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        The horror and trauma suffered by people in Noida and Gurgaon are still raw. What is obscured about the occurrences in these places which drive a chill down the spine is that they perhaps represent the tip of the iceberg of such gruesome killings. Indeed in the wake of these events hitting media headlines, more and more of such horrors, albeit of smaller dimensions, have come to be reported. Whether these dimensions are big or small does not constitute the most relevant detail about them which is, on the contrary, the question how such a thing could happen in a civilised society in a condition of inexplicable obscurity. The corollary of that question is whether the law and order machinery has either collapsed or declared an unannounced closure. Such a query is induced by the clearly irresponsible conduct of the police. At Nithari village (Noida), they did not register a first information report except after five months and particularly only the intervention of the Chief Judicial Magistrate who helped spontaneously the father of the 26-year-old victim to have his complaint about his missing ward registered. And this was the incredible surprise that the police behaved unprofessionally even when skulls were unearthed and it was left to the CBI to expose the greater dimension of the tragedy.

        Likewise, there had been serial killings in Gurgaon. Between January and November of 2006, as many as 28 persons were throttled to death by a gang of taxi drivers who were operating on National Highway 8 between Delhi airport and Gurgaon town. They strangled their victims and threw their bodies along the highway. The first killing occurred in January but the Gurgaon police disturbed themselves to act - or was it that they were disturbed only after a dozen of unwary travellers were bumped off in October. Similarly, the police did nothing when they found dead bodies of young and middle aged men in drains and bushes along the Jaipur Highway in the early part of the year. Did it not occur to them that the modus operandi of the killers were similar in all these killings suggesting clearly the hands of serial killers behind them? That for the ten months during which the murders took place the police did not notice anything did underscore their irrelevance to people of this outfit which was paid to protect their life and property.

        This is a democracy. It has local bodies and legislators elected to their offices in panchayats, municipalities, zilla parishads and State Assemblies. When ghastly tragedies were being perpetrated in their constituencies, where had all these people gone or had they not cared to notice anything? Only after a public outcry had surfaced, they had awakened themselves not always to their responsibilities but to play their political games by exploiting these sordid opportunities. These occurrences highlight what is common knowledge, which is that lives of common people as contrasted with those at the higher rungs of the social ladder have no value from the standpoint of their rights to live.

        What is inexcusable is that such insensitivity had infected the media also. Even 24/7 TV channels which hunger for stories have not cared to notice the untoward bedeviling the masses in Noida and Gurgaon. That is because the middle class which is the catchment area for these channels has no interest in the lives of those 400 millions who are below the poverty line.