Crime: Delhi; Called to Account

Police are still clueless about Irfan Hussain's murder.

For Irfan Hussain, the affable, mild-mannered cartoonist of Outlook magazine, the Press Club of India on Delhi's Raisina Road was a mandatory halt on his way back home from work. The evening of March 8 was no different, except that he never reached home. He left the club with a friend, Major N. Srinivasan, whom he dropped off at Laxmi Bai Nagar in south Delhi before driving homewards to Sahibabad in Uttar Pradesh, just beyond the capital's eastern border. Minutes away from home, he had spoken to his wife, Muneera, on his cell phone after which he went missing. Five days later, his decomposed body with 28 stab wounds, throat slit and hands and feet tied, was recovered off the highway, barely 10 minutes away from his residence. Even a fortnight later, mystery shrouds the case, his white Maruti and cell phone still untraced.

The grisly murder has enraged Delhi's journalistic community. Hussain was the fourth mediaperson to be killed in recent times. More unnerving and insidious is the fact that the killers in each of these cases are still at large. Hussain, police say, could have been a victim of highway robbery on the notorious Sahibabad-Ghaziabad stretch. "Though car-jacking seems a distinct possibility, we are exploring every angle and our teams have fanned out to different states," says Amod Kanth, joint commissioner of police, who is monitoring the case.

CASE FILES

Irfan Hussain: Case under investigation. Car-jacking suspected. No arrests yet.
Shivani Bhatnagar: Police say they're "close" to cracking case, disclosure to be "sensational".
Sudha Gupta: No breakthroughs, no arrests.
Shivani Jajodia: No arrests, unofficially attributed to mystery stalker.

On January 23, Shivani Bhatnagar, a reporter with The Indian Express and wife of Rakesh Bhatnagar, legal editor of The Times of India, was killed in her east Delhi apartment after a fierce struggle with her assailants. Two people had entered her flat, introduced themselves as family friends of her husband and then knifed her brutally. Police now say they are close to solving the case. Last week, Home Minister L.K. Advani told Parliament during question time that the "Government had clear information that a policeman was involved".

As the Crime Branch closes in on this sensational murder, other cases handled by it still remain open. Though refusing to go on record, the police, without conclusive evidence, say Shivani Jajodia, a producer with NDTV, was killed by a "stalker" who shadowed women throughout 1997. Jajodia was alone in her Vasant Kunj flat on November 19 that year when the man came in and attacked her. The news producer succumbed to her injuries two days later. Similarly, the Crime Branch remains clueless when Sudha Gupta, an air newsreader, was killed in her Mandir Marg flat in Central Delhi last November.

The impunity with which criminals strike has reduced the city to being the country's crime capital. According to official figures, for every murder reported in Chennai last year, there were 18 in Delhi. The abduction ratio at 1:88 was even more shocking.

With journalists being increasingly targeted by criminals, the media is mounting pressure on the police to get a hold on law and order. On their part, the police say they are terribly short-staffed and that half of the capital's force is being used for VIP security. Which effectively means that for 1.2 crore people, Delhi has only about 20,000 policemen on duty. Repeated requests to the Home Ministry to raise the strength of the force have evoked no response. Hussain, says a senior official, would not have been killed if the highway stretch on the Uttar Pradesh border was adequately patrolled.

With police investigations into these -- and several other cases involving non-journalists -- making little headway, a sense of panic has gripped the capital's citizens. And like the criminal himself, fear will continue to stalk them until the law enforcers do what they are supposed to do.