Dear Home Minister, cabs don't rape, and cops can stop crime

A young woman was raped inside a cab on Friday (December 5) night. It happened to be a cab from a certain app-based cab-booking company. On Monday (December 8), the Delhi government under the administration of Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung banned the company from operating in the city, saying the cab service was carrying out its business in contravention of the Motor Vehicle (MV) Act, 1988.

On Tuesday, making a suo motu statement in Rajya Sabha, Union home minister Rajnath Singh said, "The ministry of home affairs has advised the state governments (and) UT administrations to ensure that operations of web-based taxi services are stopped."

As many people have questioned, had this dispensation been around in Delhi when the December 2012 gang rape-murder took place, would it have banned private buses in Delhi?

Taking that one step forward, if Rajnath Singh was the home minister, would he have asked all states and UTs to ban private buses? Or would he have specifically asked them to ban white private buses with the name of a certain caste/community writ large on it? Or, wait further, would he have called for a ban on bus drivers? And per chance if the police had delayed lodging a complaint and filing an FIR, as happens in many, if not most, cases across the country, perhaps there would have been a call for banning the police.

Of course these are inane points on an issue that is very, very serious. But so are the steps advocated by the government and advised by the Union home minister for the same issue that remains just as serious as it was on December 17, 2012.

Let's take the inanity out of the second equation first: the sane, expected, and first reaction would have been to call for a ban on drivers under the influence of alcohol, though that is hardly any guarantee against crime. But that would have meant increased policing, for one. For another, it would have brought many in the executive under direct line of questioning, including the Union home minister himself for any eventuality in the capital since Delhi Police is under his jurisdiction.

Similarly — and I hold no brief for the company in question — banning Uber cab service in the capital, and further seeking a ban on all "web-based taxi services" across the country would mean little beyond five minutes of head-banging on 9pm TV debates.

For one, who asked Jung and his transport department to not crack down on Uber — or any other fleet flouting law, for that matter—all this while if it was operating in "contravention" of the Motor Vehicle Act? A law enforced, incidentally, on July 1, 1989, when both call-a-cab or "web-based" book-a-cab services were science fiction.

For another, who will ensure that "all web-based taxi services are stopped", as per the home minister's advice, in all states and UTs? Even if Uber changes name to Kuber and Ola christens itself Bhola, are we to believe that the police and transport department officials can catch them? No sir, they simply do not have the numbers on their side to carry out any such operation in most cases.

According to a report by PTI, responding to concerns raised by MPs, that isolated places were hardly manned, Rajnath Singh said a vigil is being done at 255 sensitive identified locations or roads in Delhi. "To ensure security in such places I will call a meeting of top officials soon," he said. Spelling out steps to ensure women's safety in Delhi, Singh said, "CCTV cameras have been installed in 200 buses and 3,707 CCTV cameras in public places, while 1,518 more are planned.

Great. Now, Mr Home Minister, instead of banning cab services after crime, it is perhaps time to drive straight into action and a) ensure those CCTV cameras are actually installed, and b) when installed, ensure that they are rolling to catch the culprits.

But more than anything else, get more boots on our streets.

Here are three pointers:

1) According to the National Crime Records Bureau's statistical collation for 2013, "The ‘actual’ strength of civil police, including district armed police in the country during 2013 stood at 13,48,984 against the ‘sanctioned’ strength of 17,86,112. Thus, the civil police strength in position was 75.5% of the sanctioned strength and remaining 24.5% of the posts were vacant."

2) Delhi, according to NCRB report, had 67,686 police personnel on ground out of a sanctioned total of 80,027. However, a huge chunk of that is reserved to guard VIPs.

3) And how huge is that chunk? According to a January 2013 report by Indiaspend.com (based on figures from the Bureau of Police Research and Development), there were 14,842 persons requiring protection (read VIPs) in 2011. The number of police personnel sanctioned for protecting them was 32,476. The number of police personnel deployed for protection of such VIPs: 47,557.

Perhaps the only area across sectors across the country where the numbers deployed beats the numbers sanctioned! And I am sure, Mr Home Minister, you know way better about all this than me. So why deflect the issue by banning some service or the other instead of getting to the core of it? So, sir, recruit more cops, give them adequate facilities to let more young men and women join the police force and sensitise them, instead of wasting time on whether Sanskrit should be part of the curriculum and if ancient Indian science was better than the modern global one if you seriously want to curb crimes against women.