Menace of illicit small arms

By Radhavinod Raju

According to a recent study, India witnessed 4,100 gunshot murders in 2008. These murders would work out to 12.2 per cent of the over 33,700 murders reported during the year. Overall, there were over 6,200 deaths due to gunshots; about 66 per cent of them were murders, 26.3 per cent were accidental deaths and 7.7 per cent were suicides. It was also reported that most of the victims of firearm murders in India were killed using unlicensed firearms. Studies conducted over a period of 10 years from 1999 would show that illicit firearms were used in 86 to 92 per cent of all arms-related murders. But that is not the whole story. Going by the number of firearm murders in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand, it appears that unlicensed weapons are easily available in these states. These three states alone have accounted for over 2,500 of the over 4,100 firearm murders in 2008. Of these three states, Uttar Pradesh alone reported 1,470 murders; six cities in Uttar Pradesh figure among the eight most unsafe megacities in India.

Police reports indicate a general rise in gun culture in Delhi and surrounding areas, with even teenagers resorting to guns for settling minor scores. In December 2007, a 14-year-old boy, studying in Class VII, was shot dead by two of his classmates inside a school in Gurgaon. Two students, sons of property dealers, fired five bullets from a licensed pistol at Abhishek Tyagi following a quarrel in the corridor of the Euro International School at the end of the class.

In September 2008, Soumya Viswanathan, a 26-year-old television journalist, was shot and killed on her way home from work. She was less than a mile from her house when a car tried to force her to pull over. When she didn’t stop, one of the persons in the car pulled out a country-made pistol and shot her. Soumya became another victim of India’s ever-increasing multitude of illegal guns. A few months after Soumya’s murder, in March 2009, Jigisha Ghose, a 28-year-old IT executive, was killed in similar circumstances, and this murder led the police to the killers of Soumya. The motive in both cases was robbery. In October 2009, Himanshu Sharma, a travel agency owner had gone to a petrol pump in Anand Vihar in Delhi to refill his car. During an altercation with the petrol pump staff, the pump security guard opened fire hurting him fatally. In June 2010, a 22-year-old man was shot dead and two others were injured when some persons opened fire in a north-east Delhi locality following a fight between two groups over water.

In the last week of September 2011, Umeshkant Pandey, a toll collector manning gate number 11 at the Kherki Dhaula toll Plaza on the Delhi Gurgaon Expressway was shot dead by a person travelling in a Bolero after some minor argument over payment of toll. The CCTV visual provided on the day of the incident showed Pandey talking to the accused and then being shot before collapsing on the floor of the toll booth. The 22-year-old died later at Medanta Hospital. According to the police, it was a case of drunken road rage. The accused were later identified and arrested. Police claimed to have recovered remains of the gun used to murder the toll gate employee, a country made pistol. All these are proof that there is a steep rise in the number of violent incidents by illicit small arms in the country. According to the police, there has been an alarming rise in gun violence in and around Delhi over the past few years as weapons proliferate. Illegal gun factories have a roaring business.

The United Nation’s India Armed Violence Survey shows that out of 650 million civilian-owned guns in the world, 40 million were in India. Of these, just 6.3 million are licensed, thereby increasing the possibility of criminals procuring unlicensed weapons for crimes. Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populated state, has around 9,00,000 licensed gun owners, and several times that number of illegal arms. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand, accounted for almost two-thirds of India’s gun-related homicides in 2008, the most recent year for which statistics have been collected. The study also shows that like other countries, gun crime is an urban phenomenon in India too. There is a rise in demand for gun licenses from scared citizens to protect themselves from criminals. And, it appears the illegal gun factories in the above mentioned three states have booming business, along with the growing gun culture, in India’s cities.

We are in the immediate neighbourhood of the world’s terrorist epicentre, and subjected to an asymmetric war by our neighbour using jihadist proxies. Over 30,000 assault rifles have been seized by security forces in Jammu & Kashmir, along with thousands of pistols, grenades, explosives and other sophisticated weapons, and their ammunition. That some of these weapons would find their way to the illegal arms bazaars in the country through unscrupulous elements cannot be ruled out. Some insurgencies are underway in the Northeast and these groups are getting arms supplies from the busy arms markets in Thailand and Cambodia through Myanmar and Bangladesh. The Naxals are seen taking advantage of this proliferation of illegal arms, apart from looting arms from unsuspecting, ill-armed and ill-trained policemen. According to a newspaper report ‘An illegal arms bazaar is thriving in the capital. From country-made pistols to sophisticated guns smuggled from foreign countries, everything is available for a price. One can even get them on rent. The number of illegal weapons in the city is eight times more than the legal ones. Such illegal weapons account for 90 per cent crimes committed in Delhi in which firearms were used’.

While international efforts to check the proliferation of small arms and light weapons are yet to come out with a concrete programme, it is time the central and state governments in India worked out a comprehensive programme to check the growth of the illegal firearm factories and the trade in illicit arms in the country. Efforts in this regards need to be recorded and closely monitored by the state and central governments for effective results, and each such case properly investigated and prosecuted. There is urgent need to check the growing firearm violence in the country and the sense of insecurity it breeds in the common citizen.

(Views expressed in the column are the author’s own) 

Radhavinod Raju 

is a former director general of the National Investigation Agency. E-mail: radhavinodraju@gmail.com 

New Indian Express

28th November 2011