In his extrordinary essay in The Little Magazine (www.littlemag.com), volume VII issue 3 & 4, titled Poverty, war and peace, Prof. Amartya Sen* writes –

“ The simple thesis linking poverty with violence is not only compromised by doubtful ethical use, it is also, as it happens, riddled with epistemic problems. The claim that poverty is responsible for group violence is empirically much too crude both because the linkage of poverty and violence is far from universally observed, and because there are other social factors that are also associated with poverty and violence.”

In his recent lecture at Lewis Mumford Lecture at the City College of New York, titled “ The Urbanity Of Calcutta”, he had commented on, “ the remarkable fact that Calcutta is not only one of the poorest cities – and indeed in the world – it so happens that it also has a very low crime rate. Indeed, in serious crimes, the poor city of Calcutta has the lowest incidence among all the Indian cities (including all the 35 cities that are counted in the category) is 2.7 per 100,000 people – 2.9 for Delhi. The rate is 0.3 in Calcutta.** The same lowness of violent crime cab be seen in looking at the total number of all violations of the Indian Penal Code put together. It also applies to crime against women, the incidence of which is very substantially lower in Calcutta than in all other major cities in India.

It also emerges that while Calcutta is by a long margin the city with lowest homicide rate in India, the Indian cities in general are strikingly low in the incidence of violent crimes by world standards, and are beaten only by much richer and more well-placed cities like Hong Kong and Singapore. Here are some numbers related to 2005, the closest year for which we could get data. Paris has a homicide rate of 2.3, London of 2.4, Dhaka of  3.6, New York of 5.0, Buenos Aires of 6.4, Los Angeles 8.8, Mexico 17.0, Johannesburg 21.5, Sao Paulo 24.0, and Rio de Janeiro an astonishing 34.9. In India, only Patna in the troubled state of Bihar is in the big league with the figure of 14.0 as the homicide rate – no other Indian city gets to even half that number, and the average of Indian cities is, as mentioned earlier, only 2.7. Even the famously low-crime Japanese cities have more than three times the murder rate of Calcutta, with 1.0 per hundred thousand for Tokyo and 1.8 for Osaka, and only Hong Kong and Singapore come close to Calcutta (though still more than 60 per cent higher), at 0.5 per hundred thousand, compared with Calcutta’s 0.3.”

He goes on to say that the above data seems “unfathomable conundrum, given Calcutta’s poverty, that may be reflection of the limitation of our thoughts rather than a paradox in nature.. …….It is important to remember that the low crime rate does not make those nasty problem of eradication of poverty from Calcutta , go away. And yet, there is something important to note, even celebrate, in the recognition that poverty does not inescapably produce violence, independently of political movements as well as social and cultural interactions.”

This essay is the official version of the Nadine Gordimer Lecture delivered at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, and University of Cape Town, South Africa, April 2007

* Prof Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Harvard University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998

** An insightful assessment of the recent cultivation of communal strife in India, especially in Gujarat, can be found in Martha C. Nussbaum’s “The Clash Within –Permanent Black, Delhi 2007

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It is heartening to see that Calcutta is perhaps the safest city in India to live. But, the recent spurts of violence in Calcutta and in Nandigram and Singur, prove otherwise. We have seen, truckloads of people leave their land and come to Calcutta, for safety although they had no job, or the knowledge or assurance as to where their next meal was going to come from. We are in the midst of watching a CPM government, which is damn care, and my own personal experience is, though the field study conducted and by speaking to the people, that if there is no violent uprising, it is also because, CPM cadre is a bully. They have CPM posts and addas at every nook and corner. The individual voice of the citizen is crushed under the Red Flag and the musclemen, who are in fact, quite often your friendly neighbour down the street or building.

So in such a case, can we read too much into the happy figure of 0.3. Or shall we just say, that the figure is most certainly right, but we need to look at the reasons for this more carefully.

Can we rely in culture? Can we say fundamentally, Bengalis are non-violent people? We can’t, because, Calcutta has a mix of different peoples in almost every locality. Can we say that since, Bengalis are more into education and even those in business fail miserably in the face of Marwaris and bhaiyas in Calcutta who are really the business community in Calcutta, the incidence of violence is are few and far between? 

Or shall we say, that with increasing wealth, violence increases simultaneously?

Or shall we dare to tut-tut, Prof Sen’s claim as not entirely up-to-date?



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