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Direction :- A passage given below is followed by some questions. Choose the best answer to the question.The UP police and the crime branch of the Delhi police have cooperated admirably to produce com
Direction :- A passage given below is followed by some questions. Choose the best answer to the question.The UP police and the crime branch of the Delhi police have cooperated admirably to produce computer-generated images of the three persons suspected of having pushed Manish Mishra, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's grand-nephew, off a running train near Kosi Kalan and killed him. But it would be a great mistake to treat his murder as a run-of-the-mill crime that needs to be addressed by normal police methods alone. On the contrary, it is another piece in a mosaic of incredibly brutal behaviour, occurring all over India, that calls into question every cosy illusion that we harbour about our country. There is a disturbing accumulation of evidence that pushing people out of running trains is no longer aberrant behaviour, but is becoming almost commonplace. Last Sunday's papers in Mumbai carried a story about how a young telecom engineer, on his way to work, was deliberately pushed out of a crowded suburban train by a gang of young men who first made some space for him and then pushed him out after it had gathered speed. He survived to tell the tale, but another young man who was similarly pushed out is now in a coma and may not survive. Most of the victims do not, of course, survive. In Mumbai, around half a dozen people are killed in this way everyday. No one knows how many of them slip and how many are pushed.In Mumbai, such deaths at least get noticed. In Bihar, UP and many other parts of India, especially when they happen off longdistance trains, they do not even get reported. So no one knows precisely how many of them are cases of murder. Manish Mishra's gratuitous murder suggests that a fair proportion could be the latter.What kind of human being is he that can deliberately, cold-bloodedly, and as happened in Mumbai, purposelessly take the life of another? The answer is, one that has lost every vestige of his humanity and revels in the act of killing. The recent history of the country shows that the number of such people is growing by leaps and bounds. In fact, a special new form of barbarism is sprouting like an evil weed all across the face of India. It is reflected not just by the rising spate of murders but by the sheer inventiveness that the killers are displaying in making death as excruciatingly painful as possible. India's new killers, in short, are not just committing murder for profit or revenge; they are killing for sport and trying to maximise the pleasure they derive fromit.We got our first glimpse of this new phenomenon during the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. Not only were an estimated 2,700 Sikhs killed in Delhi, but most were killed in barbaric ways. A common sport was to push automobile tyres over their heads, trapping their arms, set the tyres alight and watch the victims burn. Entire families were also trapped in their cars and burnt to death. Many women were raped and then killed.Since then, every communal riot has seen the inventiveness of the killers grow. The massacres in Gujarat after Godhra were horrifying not just because of the numbers killed but because of the ways in which the victims were killed. There, too, immolation was the favourite sport. Rape was, as usual, common. But a new twist was the murder of a foetus. Worst of all, many of the killings were instigated or carried out by middle-class people, whom one could easily meet in an Ahmedabad hotel, a Goa resort or a sales conference in Mumbai.How has India come to such a sorry pass? It would need a psychoanalyst of the stature of Eric Fromm (who wrote a seminal book linking sadism and necrophilia to the rise of an industrial civilisation) to answer that question. But the reason why more and more people are giving free reign to their darkest fantasies and most depraved yearnings is easier to understand.Purposeless, sadistic violence is on the increase because the perpetrators have lost all fear of retribution. Since the legal right to exact retribution in any society rests with the State, this means that they have completely lost their fear of the State. The reason for this is not far to seek. In all healthy, functioning societies, the State deals with the people through a mix of coercion and persuasion. In India, the coercive power of the State has been all but destroyed. The immediate cause is the emasculation of the police and the virtual collapse of the judicial system. The police is understaffed and ill-equipped. In the cities, a large proportion of even the available personnel has been diverted to providing protection to VIPs. Worse still, in the state governments in particular, the police has been utterly politicised and corrupted. As a result, it has lost every vestige of accountability to the public.The judicial system is close to collapse. As of the end of 2002 , there were more than 20 million cases pending before the courts of the country. Over a million persons are languishing in jails waiting for trial and the trials have become a farce, for the conviction rate is around 1 per cent. Even conviction does not always lead to incarceration, for the law, delays and an overgenerous concern for individual freedom have combined to ensure that anyone who can get an appeal to his or her conviction entertained by a higher court is sure to remain at large for several more years.There are, in short, a hundred ways in which a wrongdoer can cheat punishment. The Best Bakery case in Ahmedabad, and the BMW and Jessica Lal murder cases in Delhi are among hundreds of highly publicised cases that show how easy it is to do so. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that fear of the law has almost vanished from Indian societyThis progressive decay would not have taken place, however, if criminals had not found such ready shelter in the political system. The organic link that has developed over the last four decades between politics and crime is too well understood to need elaboration. That it was born out of political parties' and candidates' need for funds with which to fight elections, and manpower to mobilise one's supporters and discourage those of one's rivals, is also well-known. What few people anticipated was the extent to which the tacit legitimisation of crime would poison the roots of Indian society Thus, the ultimate cause of growing lawlessness and sadism in Indian society is the perversion of Indian democracy.Over the decades since Independence, the crime-politics nexus has bred a criminal 'over-class' that wields almost unchallenged political power because it pervades all political parties. Everyone who wants to get ahead in India today, has to deal with it. And each transaction makes it stronger and more deeply entrenched.The members of this class are not averse to abusing their new-found power. The commonest manifestation is the readiness of the goons with whom its more prominent members habitually travel to throw fare-paid passengers out of their berths on trains to make room for their masters and to beat up anyone on the roads who does not immediately move out of the way of their cavalcade as they pass.These space-age Pindaris have become the role models of the lumpen proletariat, and of successive generations of barely educated young people as they make their uncertain way into the adult world. It is, therefore, no surprise that more and more of its members are displaying the same contempt as their mentors for the rights of other humans, including their right to life.
The murderers like those of Manish Mishra
are cold-blooded.
derive pleasure from their brutal acts.
are still few in number.
try to get the deed done, caring little for the mode that is chosen.
1 answers
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3 and 4 seem to be beside the point. 1 is more a description of the murder than of the murderer. 2 follows because the author says, ''India's new killers ... are killing for sport and trying to maximise the pleasure they derive from it.âÂÂ
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