Horrendous offences are increasing in contemporary India. Alarmingly,
these degrading incidents are not confined only to the youth, and nor are they
contained in the private sphere of individuals. The alarming increase in
instances of mob lynching reveals that the morally repugnant behaviour has also
engulfed the public domains of the Indian society.
The fact is further corroborated
by rampant corruption, which has enveloped almost all sections of the Indian
society such as politics, government bureaucracy, police, judiciary, medicine,
health care, armed forces, banks, businesses, industries, education and science
and technology. Unsurprisingly, the Berlin-based ‘Transparency International’
reported in its Corruption Perceptions Index 2017, that India is one of the
most corrupt countries, ranking 81 among a group of 180 countries surveyed.
The report also indicates that
the rate of corruption in India has significantly increased as compared to that
of 2012.1 Besides, as shown in Table 1, rates of cognizable crimes have also
increased over a period. In the year 2016, a total 48,31,515 cognizable offences
committed under the Indian Penal Code and Special and Local Laws were recorded,
showing an increase of about 6 per cent over the year 2014. And the crime rate
increased from 367.5 in 2014 to 379.3 in 2017.
According to the above-referred
source, crimes against women have also increased by 2.9 per cent in 2016 over
2015. A majority of the crimes against women reported in 2016 were under
‘Cruelty by Husband or His Relatives’ (32.6%), followed by ‘Assault on Women
with Intent to Outrage her Modesty’ (25.0%), ‘Kidnapping & Abduction of
Women’ (19.0%) and ‘Rape’ (11.5%) (Government of India, 2016, p. xix).
Theories Explaining the Deviance
Normally, such crimes are
attributed by the media either to psychological factors such as individual
abnormality, fury, passion or crowd behaviour or to the administrative factors
like the failure of the law and order machinery of the society. But such
explanations are trivial. To give a more comprehensive explanation of the mounting
degree of deviance in India, deeper societal and moral factors need to
be explored, since such crimes are indicative of the decaying moral fabric of Indian society.
Evidently, other
societies, including modern Western ones, are also not free from grievous
crimes including mass killings related to ethnic cleansing or holocaust (de Swaan,
2015). However, some of the explanations of those phenomena also appear to
be less than satisfactory. For instance, one such account, known as the
situational explanation, formulated by Milgram (1974)
and Arendt (1963–2006), attributes such crimes to the immediate situation that
causes normal people to commit evil acts, meaning thereby: ‘Under identical
circumstance, anyone might commit a similar crime’.
Alternatively, the Dutch
sociologist, de Swaan, proposed a socio-psychological explanation (2015).
According to de Swaan, the social and psychological compartmentalisation of the
predator and victim, caused by indoctrination and brainwashing propaganda, is
responsible for the monstrous acts of genocide committed by the Nazis.
Apparently, such explanations have an element of truth, but are inadequate from
the moral and sociological standpoints.
Interestingly, sociologists have
formulated several fascinating theories of crime and deviance. For instance,
the 19th-century French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of
modern sociology, was the first to formulate a sociological theory of the
deviant behaviour. Explaining the variance in suicide rates in different
groups, he argued that it was a societal rather than an abnormal individual
phenomenon.
Examining social compositions of
different groups having differential suicide rates, Durkheim found that
unusually high or low suicide rates were inversely related to social
cohesiveness: the greater the social solidarity, the lesser the suicide rates,
and conversely, the lesser the social cohesiveness, the greater the suicide
rates (1897–2006).
Inspired by Durkheim, Merton, the
renowned American (sociolo)gist, developed the structural–functional theory of
anomie (1968). Identifying four types of deviant behaviour, namely innovation,
ritualism, retreatism and rebellion, Merton argued that they were the
dysfunctional consequences of: (a) the overemphasis on the goal of
success along with the underemphasis on culturally prescribed
legitimate means to achieve it, and (b) the structural inequality of
opportunities in the American society (1968, pp. 198–258).
On the other hand,
Lemert (1951)
and Becker (1963)
of the symbolic interaction school have proposed the labelling theory,
attributing the cause of deviance to the process of labelling the deviants as
‘deviants’, who, in turn, owning that label, behave accordingly. In contrast,
some sociologists proposing the conflict theory of crime argued that the
deviance is caused by social inequalities and associated power dynamics (Liazos,
1972).
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