the official examinations run by the Madhya Pradesh Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal – known as Vyapam – a state body that conducted standardised tests for thousands of highly coveted government jobs and admissions to state-run medical colleges. When the scandal first came to light in 2013, it threatened to paralyse the entire machinery of the state administration: thousands of jobs appeared to have been obtained by fraudulent means, medical schools were tainted by the spectre of corrupt admissions, and dozens of officials were implicated in helping friends and relatives to cheat the exams.
A fevered investigation began, and hundreds of arrests were made
A fevered investigation began, and hundreds of arrests were made. But Singh suspected that the unsolved murder of Namrata Damor – and the baffling insistence of the police that she had flung herself from a moving train – might be part of a massive cover-up, intended to protect senior political figures, all the way up to the powerful chief minister of Madhya Pradesh.
By the time Singh came to interview Mehtab Singh Damor, the Vyapam scam had begun to seem like something more deadly than an unusually large bribery scandal. Since 2010, more than 40 doctors, medical students, policemen and civil servants with links to the Vyapam scam had died in mysterious circumstances.
The state government, under relentless pressure from its political opponents, insisted that none of the dead had been murdered – the media, they contended, had simply stitched together a series of unconnected natural deaths. “Whoever is born has to die one day,” the state’s home minister, Babulal Gaur, said in a memorable TV interview, citing Hindu scripture. “This is the mrityu lok” – the realm of death.
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When Akshay Singh arrived at the Damor home, Namrata’s father sat him down on a heavy wooden armchair in his living room, silenced the television, and handed over a well-thumbed file stuffed with photocopies of petitions, police reports, and court papers. Tea arrived on a tray; Singh picked up a cup and turned his attention to Namrata’s postmortem report and the coroner’s feathery scrawl.
As he sipped his tea, Singh turned as if to ask a question, but his face froze, his left arm shivered, his open mouth gasped for air, tiny bubbles of spittle formed on his lips before he collapsed in his chair, the dead woman’s case file motionless in his lap.
“We lay him down on the floor, loosened his clothes and sprinkled his face with water,” recalled Rahul Kariaya, an Indore-based journalist who took Singh to Damor’s house, “I checked his pulse and I knew right away, Akshay Singh was dead.”
* * *
Within hours of Singh’s death, the long-simmering Vyapam scandal exploded from the inside pages of newspapers on to primetime television. It soon emerged that the Madhya Pradesh police had ended their investigation into Namrata Damor’s death on the basis of a second postmortem report, prepared by a doctor who later admitted that he had not examined the body and had based his findings solely on photographs provided by the police. Namrata Damor, according to this postmortem, had killed herself because of a failed relationship.
“I want everyone across the country to ask themselves one question,” the country’s most bombastic TV news presenter, Arnab Goswami, bellowed one night in July, waving copies of both postmortem reports on his popular nightly programme. “How does a postmortem come to the conclusion, [without] using any evidence, that the ‘victim is disappointed in love and has caused annoyance of her parents?’”
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The Vyapam scandal began as an old-fashioned scam in a country with a long and storied history of corruption. Officials at the testing agency, along with their political backers and a network of fixers and touts, had charged preposterous sums of money to guarantee candidates either a government job or admission to a state medical college by fixing the results of the entrance examinations. Cheating of this sort was not a new phenomenon – but the enormous scale of the racket, the involvement of top government officials and medical colleges, and the alleged murder of suspects made the Vyapam scam into an explosive political controversy. The four-week long summer session of the Indian parliament in 2015 was completely paralysed by demands from the opposition Congress party for the resignation of Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister of Madhya Pradesh.
When the scandal first became public in 2013, the Madhya Pradesh government assembled a special taskforce of state police officers to investigate the allegations. It moved quickly, sweeping up everyone from individual students and their parents to the chief minister’s personal secretary. By the time of Singh’s sudden death in July 2015, the taskforce had already arrested an astonishing 2,235 people – of whom 1,860 were released on bail after questioning.
The list of top state officials placed under arrest reads like the telephone directory of the Madhya Pradesh secretariat. The most senior minister in the state government, Laxmikant Sharma – who had held the health, education and mining portfolios – was jailed, and remains in custody, along with his former aide, Sudhir Sharma, a former schoolteacher who parlayed his political connections into a vast mining fortune. Another minister, Gulab Singh Kirar, simply disappeared rather than face questioning from the police. (Many of those accused have protested their innocence, but it may take years for the prosecution to secure any convictions.)
Among those detained by the taskforce were half a dozen aides to top state ministers – but from the start, opposition parties insisted that the probe was an elaborate charade, intended to convey a sense of urgency to the public while protecting the chief minister. The preponderance of aides among the arrested fuelled speculation that underlings had been forced to fall on their swords to protect their bosses.
And then, as the investigation widened, people started dying. Some had perished before the taskforce had a chance to interrogate them – such as Anuj Uieke, a medical student accused of working as a middleman connecting exam aspirants and Vyapam officials. He died along with two friends also accused of involvement in the scam when a truck ploughed into their car in 2010. Others apparently took their own lives, like Dr Ramendra Singh Bhadouriya, who was accused of cheating his way to a medical college seat in 2008 and then helping others do the same. He was found hanging from the ceiling fan in his home in January 2015. (Five days later, his mother took her own life by drinking acid.) Another suspect, Narendra Tomar – a seemingly healthy 29-year-old veterinary doctor at a government hospital, who had been arrested for his role as a middleman in the scam – had a sudden heart attack in jail this June and died in hospital the next day.
In July 2014, the dean of a medical college in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, Dr SK Sakalle – who was not implicated in the scandal, but had reportedly investigated fraudulent medical admissions and expelled students accused of obtaining their seats by cheating – was found burned to death on the front lawn of his own home. The police initially maintained that Sakelle had doused himself in kerosene and set himself alight; an unusual means of suicide for a doctor with easy access to a wide range of toxins. But they were forced to reopen their investigation one year later, when Sakelle’s colleague and close friend, Dr Arun Sharma, who took over as dean of the medical college, was found dead in a Delhi hotel alongside a half-empty bottle of whisky and a strip of anti-depressant pills.
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In March of this year, Shailesh Yadav, the 50-year-old son of the governor of Madhya Pradesh – the formal head of state government, appointed by the president of India – died of a suspected brain haemorrhage in his family home. Both the governor and his son were implicated in the scam.
Each new death brought a flurry of headlines, and increasingly excited speculation about conspiracies and cover-ups. “Who is killing all these people?” the TV presenter Goswami demanded on air one night – inviting viewers to tag their tweets on the story with #KillingAScam.
Through it all, the government of Madhya Pradesh insisted that the series of deaths was nothing more than a coincidence – a conspiracy theory cooked up by its political opponents – and that the state police taskforce was conducting an exemplary investigation of the scandal. But the death of Akshay Singh, which brought the national spotlight on to the case, forced the government to ask for a probe by the notionally autonomous Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). In an interview with the Indian Express newspaper, Chouhan, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, said he was satisfied by the state police investigation, but agreed to a CBI investigation to clear “an atmosphere of falsehood” that “would have eventually affected the wellbeing of the state”.
When I arrived in the state capital, Bhopal, a beautiful city of lakes, greenery, and double-storey buildings, at the end of July, the local press had coined a cruel pun on the chief minister’s first name. Rather than Shivraj – after the Hindu god Shiva – they were calling him Shavraj, or King of the Corpses.
* * *
In 2013, the year the scam was first revealed, two million young people in Madhya Pradesh – a state the size of Poland, with a population greater than the UK – sat for 27 different examinations conducted by Vyapam. Many of these exams are intensely competitive. In 2013, the prestigious Pre-Medical Test (PMT), which determines admission to medical school, had 40,086 applicants competing for just 1,659 seats; the unfortunately named Drug Inspector Recruitment Test (DIRT), had 9,982 candidates striving for 16 vacancies in the state department of public health.
For most applicants, the likelihood of attaining even low-ranking government jobs, with their promise of long-term employment and state pensions, is incredibly remote. In 2013, almost 450,000 young men and women took the exam to become one of the 7,276 police constables recruited that year – a post with a starting salary of 9,300 rupees (£91) per month. Another 270,000 appeared for the recruitment examination to fill slightly more than 2,000 positions at the lowest rank in the state forest service.
It was on the morning of the medical exam in 2013 that the Vyapam scandal began to unravel. A team of policemen raided the Hotel Pathik, a seedy £5-a-night motel on the outskirts of Indore, the largest city in Madhya Pradesh.
In room 13, the police came upon a young man readying himself for that morning’s exam. He handed over a voter identity card, introducing himself as exam candidate Rishikesh Tyagi, but when the police asked him his father’s name and his date of birth, he said he could not remember.
“On doing strict interrogation,” a police report of the incident reads, “he told his correct name as Ramashankar … he told us he came to give the examination in the name of Rishikesh Tyagi.”
Ramashankar, the police alleged, was already studying medicine in Uttar Pradesh, and had accepted 50,000 rupees (£500) to take the exam on behalf of Rishikesh Tyagi. Twenty such impostors were arrested that morning, 18 of whom had come from out of town to impersonate young students who felt they could not pass the entrance exams themselves.
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The impersonators led the police to Jagdish Sagar, a crooked Indore doctor who had set up a lucrative business that charged up to 200,000 rupees (£2,000) to arrange for intelligent but financially needy medical students to sit examinations on behalf of applicants who could afford to pay. Police claimed that Sagar had amassed a fortune in land, luxury cars, and jewellery from the racket: according to a report in the Hindustan Times (headline: “Vintage Wine, Bed of Cash”), he slept on a mattress stuffed with 1,300,000 rupees. But Sagar, one policeman told me, was only the most prominent of a swarm of middlemen who offered similar services.
Standardised testing in India is a heroic and misguided attempt to compensate, over three short hours, for a young lifetime’s worth of inequities of caste, class, gender, language, region and religion, and the crushing inadequacy of the state-run schooling system. It is the only consideration for achieving college admissions or government employment. Nothing else matters – not your grades over 12 years of school, nor any hobbies, interests or transformative life experiences.
The competition is so intense, and India’s schools so poor that, according to the National Statistics and Sampling Office, a quarter of all students in India are enrolled in tuition centres. In some states, that figure is as high as 90%. The private tuition industry grew 35% over a five-year period from 2008 to 2013, as reported in a 2013 survey by the Indian Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and is expected to be worth around £27bn by 2015.
This fevered demand for after-school classes has turned tuition centres into well-known brands – represented by star students who have secured the highest test results, whose bespectacled and slightly woebegone faces are plastered, like football stars, on billboards along rural highways, crowded railway stations, dusty bus stands, and outside schools and colleges.
The tuition industry has taken over entire towns, such as Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh, where students come from across the country to sleep in cramped hostels, subsisting on fried snacks and shuttling from coaching centre to coaching centre under the tutelage of “celebrity” teachers. While established centres advertise “world-class” facilities and faculties, less well-known institutes offer tales of improbable success, such as the poster I saw in Kanpur for a centre called The New Tech Education, featuring four young women in hijab and celebrating a “Miracle in the history of pre medical institute, all the 4 sisters of middle class family became doctor.”
The explosion of tuition centres, and the scarcity of jobs, has only intensified the desperation to grasp the tiny number of university places and jobs that are made available each year. “The impostor system has its roots in the world of the tuition centres,” I was told by a medical student who I met at his college hostel in Gorakhpur, in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh, where Sagar had recruited most of his fraudulent candidates. “Centres conduct weekly exams and post the results on their bulletin boards, which makes it easy for touts to spot both – bright students who can work as impostors, and weak students looking to cheat their tests,” he said.
Once I started doing well in my tests, touts started calling, promising me 100,000 rupees for two days’ work
“Once I started doing well in my tests, touts started calling me every week promising me 100,000 rupees (£1,000) for two days’ work. He said, I’d be flown to an examination centre, put up in a five-star hotel, and flown back to home – all I had to do was solve a paper.” My source said he had declined their overtures – but one of his classmates did not, and is now in jail in a Vyapam-related case.
Beginning in the late 1990s, investigators allege, Sagar and his out-of-town impostors helped hundreds of students cheat the medical exams. But eventually Sagar’s ambitions widened, and he turned to a man called Nitin Mohindra.
* * *
Nitin Mohindra is a short, pudgy man with a receding hairline, descending paunch, and lampshade moustache, who joined Vyapam in 1986 at the age of 21 as a data entry operator. By the time he met Jagdish Sagar, he had risen through the ranks to become the agency’s principal systems analyst, without ever drawing much attention to himself.
His colleagues recalled that he had only twice been the subject of any office gossip – both times for arriving at work in slightly flashy new cars: a Honda City in 2008, and Renault Duster SUV a few years later. “And he wore very nice shirts,” one colleague told me. “Nothing fancy, but you could tell that the material was just better quality than everyone else’s shirts.”
In 2009, police claim, Sagar and Mohindra had a meeting in Sagar’s car in Bhopal’s New Market bazaar, where the doctor made an unusual proposition: he would give Mohindra the application forms of groups of test-takers, and Mohindra would alter their “roll numbers” to ensure they were seated together so they could cheat from each other. According to Mohindra’s statement to the police, Sagar “offered to pay me 25,000 rupees (£250) for each roll number I changed.”
This came to be known as the “engine-bogie” system. The “engine” would be one of Sagar’s impostors – a bright student from a medical college, taking the exam on behalf of a paying customer – who would also pull along the lower-paying clients sitting next to him by supplying them with answers.
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Vyapam officials showed me seating plans from examination centres to illustrate how Mohindra ensured that engines and bogies not only sat together, but were allotted seats in the last few benches in each examination room – far from the moderator – to make it easier for them to cheat. From 2009 to 2013, the police claim, Mohindra tampered with seating assignment for at least 737 of Sagar’s clients taking the state medical exam.
The scam became even more sophisticated in 2011, when the Madhya Pradesh state government appointed Pankaj Trivedi, a lecturer at a government college in Indore, as the controller of examinations at Vyapam – responsible for ensuring the security of the testing process. According to the police, Trivedi, who is now in jail, came under pressure from influential state ministers and officials to provide jobs and admissions for their relatives and friends. New to the job, Trivedi turned to Mohindra, who devised a solution that was dazzling in its simplicity. Students who had paid to have their results fixed were told to attempt only those questions for which they knew the answers, and leave the rest blank.
“Mohindra hooked all of Vyapam’s computers to a common office network and retained all administrator privileges,” said Tarun Pithode, an energetic young civil servant who was appointed Vyapam’s new director to set things straight after the scam broke. After the multiple-choice exam sheets were scanned, Mohindra could access the computer that stored the results, and alter the answers as he wished.
Once the results had been altered on the computer, Mohindra would approach the exam observers and ask for the original answer sheet, claiming that the student had requested a copy under India’s Right to Information Act. He would then sit in Trivedi’s office and fill out the originals so that they tallied with the altered version saved on the computer
The most glaring example of this method was discovered in the case of Anita Prasad, a daughter of Prem Chand Prasad, the personal secretary to Chief Minister Chouhan. She had passed the PMT exam in 2012 with the assistance of Trivedi and Mohindra – but failed to follow their instructions, and attempted to answer all of the questions, many of them incorrectly. When police investigators later obtained a copy of her original answer sheet, they found that Vyapam officials had used correction fluid to blank out her wrong answers and pencil in the correct ones instead.
“In our review, we found almost every system had been subverted,” Pithode said. “For example, every question paper set has an ‘answer key’ that is put into a self-sealing envelope before the exam and opened only at the time of tabulating results. Trivedi would seal the envelope in the presence of observers, but later would simply tear open the envelope, make copies of the key, and put the original document into a new envelope.”
Over the course of only two years, police allege, Mohindra and Trivedi conspired to fix the results of 13 different examinations – for doctors, food inspectors, transport constables, police constables and police sub-inspectors, two different kinds of school teachers, dairy supply officers and forest guards – which had been taken by a total of 3.2 million students.
Amidst this tangle of impostors, engine-bogies and altered answer sheets, the police soon found a spreadsheet on Nitin Mohindra’s hard drive that listed the names of hundreds of students who had paid to cheat the exams – along with the names of the minister, bureaucrat or fixer who had referred the student to Mohindra and the agreed payment.
The list included political heavyweights such as Uma Bharati, a former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh who is now the water minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet – and a longtime rival of Shivraj Singh Chouhan.
With the police in possession of Mohindra’s spreadsheet and a ready list of suspects, the case seemed to be heading to a speedy closure. But in February this year, the opposition Congress party – which had been demanding for months that Chouhan resign over the scam – made a startling claim. The police taskforce, they alleged, had tampered with the spreadsheet of conspirators to remove the name of the chief minister and replace it with the names of his rivals. The changes were made in “at least 48 places”, the Congress leader Digvijaya Singh – another former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh – claimed when we met in his office in New Delhi. “The chief minister’s name was either removed all together, or replaced with the name of Uma Bharati.”
* * *
The Central Bureau of Investigationtook over the case in July of this year. But there is little reason to believe that its findings will resolve the scandal. In 2013, India’s Supreme Court famously described the country’s premier investigating agency as a “caged parrot” for its susceptibility to political pressure from the reigning central government. And while the investigation drags on, it has been further muddied by an elaborate and increasingly impenetrable series of allegations and counter-allegations between the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress over the veracity of the evidence seized from Mohindra’s computer.
Two days after Mohindra’s arrest in 2013, a policeman showed up at the office of Prashant Pandey, a cyber-security expert with pointed sideburns, bouffant hair, a handlebar moustache and a taste for fitted waistcoats.
Pandey is the proprietor of a firm called Techn07. In a detailed resume he sent me after our first meeting, Pandey claimed to have helped the Madhya Pradesh police crack cases involving Islamist terrorists, tax evaders, kidnappings, and political murders – along with the Vyapam investigation. (The head of the Vyapam taskforce did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but state officials and police officers confirmed that Pandey had done work for the Indian Revenue Service and the Vyapam taskforce.)
“The policeman said his seniors had seized a hard drive from a suspect, but the local police station did not have a SATA cable to connect it to their desktop,” Pandey recalled when we met in his lawyer’s office in Delhi. “I gave him a cable, but the policeman wanted to make sure the connector was working and so he plugged it into one of my computers.” Pandey said that once he connected the drive, his computer automatically began to make a mirror image. The policeman had a cup of tea and left.
Two months later, Pandey said, the Vyapam taskforce paid him to install hidden cameras in their interrogation cells in Bhopal. (Pandey showed me a bill, dated March 2014, for a “bullet camera”, a Sony voice recorder, and various accessories, along with copies of cheques from the state finance ministry, to prove he had worked for the government in the past.)
Pandey said that he had worked for the Vyapam taskforce for more than six months – until the relationship soured in June 2014, when the Congress party released phone records alleging that Sadhna Singh, the wife of Shivraj Singh Chouhan, had made 139 calls from the chief minister’s residence to the ringleaders of the scam, Nitin Mohindra and Pankaj Trivedi. (The chief minister dismissed the allegations as a fabrication, and the matter was never investigated by the police.)
The police arrested Pandey, and jailed him on charges of trying to sell confidential phone records. His computers were seized, he said, and he was interrogated for three days. “All they asked me was, ‘What do you know about the chief minister and Vyapam.’” He was released on bail, but claims he was picked up again in the middle of the night, and taken to a safe house for further interrogation. “They said, you give anyone any more information and you are finished,” he told me.
I decided to fight back and expose all these corrupt officials. I realised that the police had doctored the evidence
“I decided to fight back and expose all these corrupt officials,” Pandey continued. “I realised that I had a mirror image of Nitin Mohindra’s hard drive, and on comparing the Excel sheet submitted by the police in court, and the Excel sheet from my copy of Mohindra’s hard drive, I realised that the police had doctored the evidence to save the chief minister.” Through his lawyer, Pandey leaked the information to the Congress leader Digvijaya Singh, who released it to the public.
The state government insists that it is Pandey – and the Congress party – who have tampered with the evidence. The Madhya Pradesh police submitted Mohindra’s hard drive to a government forensic laboratory in Gujarat, which certified the authenticity of their version of the document. Pandey’s lawyers, on the other hand, submitted his copy of the spreadsheet to a well-regarded private forensic lab in Bangalore, which verified that his was the original copy. So the BJP-led government has its own version of the evidence, and the Congress opposition has another – a neat parable for the general condition of Indian political debate. It will fall to the Supreme Court (and perhaps yet another forensic lab) to decide whose report to believe.
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In the meantime, Mohindra’s lawyer, Ehtesham Qureshi, has seized on the controversy to insist that the case against his client has been fabricated. “If the police have altered the Excel sheet in my client’s hard drive,” Qureshi told me, “how can we trust any of the supposed evidence seized from his computer?” The police, he alleges, have kept Mohindra in jail for two years by filing a succession of cases against him, one each 90 days, to prevent him from becoming eligible for bail. “My client, who is a poor, middle-class person, is being made a scapegoat to protect the wealthy and powerful,” Qureshi said. “They are going to keep him in forever, because if he gets out and starts speaking, who knows what will happen.”
* * *
When I met Rajendra Shukla, Madhya Pradesh’s minister for public relations, power and electricity, and mines and minerals – the man with the unenviable task of managing the fallout from the Vyapam scam – he calmly insisted that the massive scale of the multiple ongoing investigations was proof that the state government had nothing to hide.
“Several senior people have been arrested in connection with this case,” Shukla told me one evening at his residence in Bhopal. “This means no one is being shielded and the probe has been conducted in a fair way.” He declared that the chief minister was completely innocent, and added – very plausibly – that “if senior people had not been arrested, the opposition would have said this is a cover up.”
But what of the deaths? “Please read this booklet,” Shukla said, reaching for a glossy pamphlet titled Vyapam: Propaganda and Reality. “It should answer most of your questions.”
The 23-page booklet, which the state government has distributed widely in Madhya Pradesh and Delhi, praises Chouhan’s administration for its swift and decisive action in appointing a police taskforce to investigate the case, and reviews each fatality alleged to be connected to Vyapam in succinct paragraphs, nearly all of which end with some variation on the following phrase: “The family has not expressed any doubt about his death so far.”
The booklet considers the deaths of 31 people: 11 died in road accidents, five allegedly committed suicide, two drowned in ponds, and three lost their lives to “excessive liquor consumption” – all of which have come under suspicion precisely because of the apparent reluctance of the state police to investigate any of the deaths allegedly connected to the scandal. Shukla and his government, however, insist that all these deaths, while tragic, have no connection to the Vyapam scandal to begin with.
Namrata Damor, the young woman found dead on the railway tracks in 2012, is not mentioned in the government’s list of deaths allegedly linked to Vyapam. When I met her father Mehtab, however, he also insisted that his daughter had no connection to the scam.
But why would anyone want to kill his daughter? “She fell into bad company,” he said, “When a young girl from a small town like Meghnagar goes to a city like Indore, there are always people who could prey on her.”
Yet after our meeting, I spoke to Rahul Karaiya, the local journalist who had gone to interview Damor with the television reporter Akshay Singh shortly before Singh’s death – which remains unsolved. Karaiya sent me a video clip from a “sting operation” that had been conducted by a local TV station four years earlier.
The clip, from 2011 – prior to Damor’s death – records Gaurav Patni, who identifies himself as a fourth-year student at a city medical college, speaking with a reporter on the assumption that his camera was off. Patni claims that he is planning to get out of the business of fixing Vyapam exams because of the increasing difficulty in getting people through and collecting their payments.
“Last year we got only two students through, I’ll even tell you the names,” he says, “One is a girl from Indore, Namrata Damor … You can ask around, they haven’t even paid as yet.”
Was Namrata killed because she did not, or could not, pay whoever had rigged her exam? Her father, understandably, refused to entertain such speculation. He said the police, who had left him waiting years for any news in his daughter’s death, were now floating wild theories to cover up their own incompetence.
The police aren’t the only ones floating theories. The scandal was so vast that almost everyone I met in Madhya Pradesh knew someone connected to it – and it quickly became clear that Vyapam had become the stuff of myth and legend: everyone had a theory, and no scenario was too implausible to entertain.
In an interview with the Hindustan Times earlier this year, a policeman, whose own son was accused in the scam and died in a road accident, advanced an unlikely yet tantalising theory. He argued that the Vyapam taskforce – under pressure to conduct a credible probe that nevertheless absolved top government officials – had falsely named suspects who were already deceased in order to shield the real culprits.
A competing theory, voiced by journalists covering the scandal in Bhopal, proposes that it will be all but impossible to determine whether the deaths are connected to Vyapam, because the families of many of the dead refuse to admit that their children paid money to cheat on their exams – for fear that the police might arrest the bereaved parents as well.
All this suggests that it is unlikely that the truth behind the Vyapam deaths will ever be established. Rather than a simple scam, Vyapam appears to be a vast societal swindle – one that reveals the hollowness at the heart of practically every Indian state institution: inadequate schools, a crushing shortage of meaningful jobs, a corrupt government, a cynical middle class happy to cheat the system to aid their own children, a compromised and inept police force and a judiciary incapable of enforcing its laws.
* * *
While the investigation goes nowhere, some of the hundreds of students implicated in the scam have begun to feel like its victims. In Indore, I met a young man who I’ll call Ishan. The son of an impoverished lower-caste family in rural western Madhya Pradesh, neither of his parents can read or write. After moving to Indore in 2007, he spent four years at a series of tuition centres preparing for the medical exam, which he finally passed in 2011. Two years later, when he was a student at medical college, he was swept up in the Vyapam investigation and accused of serving as an agent for one of Jagdish Sagar’s impostors.
“Students preparing for their exams would often approach me for advice,” Ishan told me. “One day a boy asked me for a phone number for a doctor known to Jagdish Sagar. I gave the number because the doctor was our senior from medical school.” Ishan’s friend cleared the exam, was picked up by the police, and mentioned Ishan’s name in the interrogation.
Six years of my life are wasted, my dream of becoming a doctor over. It will take the rest of my life to clear my name
“Now the police claim I am a middleman in the Vyapam scam,” he said, “I spent three months in jail before I was granted bail. My college admission has been cancelled, six years of my life are wasted, and my dream of becoming a doctor is over. I know I will be exonerated, the police have no evidence against me, but it will take the rest of my life to clear my name. Now tell me, why shouldn’t someone in my place commit suicide?”
At a lawyer’s office in Bhopal, I heard a similar tale from a man who had come to help secure bail for his brother, another accused in the scam.
“My brother was arrested four months ago for paying someone to ensure he cleared the police constable exam in 2012,” the man told me. “Some people in our village said, ‘This is Madhya Pradesh, nothing happens without money.’ My brother sold his land and paid them 600,000 rupees.”
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In August that year, he was one of 403,253 people who appeared for the recruitment test to become a police constable. When he passed it was clear to everyone that he had a bright future ahead of him – and so he was soon married off. Four months after his marriage, his name popped up in the scam, he lost his job and he was hauled off to prison.
“So now my brother has a wife and his first child, but no job, no land, no money, no prospects and a court case to fight,” the man said. “You can write your story, but write that this is a state of 75 million corrupt people, where there is nothing in the villages and if a man comes to the city in search of an honest day’s work, the politicians and their touts demand money and then throw him into jail for paying.”
It seemed plausible that some of Vyapam deaths really were suicides – that people did hang themselves, jump off trains, and drink themselves to death rather than meeting their demise at the hands of mysterious assassins. Many of the accused had, at great personal expense, through fraud or perseverance, succeeded in overcoming a system designed to reward a microscopic minority with the lifelong privilege of permanent employment, only to see their rewards snatched away after the fact. But these deaths were not “unrelated to Vyapam”, as the government kept insisting. Rather, they seemed a consequence of the prevailing corruption common to both the scandal and and investigation that shows no sign of ever concluding.
“A scam like this is going to take years to investigate,” a lawyer representing several of the thousands of accused told me. “The CBI just doesn’t have the manpower to investigate so many deaths and arrests. When the CBI took the case from the police, they literally sent a truck to gather all the documents.”
So the case, in all likelihood, will ultimately collapse into a giant, disorganised pile of court hearings and paperwork. Memories of the dead will fade away, while the living spend the rest of their lives appearing in court to defend themselves from the accusation that they once cheated on their exams.
* * *
On 9 October this year, the Supreme Court reviewed the progress of the Vyapam case with some satisfaction, noting that the mysterious deaths had suddenly ceased since the investigation was taken away from the Madhya Pradesh police and handed to the CBI.
“I was wondering that from the time the court had ordered the CBI probe into the case and decided to monitor the investigations,” the chief justice, HL Dattu, asked, “how come not a single death has been reported?”
One week later, the driver of a train en route to Bhopal spotted a corpse on the tracks. The body was later identified as Vijay Bahadur, a retired Madhya Pradesh bureaucrat, who had served as an observer for at least two Vyapam exams. His wife, who had been travelling with him, told the police that Bahadur had stepped out of their train compartment and into the corridor to shut the door of their carriage, and never returned. The CBI has now added Bahadur to the list of suspected Vyapam-related fatalities – and begun an investigation into his death.
On the night of 7 January 2012, a stationmaster at a provincial railway station in central India discovered the body of a young woman lying beside the tracks. The corpse, clothed in a red kurta and a violet and grey Puma jacket, was taken to a local morgue, where a postmortem report classified the death as a homicide.
The unidentified body was “a female aged about 21 to 25 years”, according to the postmortem, which described “dried blood present” in the nostrils, and the “tongue found clenched between upper and lower jaw, two upper teeth found missing, lips found bruised”. There was a crescent of scratches on the young woman’s face, as if gouged by the fingernails of a hand forcefully clamped over her mouth. “In our opinion,” the handwritten report concluded, “[the] deceased died of asphyxia (violent asphyxia) as a result of smothering.”
Three weeks later, a retired schoolteacher, Mehtab Singh Damor, identified the body as his 19-year-old daughter Namrata Damor – who had been studying medicine at the Mahatma Gandhi Medical College in Indore before she suddenly vanished one morning in early January 2012. Damor demanded an investigation to find his daughter’s killer, but the police dismissed the findings of the initial postmortem, and labelled her death a suicide.
The case was closed – until this July, more than three years later, when a 38-year-old television reporter named Akshay Singh travelled from Delhi to the small Madhya Pradesh town of Meghnagar to interview Namrata’s father. Singh thought that Namrata’s mysterious death might be connected to an extraordinary public scandal, known as the Vyapam scam, which had roiled the highest echelons of the government of Madhya Pradesh.
For at least five years, thousands of young men and women had paid bribes worth millions of pounds in total to a network of fixers and political operatives to rig the official examinations run by the Madhya Pradesh Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal – known as Vyapam – a state body that conducted standardised tests for thousands of highly coveted government jobs and admissions to state-run medical colleges. When the scandal first came to light in 2013, it threatened to paralyse the entire machinery of the state administration: thousands of jobs appeared to have been obtained by fraudulent means, medical schools were tainted by the spectre of corrupt admissions, and dozens of officials were implicated in helping friends and relatives to cheat the exams.
A fevered investigation began, and hundreds of arrests were made
A fevered investigation began, and hundreds of arrests were made. But Singh suspected that the unsolved murder of Namrata Damor – and the baffling insistence of the police that she had flung herself from a moving train – might be part of a massive cover-up, intended to protect senior political figures, all the way up to the powerful chief minister of Madhya Pradesh.
By the time Singh came to interview Mehtab Singh Damor, the Vyapam scam had begun to seem like something more deadly than an unusually large bribery scandal. Since 2010, more than 40 doctors, medical students, policemen and civil servants with links to the Vyapam scam had died in mysterious circumstances.
The state government, under relentless pressure from its political opponents, insisted that none of the dead had been murdered – the media, they contended, had simply stitched together a series of unconnected natural deaths. “Whoever is born has to die one day,” the state’s home minister, Babulal Gaur, said in a memorable TV interview, citing Hindu scripture. “This is the mrityu lok” – the realm of death.
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When Akshay Singh arrived at the Damor home, Namrata’s father sat him down on a heavy wooden armchair in his living room, silenced the television, and handed over a well-thumbed file stuffed with photocopies of petitions, police reports, and court papers. Tea arrived on a tray; Singh picked up a cup and turned his attention to Namrata’s postmortem report and the coroner’s feathery scrawl.
As he sipped his tea, Singh turned as if to ask a question, but his face froze, his left arm shivered, his open mouth gasped for air, tiny bubbles of spittle formed on his lips before he collapsed in his chair, the dead woman’s case file motionless in his lap.
“We lay him down on the floor, loosened his clothes and sprinkled his face with water,” recalled Rahul Kariaya, an Indore-based journalist who took Singh to Damor’s house, “I checked his pulse and I knew right away, Akshay Singh was dead.”
* * *
Within hours of Singh’s death, the long-simmering Vyapam scandal exploded from the inside pages of newspapers on to primetime television. It soon emerged that the Madhya Pradesh police had ended their investigation into Namrata Damor’s death on the basis of a second postmortem report, prepared by a doctor who later admitted that he had not examined the body and had based his findings solely on photographs provided by the police. Namrata Damor, according to this postmortem, had killed herself because of a failed relationship.
“I want everyone across the country to ask themselves one question,” the country’s most bombastic TV news presenter, Arnab Goswami, bellowed one night in July, waving copies of both postmortem reports on his popular nightly programme. “How does a postmortem come to the conclusion, [without] using any evidence, that the ‘victim is disappointed in love and has caused annoyance of her parents?’”
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The Vyapam scandal began as an old-fashioned scam in a country with a long and storied history of corruption. Officials at the testing agency, along with their political backers and a network of fixers and touts, had charged preposterous sums of money to guarantee candidates either a government job or admission to a state medical college by fixing the results of the entrance examinations. Cheating of this sort was not a new phenomenon – but the enormous scale of the racket, the involvement of top government officials and medical colleges, and the alleged murder of suspects made the Vyapam scam into an explosive political controversy. The four-week long summer session of the Indian parliament in 2015 was completely paralysed by demands from the opposition Congress party for the resignation of Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister of Madhya Pradesh.
When the scandal first became public in 2013, the Madhya Pradesh government assembled a special taskforce of state police officers to investigate the allegations. It moved quickly, sweeping up everyone from individual students and their parents to the chief minister’s personal secretary. By the time of Singh’s sudden death in July 2015, the taskforce had already arrested an astonishing 2,235 people – of whom 1,860 were released on bail after questioning.
The list of top state officials placed under arrest reads like the telephone directory of the Madhya Pradesh secretariat. The most senior minister in the state government, Laxmikant Sharma – who had held the health, education and mining portfolios – was jailed, and remains in custody, along with his former aide, Sudhir Sharma, a former schoolteacher who parlayed his political connections into a vast mining fortune. Another minister, Gulab Singh Kirar, simply disappeared rather than face questioning from the police. (Many of those accused have protested their innocence, but it may take years for the prosecution to secure any convictions.)
Among those detained by the taskforce were half a dozen aides to top state ministers – but from the start, opposition parties insisted that the probe was an elaborate charade, intended to convey a sense of urgency to the public while protecting the chief minister. The preponderance of aides among the arrested fuelled speculation that underlings had been forced to fall on their swords to protect their bosses.
And then, as the investigation widened, people started dying. Some had perished before the taskforce had a chance to interrogate them – such as Anuj Uieke, a medical student accused of working as a middleman connecting exam aspirants and Vyapam officials. He died along with two friends also accused of involvement in the scam when a truck ploughed into their car in 2010. Others apparently took their own lives, like Dr Ramendra Singh Bhadouriya, who was accused of cheating his way to a medical college seat in 2008 and then helping others do the same. He was found hanging from the ceiling fan in his home in January 2015. (Five days later, his mother took her own life by drinking acid.) Another suspect, Narendra Tomar – a seemingly healthy 29-year-old veterinary doctor at a government hospital, who had been arrested for his role as a middleman in the scam – had a sudden heart attack in jail this June and died in hospital the next day.
In July 2014, the dean of a medical college in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, Dr SK Sakalle – who was not implicated in the scandal, but had reportedly investigated fraudulent medical admissions and expelled students accused of obtaining their seats by cheating – was found burned to death on the front lawn of his own home. The police initially maintained that Sakelle had doused himself in kerosene and set himself alight; an unusual means of suicide for a doctor with easy access to a wide range of toxins. But they were forced to reopen their investigation one year later, when Sakelle’s colleague and close friend, Dr Arun Sharma, who took over as dean of the medical college, was found dead in a Delhi hotel alongside a half-empty bottle of whisky and a strip of anti-depressant pills.
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In March of this year, Shailesh Yadav, the 50-year-old son of the governor of Madhya Pradesh – the formal head of state government, appointed by the president of India – died of a suspected brain haemorrhage in his family home. Both the governor and his son were implicated in the scam.
Each new death brought a flurry of headlines, and increasingly excited speculation about conspiracies and cover-ups. “Who is killing all these people?” the TV presenter Goswami demanded on air one night – inviting viewers to tag their tweets on the story with #KillingAScam.
Through it all, the government of Madhya Pradesh insisted that the series of deaths was nothing more than a coincidence – a conspiracy theory cooked up by its political opponents – and that the state police taskforce was conducting an exemplary investigation of the scandal. But the death of Akshay Singh, which brought the national spotlight on to the case, forced the government to ask for a probe by the notionally autonomous Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). In an interview with the Indian Express newspaper, Chouhan, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, said he was satisfied by the state police investigation, but agreed to a CBI investigation to clear “an atmosphere of falsehood” that “would have eventually affected the wellbeing of the state”.
When I arrived in the state capital, Bhopal, a beautiful city of lakes, greenery, and double-storey buildings, at the end of July, the local press had coined a cruel pun on the chief minister’s first name. Rather than Shivraj – after the Hindu god Shiva – they were calling him Shavraj, or King of the Corpses.
* * *
In 2013, the year the scam was first revealed, two million young people in Madhya Pradesh – a state the size of Poland, with a population greater than the UK – sat for 27 different examinations conducted by Vyapam. Many of these exams are intensely competitive. In 2013, the prestigious Pre-Medical Test (PMT), which determines admission to medical school, had 40,086 applicants competing for just 1,659 seats; the unfortunately named Drug Inspector Recruitment Test (DIRT), had 9,982 candidates striving for 16 vacancies in the state department of public health.
For most applicants, the likelihood of attaining even low-ranking government jobs, with their promise of long-term employment and state pensions, is incredibly remote. In 2013, almost 450,000 young men and women took the exam to become one of the 7,276 police constables recruited that year – a post with a starting salary of 9,300 rupees (£91) per month. Another 270,000 appeared for the recruitment examination to fill slightly more than 2,000 positions at the lowest rank in the state forest service.
It was on the morning of the medical exam in 2013 that the Vyapam scandal began to unravel. A team of policemen raided the Hotel Pathik, a seedy £5-a-night motel on the outskirts of Indore, the largest city in Madhya Pradesh.
In room 13, the police came upon a young man readying himself for that morning’s exam. He handed over a voter identity card, introducing himself as exam candidate Rishikesh Tyagi, but when the police asked him his father’s name and his date of birth, he said he could not remember.
“On doing strict interrogation,” a police report of the incident reads, “he told his correct name as Ramashankar … he told us he came to give the examination in the name of Rishikesh Tyagi.”
Ramashankar, the police alleged, was already studying medicine in Uttar Pradesh, and had accepted 50,000 rupees (£500) to take the exam on behalf of Rishikesh Tyagi. Twenty such impostors were arrested that morning, 18 of whom had come from out of town to impersonate young students who felt they could not pass the entrance exams themselves.
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The impersonators led the police to Jagdish Sagar, a crooked Indore doctor who had set up a lucrative business that charged up to 200,000 rupees (£2,000) to arrange for intelligent but financially needy medical students to sit examinations on behalf of applicants who could afford to pay. Police claimed that Sagar had amassed a fortune in land, luxury cars, and jewellery from the racket: according to a report in the Hindustan Times (headline: “Vintage Wine, Bed of Cash”), he slept on a mattress stuffed with 1,300,000 rupees. But Sagar, one policeman told me, was only the most prominent of a swarm of middlemen who offered similar services.
Standardised testing in India is a heroic and misguided attempt to compensate, over three short hours, for a young lifetime’s worth of inequities of caste, class, gender, language, region and religion, and the crushing inadequacy of the state-run schooling system. It is the only consideration for achieving college admissions or government employment. Nothing else matters – not your grades over 12 years of school, nor any hobbies, interests or transformative life experiences.
The competition is so intense, and India’s schools so poor that, according to the National Statistics and Sampling Office, a quarter of all students in India are enrolled in tuition centres. In some states, that figure is as high as 90%. The private tuition industry grew 35% over a five-year period from 2008 to 2013, as reported in a 2013 survey by the Indian Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and is expected to be worth around £27bn by 2015.
This fevered demand for after-school classes has turned tuition centres into well-known brands – represented by star students who have secured the highest test results, whose bespectacled and slightly woebegone faces are plastered, like football stars, on billboards along rural highways, crowded railway stations, dusty bus stands, and outside schools and colleges.
The tuition industry has taken over entire towns, such as Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh, where students come from across the country to sleep in cramped hostels, subsisting on fried snacks and shuttling from coaching centre to coaching centre under the tutelage of “celebrity” teachers. While established centres advertise “world-class” facilities and faculties, less well-known institutes offer tales of improbable success, such as the poster I saw in Kanpur for a centre called The New Tech Education, featuring four young women in hijab and celebrating a “Miracle in the history of pre medical institute, all the 4 sisters of middle class family became doctor.”
The explosion of tuition centres, and the scarcity of jobs, has only intensified the desperation to grasp the tiny number of university places and jobs that are made available each year. “The impostor system has its roots in the world of the tuition centres,” I was told by a medical student who I met at his college hostel in Gorakhpur, in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh, where Sagar had recruited most of his fraudulent candidates. “Centres conduct weekly exams and post the results on their bulletin boards, which makes it easy for touts to spot both – bright students who can work as impostors, and weak students looking to cheat their tests,” he said.
Once I started doing well in my tests, touts started calling, promising me 100,000 rupees for two days’ work
“Once I started doing well in my tests, touts started calling me every week promising me 100,000 rupees (£1,000) for two days’ work. He said, I’d be flown to an examination centre, put up in a five-star hotel, and flown back to home – all I had to do was solve a paper.” My source said he had declined their overtures – but one of his classmates did not, and is now in jail in a Vyapam-related case.
Beginning in the late 1990s, investigators allege, Sagar and his out-of-town impostors helped hundreds of students cheat the medical exams. But eventually Sagar’s ambitions widened, and he turned to a man called Nitin Mohindra.
* * *
Nitin Mohindra is a short, pudgy man with a receding hairline, descending paunch, and lampshade moustache, who joined Vyapam in 1986 at the age of 21 as a data entry operator. By the time he met Jagdish Sagar, he had risen through the ranks to become the agency’s principal systems analyst, without ever drawing much attention to himself.
His colleagues recalled that he had only twice been the subject of any office gossip – both times for arriving at work in slightly flashy new cars: a Honda City in 2008, and Renault Duster SUV a few years later. “And he wore very nice shirts,” one colleague told me. “Nothing fancy, but you could tell that the material was just better quality than everyone else’s shirts.”
In 2009, police claim, Sagar and Mohindra had a meeting in Sagar’s car in Bhopal’s New Market bazaar, where the doctor made an unusual proposition: he would give Mohindra the application forms of groups of test-takers, and Mohindra would alter their “roll numbers” to ensure they were seated together so they could cheat from each other. According to Mohindra’s statement to the police, Sagar “offered to pay me 25,000 rupees (£250) for each roll number I changed.”
This came to be known as the “engine-bogie” system. The “engine” would be one of Sagar’s impostors – a bright student from a medical college, taking the exam on behalf of a paying customer – who would also pull along the lower-paying clients sitting next to him by supplying them with answers.
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Vyapam officials showed me seating plans from examination centres to illustrate how Mohindra ensured that engines and bogies not only sat together, but were allotted seats in the last few benches in each examination room – far from the moderator – to make it easier for them to cheat. From 2009 to 2013, the police claim, Mohindra tampered with seating assignment for at least 737 of Sagar’s clients taking the state medical exam.
The scam became even more sophisticated in 2011, when the Madhya Pradesh state government appointed Pankaj Trivedi, a lecturer at a government college in Indore, as the controller of examinations at Vyapam – responsible for ensuring the security of the testing process. According to the police, Trivedi, who is now in jail, came under pressure from influential state ministers and officials to provide jobs and admissions for their relatives and friends. New to the job, Trivedi turned to Mohindra, who devised a solution that was dazzling in its simplicity. Students who had paid to have their results fixed were told to attempt only those questions for which they knew the answers, and leave the rest blank.
“Mohindra hooked all of Vyapam’s computers to a common office network and retained all administrator privileges,” said Tarun Pithode, an energetic young civil servant who was appointed Vyapam’s new director to set things straight after the scam broke. After the multiple-choice exam sheets were scanned, Mohindra could access the computer that stored the results, and alter the answers as he wished.
Once the results had been altered on the computer, Mohindra would approach the exam observers and ask for the original answer sheet, claiming that the student had requested a copy under India’s Right to Information Act. He would then sit in Trivedi’s office and fill out the originals so that they tallied with the altered version saved on the computer
The most glaring example of this method was discovered in the case of Anita Prasad, a daughter of Prem Chand Prasad, the personal secretary to Chief Minister Chouhan. She had passed the PMT exam in 2012 with the assistance of Trivedi and Mohindra – but failed to follow their instructions, and attempted to answer all of the questions, many of them incorrectly. When police investigators later obtained a copy of her original answer sheet, they found that Vyapam officials had used correction fluid to blank out her wrong answers and pencil in the correct ones instead.
“In our review, we found almost every system had been subverted,” Pithode said. “For example, every question paper set has an ‘answer key’ that is put into a self-sealing envelope before the exam and opened only at the time of tabulating results. Trivedi would seal the envelope in the presence of observers, but later would simply tear open the envelope, make copies of the key, and put the original document into a new envelope.”
Over the course of only two years, police allege, Mohindra and Trivedi conspired to fix the results of 13 different examinations – for doctors, food inspectors, transport constables, police constables and police sub-inspectors, two different kinds of school teachers, dairy supply officers and forest guards – which had been taken by a total of 3.2 million students.
Amidst this tangle of impostors, engine-bogies and altered answer sheets, the police soon found a spreadsheet on Nitin Mohindra’s hard drive that listed the names of hundreds of students who had paid to cheat the exams – along with the names of the minister, bureaucrat or fixer who had referred the student to Mohindra and the agreed payment.
The list included political heavyweights such as Uma Bharati, a former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh who is now the water minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet – and a longtime rival of Shivraj Singh Chouhan.
With the police in possession of Mohindra’s spreadsheet and a ready list of suspects, the case seemed to be heading to a speedy closure. But in February this year, the opposition Congress party – which had been demanding for months that Chouhan resign over the scam – made a startling claim. The police taskforce, they alleged, had tampered with the spreadsheet of conspirators to remove the name of the chief minister and replace it with the names of his rivals. The changes were made in “at least 48 places”, the Congress leader Digvijaya Singh – another former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh – claimed when we met in his office in New Delhi. “The chief minister’s name was either removed all together, or replaced with the name of Uma Bharati.”
* * *
The Central Bureau of Investigationtook over the case in July of this year. But there is little reason to believe that its findings will resolve the scandal. In 2013, India’s Supreme Court famously described the country’s premier investigating agency as a “caged parrot” for its susceptibility to political pressure from the reigning central government. And while the investigation drags on, it has been further muddied by an elaborate and increasingly impenetrable series of allegations and counter-allegations between the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress over the veracity of the evidence seized from Mohindra’s computer.
Two days after Mohindra’s arrest in 2013, a policeman showed up at the office of Prashant Pandey, a cyber-security expert with pointed sideburns, bouffant hair, a handlebar moustache and a taste for fitted waistcoats.
Pandey is the proprietor of a firm called Techn07. In a detailed resume he sent me after our first meeting, Pandey claimed to have helped the Madhya Pradesh police crack cases involving Islamist terrorists, tax evaders, kidnappings, and political murders – along with the Vyapam investigation. (The head of the Vyapam taskforce did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but state officials and police officers confirmed that Pandey had done work for the Indian Revenue Service and the Vyapam taskforce.)
“The policeman said his seniors had seized a hard drive from a suspect, but the local police station did not have a SATA cable to connect it to their desktop,” Pandey recalled when we met in his lawyer’s office in Delhi. “I gave him a cable, but the policeman wanted to make sure the connector was working and so he plugged it into one of my computers.” Pandey said that once he connected the drive, his computer automatically began to make a mirror image. The policeman had a cup of tea and left.
Two months later, Pandey said, the Vyapam taskforce paid him to install hidden cameras in their interrogation cells in Bhopal. (Pandey showed me a bill, dated March 2014, for a “bullet camera”, a Sony voice recorder, and various accessories, along with copies of cheques from the state finance ministry, to prove he had worked for the government in the past.)
Pandey said that he had worked for the Vyapam taskforce for more than six months – until the relationship soured in June 2014, when the Congress party released phone records alleging that Sadhna Singh, the wife of Shivraj Singh Chouhan, had made 139 calls from the chief minister’s residence to the ringleaders of the scam, Nitin Mohindra and Pankaj Trivedi. (The chief minister dismissed the allegations as a fabrication, and the matter was never investigated by the police.)
The police arrested Pandey, and jailed him on charges of trying to sell confidential phone records. His computers were seized, he said, and he was interrogated for three days. “All they asked me was, ‘What do you know about the chief minister and Vyapam.’” He was released on bail, but claims he was picked up again in the middle of the night, and taken to a safe house for further interrogation. “They said, you give anyone any more information and you are finished,” he told me.
I decided to fight back and expose all these corrupt officials. I realised that the police had doctored the evidence
“I decided to fight back and expose all these corrupt officials,” Pandey continued. “I realised that I had a mirror image of Nitin Mohindra’s hard drive, and on comparing the Excel sheet submitted by the police in court, and the Excel sheet from my copy of Mohindra’s hard drive, I realised that the police had doctored the evidence to save the chief minister.” Through his lawyer, Pandey leaked the information to the Congress leader Digvijaya Singh, who released it to the public.
The state government insists that it is Pandey – and the Congress party – who have tampered with the evidence. The Madhya Pradesh police submitted Mohindra’s hard drive to a government forensic laboratory in Gujarat, which certified the authenticity of their version of the document. Pandey’s lawyers, on the other hand, submitted his copy of the spreadsheet to a well-regarded private forensic lab in Bangalore, which verified that his was the original copy. So the BJP-led government has its own version of the evidence, and the Congress opposition has another – a neat parable for the general condition of Indian political debate. It will fall to the Supreme Court (and perhaps yet another forensic lab) to decide whose report to believe.
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In the meantime, Mohindra’s lawyer, Ehtesham Qureshi, has seized on the controversy to insist that the case against his client has been fabricated. “If the police have altered the Excel sheet in my client’s hard drive,” Qureshi told me, “how can we trust any of the supposed evidence seized from his computer?” The police, he alleges, have kept Mohindra in jail for two years by filing a succession of cases against him, one each 90 days, to prevent him from becoming eligible for bail. “My client, who is a poor, middle-class person, is being made a scapegoat to protect the wealthy and powerful,” Qureshi said. “They are going to keep him in forever, because if he gets out and starts speaking, who knows what will happen.”
* * *
When I met Rajendra Shukla, Madhya Pradesh’s minister for public relations, power and electricity, and mines and minerals – the man with the unenviable task of managing the fallout from the Vyapam scam – he calmly insisted that the massive scale of the multiple ongoing investigations was proof that the state government had nothing to hide.
“Several senior people have been arrested in connection with this case,” Shukla told me one evening at his residence in Bhopal. “This means no one is being shielded and the probe has been conducted in a fair way.” He declared that the chief minister was completely innocent, and added – very plausibly – that “if senior people had not been arrested, the opposition would have said this is a cover up.”
But what of the deaths? “Please read this booklet,” Shukla said, reaching for a glossy pamphlet titled Vyapam: Propaganda and Reality. “It should answer most of your questions.”
The 23-page booklet, which the state government has distributed widely in Madhya Pradesh and Delhi, praises Chouhan’s administration for its swift and decisive action in appointing a police taskforce to investigate the case, and reviews each fatality alleged to be connected to Vyapam in succinct paragraphs, nearly all of which end with some variation on the following phrase: “The family has not expressed any doubt about his death so far.”
The booklet considers the deaths of 31 people: 11 died in road accidents, five allegedly committed suicide, two drowned in ponds, and three lost their lives to “excessive liquor consumption” – all of which have come under suspicion precisely because of the apparent reluctance of the state police to investigate any of the deaths allegedly connected to the scandal. Shukla and his government, however, insist that all these deaths, while tragic, have no connection to the Vyapam scandal to begin with.
Namrata Damor, the young woman found dead on the railway tracks in 2012, is not mentioned in the government’s list of deaths allegedly linked to Vyapam. When I met her father Mehtab, however, he also insisted that his daughter had no connection to the scam.
But why would anyone want to kill his daughter? “She fell into bad company,” he said, “When a young girl from a small town like Meghnagar goes to a city like Indore, there are always people who could prey on her.”
Yet after our meeting, I spoke to Rahul Karaiya, the local journalist who had gone to interview Damor with the television reporter Akshay Singh shortly before Singh’s death – which remains unsolved. Karaiya sent me a video clip from a “sting operation” that had been conducted by a local TV station four years earlier.
The clip, from 2011 – prior to Damor’s death – records Gaurav Patni, who identifies himself as a fourth-year student at a city medical college, speaking with a reporter on the assumption that his camera was off. Patni claims that he is planning to get out of the business of fixing Vyapam exams because of the increasing difficulty in getting people through and collecting their payments.
“Last year we got only two students through, I’ll even tell you the names,” he says, “One is a girl from Indore, Namrata Damor … You can ask around, they haven’t even paid as yet.”
Was Namrata killed because she did not, or could not, pay whoever had rigged her exam? Her father, understandably, refused to entertain such speculation. He said the police, who had left him waiting years for any news in his daughter’s death, were now floating wild theories to cover up their own incompetence.
The police aren’t the only ones floating theories. The scandal was so vast that almost everyone I met in Madhya Pradesh knew someone connected to it – and it quickly became clear that Vyapam had become the stuff of myth and legend: everyone had a theory, and no scenario was too implausible to entertain.
In an interview with the Hindustan Times earlier this year, a policeman, whose own son was accused in the scam and died in a road accident, advanced an unlikely yet tantalising theory. He argued that the Vyapam taskforce – under pressure to conduct a credible probe that nevertheless absolved top government officials – had falsely named suspects who were already deceased in order to shield the real culprits.
A competing theory, voiced by journalists covering the scandal in Bhopal, proposes that it will be all but impossible to determine whether the deaths are connected to Vyapam, because the families of many of the dead refuse to admit that their children paid money to cheat on their exams – for fear that the police might arrest the bereaved parents as well.
All this suggests that it is unlikely that the truth behind the Vyapam deaths will ever be established. Rather than a simple scam, Vyapam appears to be a vast societal swindle – one that reveals the hollowness at the heart of practically every Indian state institution: inadequate schools, a crushing shortage of meaningful jobs, a corrupt government, a cynical middle class happy to cheat the system to aid their own children, a compromised and inept police force and a judiciary incapable of enforcing its laws.
* * *
While the investigation goes nowhere, some of the hundreds of students implicated in the scam have begun to feel like its victims. In Indore, I met a young man who I’ll call Ishan. The son of an impoverished lower-caste family in rural western Madhya Pradesh, neither of his parents can read or write. After moving to Indore in 2007, he spent four years at a series of tuition centres preparing for the medical exam, which he finally passed in 2011. Two years later, when he was a student at medical college, he was swept up in the Vyapam investigation and accused of serving as an agent for one of Jagdish Sagar’s impostors.
“Students preparing for their exams would often approach me for advice,” Ishan told me. “One day a boy asked me for a phone number for a doctor known to Jagdish Sagar. I gave the number because the doctor was our senior from medical school.” Ishan’s friend cleared the exam, was picked up by the police, and mentioned Ishan’s name in the interrogation.
Six years of my life are wasted, my dream of becoming a doctor over. It will take the rest of my life to clear my name
“Now the police claim I am a middleman in the Vyapam scam,” he said, “I spent three months in jail before I was granted bail. My college admission has been cancelled, six years of my life are wasted, and my dream of becoming a doctor is over. I know I will be exonerated, the police have no evidence against me, but it will take the rest of my life to clear my name. Now tell me, why shouldn’t someone in my place commit suicide?”
At a lawyer’s office in Bhopal, I heard a similar tale from a man who had come to help secure bail for his brother, another accused in the scam.
“My brother was arrested four months ago for paying someone to ensure he cleared the police constable exam in 2012,” the man told me. “Some people in our village said, ‘This is Madhya Pradesh, nothing happens without money.’ My brother sold his land and paid them 600,000 rupees.”
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In August that year, he was one of 403,253 people who appeared for the recruitment test to become a police constable. When he passed it was clear to everyone that he had a bright future ahead of him – and so he was soon married off. Four months after his marriage, his name popped up in the scam, he lost his job and he was hauled off to prison.
“So now my brother has a wife and his first child, but no job, no land, no money, no prospects and a court case to fight,” the man said. “You can write your story, but write that this is a state of 75 million corrupt people, where there is nothing in the villages and if a man comes to the city in search of an honest day’s work, the politicians and their touts demand money and then throw him into jail for paying.”
It seemed plausible that some of Vyapam deaths really were suicides – that people did hang themselves, jump off trains, and drink themselves to death rather than meeting their demise at the hands of mysterious assassins. Many of the accused had, at great personal expense, through fraud or perseverance, succeeded in overcoming a system designed to reward a microscopic minority with the lifelong privilege of permanent employment, only to see their rewards snatched away after the fact. But these deaths were not “unrelated to Vyapam”, as the government kept insisting. Rather, they seemed a consequence of the prevailing corruption common to both the scandal and and investigation that shows no sign of ever concluding.
“A scam like this is going to take years to investigate,” a lawyer representing several of the thousands of accused told me. “The CBI just doesn’t have the manpower to investigate so many deaths and arrests. When the CBI took the case from the police, they literally sent a truck to gather all the documents.”
So the case, in all likelihood, will ultimately collapse into a giant, disorganised pile of court hearings and paperwork. Memories of the dead will fade away, while the living spend the rest of their lives appearing in court to defend themselves from the accusation that they once cheated on their exams.
* * *
On 9 October this year, the Supreme Court reviewed the progress of the Vyapam case with some satisfaction, noting that the mysterious deaths had suddenly ceased since the investigation was taken away from the Madhya Pradesh police and handed to the CBI.
“I was wondering that from the time the court had ordered the CBI probe into the case and decided to monitor the investigations,” the chief justice, HL Dattu, asked, “how come not a single death has been reported?”
One week later, the driver of a train en route to Bhopal spotted a corpse on the tracks. The body was later identified as Vijay Bahadur, a retired Madhya Pradesh bureaucrat, who had served as an observer for at least two Vyapam exams. His wife, who had been travelling with him, told the police that Bahadur had stepped out of their train compartment and into the corridor to shut the door of their carriage, and never returned. The CBI has now added Bahadur to the list of suspected Vyapam-related fatalities – and begun an investigation into his death.
Monday 3 August 2015
Experts devise formula to crack Agatha Christie's murder mysteries
Victoria Ward in The Telegraph
Her whodunit murder mysteries have confounded millions of armchair detectives, leading them through a literary maze of twists and turns before a super sleuth finally unmasks the culprit.
But scientists who have studied some of Agatha Christie’s best-selling crime novels claim that that they can be solved with a simple formula, based on the language she uses, the murder weapon, the setting and even the type of vehicle being driven.
A panel of experts analysed 26 of the author’s most famous books, including Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, concluding that certain plot structures could help the reader identify the killer some time before he or she is dramatically revealed.
The panel, led by Dr Dominique Jeannerod, senior research fellow at the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities at Queens University, found that the culprit was always introduced within the first half of the book, and was likely to be emotionally involved with the victim, most being spouses or blood relatives.
They said that if there were several land vehicles in the story, the killer was likely to be female. Similarly, a prevalence of nautical vehicles suggests they are more likely to be male.
If the victim is strangled, the perpetrator is more likely to be male and if the setting is a country house, there is a 75 per cent chance they will be female.
Christie’s language tends to be more negative when concerned with female killers, who are normally discovered due to a domestic item, they said.
By comparison, men are normally caught using information or logic.
The panel, which also included Dr James Bernthal from the University of Exeter and data analyst Brett Jacob, found that if Hercule Poirot, the eccentric Belgiun detective, took charge of the investigation, and the cause of death was stabbing, the killer will be mentioned more frequently at the beginning of the book.
If Miss Marple is the detective, and the motive for the murder is money or an affair, the killer will be mentioned more in the later stages of the novel than the beginning.
The experts also found that Christie's novels tended to include a “main clue” which is revealed approximately half way through the text and is usually “highlighted as it appears in the text”, so the reader is likely to remember it and will not feel cheated by its later revelation as a clue.
They said a key feature of the author’s writing style was simplicity, using middle-range language and repetition.
The panel also found that the structure of a Christie novel could be reduced to a list of key events: the body will be found early on, a closed group of will be presented to the reader, the detective will then be introduced and a series of red herrings will follow and finally, after it is solved, the story will be wrapped up quickly and efficiently, leaving the reader satisfied.
The research was commissioned by UKTV channel Drama to mark the 125th anniversary of her birth.
Adrian Wills, general manager for Drama said "Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time, so the television adaptations of her books are hugely popular.
"Given her on-going popularity, we wanted to know her formula for success, especially since the whodunit is such a classic of the crime drama genre.
"We hope that her legions of dedicated fans will revisit their favourite whodunits with a better understanding of how to crack the ultimate code."
Tuesday 9 December 2014
Anni Dewani has been failed by South Africa
She died alone and terrified in one of the bleakest parts of the country, and after the collapse of Shrien Dewani’s trial her family still has no answers
Anni Dewani, a young woman shot dead in Cape Town, has haunted South Africa for four years. After the collapse of the trial of her husband, Shrien Dewani, accused of masterminding her murder, she will continue to do so. Not only because she was young, beautiful and just married; not only because her heartbroken, desperate parents have been taken into so many South African hearts; but also because the country, its police force and its justice system failed her so completely.
Anni and Shrien honeymooned in South Africa after an extravagant wedding in India in 2010. After going on safari they came to Cape Town and, on Saturday 13 November, went out for dinner. On their return their taxi was hijacked. The taxi driver, Zolo Tongo, and Shrien claimed they were forced out of the car and that the hijackers drove off with Anni. Her body was found in the abandoned vehicle at dawn the next day. She had been shot at close range in the neck.
Shrien was apparently a victim of the criminal violence that plagues South Africa. The police, goaded as they were by the press frenzy, were under huge pressure to find the killers because hijacking and murder are so commonplace, but there were anomalies from the start. Gugulethu, where the hijacking occurred, is notorious for its murder rate. Why would Tongo take them there at night? Shrien, allegedly forced through a window, did not have a scratch on him, and neither did Tongo.
Whispers of disbelief quickly began to swirl. Shrien looked less and less innocent as detectives and journalists picked apart the sequence of events described, and the statements he had made. The police, however, allowed him to return to England before the inconsistent aspects of the case – and his possible involvement in his wife’s murder – were properly investigated.
Tongo was soon arrested. He pleaded guilty to being party to the murder but, in return for a reduction of sentence, said he would tell the truth and claimed that Shrien had asked him to organise the killing. The hitmen, Mziwamadoda Qwabe and Xolile Mngeni, were subsequently arrested, tried and jailed. Monde Mbolombo, the receptionist at the luxury Cape Grace hotel where the Dewanis were staying, said that he had put Tongo in contact with the hitmen. In exchange for immunity from prosecution – now under review due to the case collapsing – he agreed to testify against Shrien.
The idea of hiring people to commit murder is not that shocking in South Africa. Firearms are cheap and easy to find, as are hitmen. In 2006 a young woman, Dina Rodrigues, went to a taxi rank in Cape Town and hired four strangers to murder the baby daughter of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. She paid a similar amount to that which Tongo claimed Shrien paid.
It is notable that Anni’s murder took place just four months after South Africa had successfully hosted the football World Cup, when the country was under intense scrutiny because of its record of violent crime. This coloured the investigation from the start.
The then-commissioner of police, Bheki Cele, is reported to have said: “A monkey came all the way from London to have his wife murdered here. Shrien thought we South Africans were stupid.” There seemed to be a great sense of relief that responsibility for this awful murder, a public relations disaster for South Africa, lay elsewhere.
Shrien was charged and four years later returned to stand trial. Everyone seemed to have a view on his innocence or guilt. It was revealed early on that perfect wedding photographs masked Anni’s doubts about marrying Shrien. There were sensational revelations about Shrien’s bisexuality and his involvement, both online and offline, in sadomasochistic sex with male prostitutes. “At last,” people thought, “a clear motive!”
Shrien’s sexual orientation and sexual practices clearly indicated a double life. But when put forward by the lacklustre prosecution as the reason for the murder, the judge, Janet Traverso, ruled this testimony irrelevant and the state’s case unravelled rapidly. This may not have been a popular move, but prejudice about a gay lifestyle should not subvert the need for hard evidence.
During the trial it became apparent that the investigation had been botched, and that much of the police work had been shockingly incompetent: lost paperwork, incomplete statements and unreliable ballistics reports.
Traverso chastised the National Prosecuting Authority. “You have had four years to prepare,” she told them when she dismissed the case. The evidence of the main witnesses was “riddled with contradictions” and fell “far below the threshold” of what a reasonable court could convict on.
Anni’s family, the Hindochas, have said that they – and by implication Anni – have been failed by South Africa’s justice system. They are right. Their daughter came here on her honeymoon and died alone and terrified in one of the bleakest parts of the country. Her grieving relatives have sought answers, as have South Africans.
In a country with such high levels of violence, there are so many who have failed to receive a robust investigation followed by the satisfaction of justice. As the Hindochas stood tearfully outside the courtroom after the verdict, there would have been so many South Africans sharing the family’s anguish at not knowing how or why a loved one died.
Sunday 2 November 2014
Murder capitals of the world: how runaway urban growth fuels violence
San Pedro Sula, Honduras, is the most dangerous city on the planet – and experts say it is a sign of a global epidemic
It was relatively quiet in San Pedro Sula last month. A gunfight between police and a drug gang left a 15-year-old boy dead; the body of a man riddled with bullets was found in a banana plantation; two lawyers were gunned down; a salesman was murdered inside his 4x4; and a father and son were murdered at home after pleading not to be killed.
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Humanity's 'inexorable' population growth is so rapid that even a global catastrophe wouldn't stop it
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One politician survived an assassination attempt and around a dozen people were found dead in the street. The number of killings is said to have fallen in the last few months, but the Honduran city is officially the most violent in the world outside the Middle East and warzones, with more than 1,200 killings in a year, according to statistics for 2011 and 2012. Its murder rate of 169 per 100,000 people far surpasses anything in North America or much larger cities such as Johannesburg, Lagos or São Paulo. London, by contrast, has just 1.3 murders per 100,000 people.
Now research by security and development groups suggests that the violence plaguing San Pedro Sula – a city of just over a million, and Honduras’s second largest – and many other Latin American and African cities may be linked not just to the drug trade, extortion and illegal migration, but to the breakneck speed at which urban areas have grown in the last 20 years.
The faster cities grow, the more likely it is that the civic authorities will lose control and armed gangs will take over urban organisation, says Robert Muggah, research director at the Igarapé Institute in Brazil.
“Like the fragile state, the fragile city has arrived. The speed and acceleration of unregulated urbanisation is now the major factor in urban violence. A rapid influx of people overwhelms the public response,” he adds. “Urbanisation has a disorganising effect and creates spaces for violence to flourish,” he writes in a new essay in the journal Environment and Urbanization.
Muggah predicts that similar violence will inevitably spread to hundreds of other “fragile” cities now burgeoning in the developing world. Some, he argues, are already experiencing epidemic rates of violence. “Runaway growth makes them suffer levels of civic violence on a par with war-torn [cities such as] Juba, Mogadishu and Damascus,” he writes. “Places like Ciudad Juárez, Medellín and Port au Prince … are becoming synonymous with a new kind of fragility with severe humanitarian implications.”
Simon Reid-Henry, of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, said: “Today’s wars are more likely to be civil wars and conflict is increasingly likely to be urban. Criminal violence and armed conflict are increasingly hard to distinguish from one another in different parts of the world.”
The latest UN data shows that many cities may be as dangerous as war zones. While nearly 60,000 people die in wars every year, an estimated 480,000 are killed, mostly by guns, in cities. This suggests that humanitarian groups, which have traditionally focused on working in war zones, may need to change their priorities, argues Kevin Savage, a former researcher with the Overseas Development Institute in London.
“Some urban zones are fast becoming new territories of conflict and violence. Chronically violent cities like Abidjan, Baghdad, Kingston, Nablus, Grozny and Mogadishu are all synonyms for a new kind of armed conflict,” he said. “These urban centres are experiencing a variation of warfare, often in densely populated slums and shantytowns. All of them feature pitched battles between state and non-state armed groups and among armed groups themselves.”
European and North American cities, which mostly grew over 150 or more years, are thought unlikely to physically expand much in the next few decades and are likely to remain relatively safe; but urban violence is certain to worsen as African, Asian and Latin American cities swell with population growth and an unprecedented number of people move in from rural areas.
More than half the world now lives in cities compared with about 5% a century ago, and UN experts expect more than 70% of the world’s population to be living in urban areas within 30 years.
The fastest transition to cities is now occurring in Asia, where the number of city dwellers is expected to double by 2030, according to the UN Population Fund. Africa is expected to add 440 million people to its cities by then and Latin America and the Caribbean nearly 200 million. Rural populations are expected to decrease worldwide by 28 million people. Most urban growth is expected to be not in the world’s mega-cities of more than 10 million people, but in smaller cities like San Pedro Sula.
“We can expect no slowing down of urbanisation over the next 30 years. The youth bulge will go on and 90% of the growth will happen in the south,” said Muggah.
But he and other researchers have found that urban violence is not linked to poverty so much as inequality and impunity from the law – both of which may encourage lawlessness. “Many places are poor, but not violent. Some favelas in Brazil are among the safest places,” he said. “Slums are often far less dangerous than believed. There is often a disproportionate fear of crime relative to its real occurrence. Yet even when there is evidence to the contrary, most elites still opt to build higher walls to guard themselves.”
Many of these shantytowns and townships were now no-go areas far beyond the reach of public security forces, he said.
“These areas are stigmatised by the public authorities and residents become quite literally trapped. Cities like Caracas, Nairobi, Port Harcourt and San Pedro Sula are giving rise to landscapes of … gated communities. Violence … is literally reshaping the built environment in the world’s fragile cities.”
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