Urban Violence
Introduction and Meaning:
Slums can be defined as an environment that lacks the basic characteristics of good living conditions and is considered the worst form of human habitation. Increasing urban population due to push and pull factors, high cost of urban land, vested interests etc. are some of the major reasons for the growth of slums. Due to their unhygienic conditions, slums spread diseases and are a hazard to public health. This also causes pollution in the city. Slums give rise to social evils like crime, delinquency, prostitution, begging etc. Mafia gangs are also flourishing in the slums.
The problem of slum can be solved by various programs like slum clearance program, slum improvement program, welfare activities and suitable government policies.
Violence is primarily a manifestation of urban settlement. An important factor contributing to the growth of violent crime is the unplanned growth of cities and towns, including their ever-increasing slums, their unhygienic conditions, the acute shortage of housing on footpaths and on railway station platforms, under bridges and subways. There is nothing to live for. They easily move forward in the society under the temptation of violent crimes and movements. Economic hardships and an uncertain future facing the youth have increased the tendency to agitate and blame the society for all its ills. Unless there is an economic breakthrough in the form of increased investment and employment, there are chances that things could turn from bad to worse.
Urban violence is a serious development obstacle in developing countries and is increasingly dominating the daily lives of citizens around the world. There has been a rise in fear and insecurity, as well as a wide-scale preoccupation with the phenomenon.
There has been violence of many types and intensities, ethnic, linguistic, religious, caste, class, urban and rural, revolutionary, counter-revolutionary, north against south, tribals against non-tribals, caste Hindus against scheduled castes, scheduled Caste against caste, Muslims against Hindus, Christians against Hindus, Hindus against Sikhs
Shia against Sunni, non-Hindi against Hindi, one political party against another and so on, making these demonstrations of discontent especially dangerous in our democratic society in the absence of minority and regional groups towards the country as a whole sense of integration between The least the nation can do is to understand the dimensions of violence that dominate the social and political fabric.
We live in a time of terrorism, communal fury, riotous mobs ready to act on the slightest provocation, real or imagined. Hyper-politicisation, growing lawlessness, contagious violence, rebellious tendencies and deepening anarchy are serious enough to plunge the country into an abyss of disorder and anarchy. today is india
Hurt by various types of violence. Nor has it been able to protect the dignity of man.
Processions are a regular affair in large cities. Rival political parties take out armed processions, and often clash with each other if the police are not strong enough to keep them under control. The growing cities and towns became a potential source of crime and disorder, with increasing unplanned slums and growing mafia hierarchies. Demonstrations have become a common feature of daily urban life in which politicians, the working class, teachers, students and even unemployed and underemployed women participate in association with the Mafia hierarchy.
They obstruct traffic, block public roads for long periods, intimidate passers-by and loot shops, burn buses, cars, trucks, tram cars, etc., and cut telecommunication and power lines. Huh. Disputes in all walks of life today are rarely resolved by peaceful means. More and more people are resorting to violence to achieve their objectives.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, violence refers to the use of “great physical forces”.
Chambers’ Twentieth Century Dictionary explains that “violence includes excessive, uncontrolled, or undue force, outrage, profanity, injury, or coercion.”
The United States National Commission on Violence has defined violence as “the threat or use of force resulting in injury or forcible restraint or intimidation of persons or destruction or forcible seizure of property.”
Urban violence refers to the destruction of persons and property in an urban context.
Violence has been widely recognized as a characteristic of societies in periods of social and political change. A society which is changing rapidly generates a lot of violence mainly due to the lack of established methods to bring about social change. We must bear in mind that the patterns of structure of our society are changing rapidly over the years and the changes are affecting the most important interests – economic, political, social and religious – in one direction or the other.
Violence is primarily a manifestation of urban settlement. An important factor contributing to the growth of violent crime is the unplanned growth of cities and towns, with their ever-growing slums, their unsanitary conditions, and acute housing shortages. People living on footpaths and on railway station platforms, under bridges and on subways who have nothing
succumb readily to the temptation of violent crime to look forward to in society
and movements. The change from homogeneity to heterogeneity is directed towards the lowest common intellectual community, which leads to aggression of some kind. It has been held by many sociologists that social structures exert certain pressures on certain individuals in society to engage in non-conformity rather than conforming behavior.
Unemployment is a powerful reason for violent crime. Economic hardships and an uncertain future facing the youth have increased the tendency to agitate and blame the society for all its ills. As Bernard Crick said, “Boredom is the only illegitimate child of conformity and physical violence becomes its inevitable bastard”.
Modern society with radio, cinema, television, pornography reinforces criminal tendencies and teaches new and better ways of being a criminal. Individuals act according to their experiences, if they have not experienced much in their youth, they will act according to what they have seen or heard.
To a large extent, street fighting is mostly fought by youths between the age group of 20-30, unmarried men with no obligations towards family. Good old men also take part in it, but it seemed that this struggle would not have been sustained if it had not been for the desperate determination of the youth. Throughout most of human history, societies have relied on young adult males to hunt, fight, and maintain social order with violence.
Most of the youth are from low socio-economic and caste status. Given the violent character of life among the lower classes and the wider history of our upheavals, it would be surprising to find educated youths from well-to-do homes, given a chance of a night or more on the town, behaved decently. Huh. They inherited all the worst features of the illiterate mob drawn from the slums, which terrorized the law-abiding sections of the society.
Nature of urban violence
Urban violence is violence against persons and property in an urban
Categories of Urban Violence
We can identify at least three broad categories of urban violence –
- a) Political violence – This includes both violence directed against the state and violence by the state against challengers.
- B) communal and caste violence
- c) criminal and economic violence
- a) Political violence – encompassing both violence directed against the state and violence by the state against challengers:
Collective violence directed against the state is often the product of large-scale unrest and dissatisfaction with state performance and includes riots, rebellions, insurrections, revolutions, and civil wars. In response, the state itself may resort to violence to meet these direct challenges to its authority. Yet states can use strong-arm tactics such as intimidation, torture, and assassination to prevent challenges from ever happening.
- b) Communal and caste violence:
The second category is urban violence involving rival ethnic, racial or religious groups. It seems to be an ever more obvious form of violence in today’s world. Here, the protagonists are usually private parties, yet the issues of contention and violence can have great political consequences for the state and society in general. Such rivalry often involves perceived inequalities in access to political and economic opportunities. Racial, ethnic or religious identities serve as rallying points for political mobilization to address these inequalities.
- c) Criminal and economic violence :
Actions that are at least overtly political are within the purview of criminal and economic violence. Rampant acts of destructive armed robbery, assault, murder, and looting by individuals and groups fall into this category. Theorists ranging from Émile Durkheim to Chalmers Johnson argue that the erosion of a society’s moral unity is a major precursor to civil violence. To the extent that criminal or antisocial violence reflects alienation from society or a calculation that the potential benefits of ignoring society’s rules outweigh the costs of doing so, it may indicate a breakdown in the moral and coercive authority of society as a whole. gives.
Does rapid urban growth contribute to urban violence? ,
The story is much more complex than is commonly thought. Urban development in itself is quite benign. However, in interaction with other factors such as economic distress and a weakened state, urban development appears more likely to contribute to violence.
Urban growth continues at a rapid pace in some places, and in some parts of the developing world, urban sizes are indeed staggering. Large and dynamic cities provide many benefits to developing societies. Cities provide extraordinary opportunities for entrepreneurship, creativity and wealth creation. But rapid urban growth often comes with complex problems. this pro
Defects include high rates of unemployment and underemployment because urban labor markets are unable to absorb the growing number of job seekers, urban poverty, inadequate shelter, inadequate sanitation, inadequate or contaminated water supplies, severe air pollution, and other forms of environmental degradation. forms, congested roads, overloaded public transportation systems, and municipal budget woes.
Rural-urban migration creates economic despair among the migrant population. The rapid influx of migrants cannot be accommodated by the public or private sectors. Frustrated expectations of mobility and the proximity of conspicuous consumption by the elite raise migrant awareness of their marginal role in society. Migrants therefore increasingly experience relative deprivation, which increases their propensity to engage in radical political activities.
Migrants have problems in adjusting socially and psychologically to the urban environment. Cultural conflict and the disintegration of past life habits and customs lead to a crisis of personal identity, leading to the breakup of the primary group. Traditional social controls on deviant behavior are thus weakened. Furthermore, as migrants seek entry into new protective groups, they enter a phase in which they are susceptible to recruitment into extremist political movements.
Rural-urban migration, increased political awareness and mobilization of radical opposition go hand in hand. The urban environment allows for a high degree of social communication and creates intense competition between different interest groups. Organized political activity is typical, which helps to politicize migrants and encourage public
Participation in political action. These factors translate into migrant support for opposition political parties and aggressive protest movements.
Evidence on rates and trends of violence
The developing world offers many examples of urban violence. In the context of political violence directed against the state, austerity measures adopted by debt-ridden countries in the mid-1970s sparked a wave of urban protests around the world. Between 1976 and 1992 there were more than 146 separate incidents of strikes, riots and demonstrations – mainly in Latin America. Some modern revolutions have also had an urban basis. The Bolivian Revolution of 1952 found its roots and support in organized labor and the disaffected middle class.
found, which did not include rural elements until the overthrow of the government. In Iran in the late 1970s, student street demonstrations and labor protests in major cities were rallying points for the overthrow of the Shah. And in Nicaragua in 1979, an urban uprising by workers and disaffected youth was crucial to the success of an organized guerrilla force against the Somoza regime.
Ethnic and communal strife is widespread in many Third World cities. Sunni Muslim extremists and Shia extremists attack each other’s buses and mosques in Karachi, Pakistan. Many Indian experts believe that cities are fertile breeding grounds for communal strife, with incidents of violence and brutality far more common than in villages. Communal issues often become vents for the anger and frustration generated by the high stress of urban life. In 1992, the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque led to an explosion of Hindu-Muslim violence in several Indian cities. About 95% of the 1500 who died died in urban areas. The cities of Ahmedabad and Mumbai were worst affected by incidents of gang rape, murders and arson even months after the demolition. Similar incidents also took place in Surat, Kolkata, Bhopal and Bengaluru.
Since the 1950s, there has been a steady increase in the frequency of communal incidents and the number of people killed and injured as a result. The frequency has risen sharply in rural areas, but the majority of incidence remains urban. Moreover, the rate of increase has been faster than the rate of rural or urban population growth.
This means that the per capita incidence of communal violence has increased exponentially.
Criminal and economic violence often accompanies sectarian conflict. In Karachi, rates have skyrocketed in recent years. In 1991, the police reported 466 murders, 802 attempted murders, 421 cases of rioting (many against civilian agencies), 103 rapes and 140 kidnappings for ransom, in addition, an estimated 50% of all crimes go unreported. Is. During communal incidents, youths of the idle rich sometimes turn to crime for excitement. In India, communal riots have provided a pretext for personally motivated violence.
In one incident, property sharks in Kolkata took advantage of the communal disarray to destroy a lower middle class Hindu colony so that a shopping complex could be built on the land at a later date. Inter-racial violence paralleled private exploitation with clashes between rival blacks
Ethnic groups in South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Communal and sectarian violence has become endemic in spite of our principles of secularism and national integration. Our Indian states have become highly communal. It is getting worse day by day. Caste and communal violence is taking place on a large scale. The most recent communal riots experienced in India were the 1992–93 Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai due to the Babri Masjid Ramjanmabhoomi dispute. Meerut riots of September 1982, Biharsharif riots of May 1981, Bhiwandi-Mumbai riots of May 1984, Jabalpur riots, Ahmedabad riots of 1969, Baroda riots of October 1982, Tamil-Sinhalese conflict, Hindu-Sikh conflict are classic examples of communalism. Riots that broke out later – Independence period September 1982.
In India, communal violence not only deprives thousands of people every year of their civil liberties and human rights, but also causes destruction of valuable properties and goods and loss of very precious human lives. lives. What is even more shocking is that most of the lives are lost not due to riots but due to firing by the law and order protectors themselves. In many riots, many innocent people also became riot victims. In the Mumbai-Bhiwandi riots of 1984, the main victims were the poorest of the poor. The communal situation becomes worse as the real criminals enjoy political support and live at large, while the poor, powerless and innocent people are detained.
Urbanization and crime in Mumbai:
It is the cities that contribute to about 70% of the crimes committed in the country. Crimes committed in urban areas are different from crimes committed in rural areas. Smuggling, tax evasion, white-collar crimes are some of the familiar crimes commonly found in urban areas.
In the newly emerging economic system, the falling rate of growth of industrial jobs, speculation in the stock market and real estate contribute to the growth of crime in Mumbai. The trend of making fast money is on the rise in Mumbai. This has given birth to gambling which increases criminal activities more and more.
Because of contract killing, Mumbai has become a haven for criminals. Under the system, a member of the underworld can kill anyone. These people are more readily available. They take betel nut for murder. Murder is considered one of the most serious crimes. Any increase in crimes causes serious concern in the minds of the people of the community. In recent years, rape has become a topic of great concern in the community. There are some states and union territories where rape crimes have increased like Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur and Nagpur etc. Generally, the crime incidents have shown an upward trend in many cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kanpur, Lucknow, Nagpur, Pune etc.
Shown trend.
In the various scandals, scams and scandals that have surfaced in recent years, they may not all be due to the antics and scams of politicians, but they have been facilitated to a large extent by the bad environment created in the country by politicians and the political system. country. Various scams like securities scam, telecom scam, Maharashtra Public Service Commission scam, NPA (Non Performing Assets) scam of banks and financial institutions have taken place in the country in the last few years.
Organized crime is on the rise. It is true that many gangs have emerged in Chennai in the last few years. These gangs are involved in various crimes such as murder for hire, dacoity, theft, robbery, bootlegging and drug trafficking.
Recommendations to control crime and violence:
1) A separate branch should be created exclusively to deal with organized criminal gangs. The wings should have separate units specializing on investigation, intelligence, improvement of computer technology.
2) All cases should be heard quickly and the accused should be put in jail as soon as possible. For this purpose, a court should be set up exclusively to deal with organized crime.
3) Most of the witnesses do not appear before the court for fear of gangs, resulting in acquittal of hardened criminals. Heavy security should be given to the witnesses during the duration of the trial.
4) The acquisition of properties and assets by the offender should be verified at the same time. Customs, IT officials and enforcement officials should be forced to act together. The investigation should unearth the investments of criminals by various fake and pseudonymous names.
5) The nexus of criminal politicians should be broken. Criminals should be exposed for communal protection.
6) The sources of income of gangs from illegal activities should be curbed by taking quick action
Prompt action on illegal activities like sale of arms/weapons, forced eviction of tenants, extortion etc.
7) Policing should be organized in the localities where theft, robbery and dacoity are frequent.
8) Children living in slums are vulnerable to crime because of their poverty and illiteracy. Therefore, areas around crime prone slums should be identified and juveniles in those areas should be prevented from becoming members of criminal gangs through various welfare programmes.
9) There is no doubt that the offense is directly related to suitable employment not being available. As a result, there is a clash of lifestyles and interests among young people. The modern youth who have turned to crime have done so out of necessity arising out of unemployment. Of course, there are people who have made crime a profession. but in the larger context of things, they will
Makes up a small percentage. They will be the kind of people who will take risks to make quick bucks.
10) Unless there is an economic breakthrough in the form of increased investment and employment, there are chances that things could turn from bad to worse.
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