Indrajit Basu
Guess what is the current status symbol in Assam - a tea-growing state in northeastern India - these days? It is not the latest-model multi-utility vehicle, the price of which could buy a small tea factory, nor a journey from the airport to the tea garden in the company-owned helicopter. Important business people or politicians are identified by the escort vehicle with gun-toting security guards that accompany their cars when they move around in the terrorist-stricken state.
“It is a big deterrent for the criminals who kidnap to earn easy money,” said a non-resident owner of one of the largest tea gardens there. “These are the unemployed young men in the region who have turned United Liberation Front of Asom [ULFA] activists.”
Like many other “big businessmen”, this tea-garden owner too has spent a small fortune over the past few years clandestinely paying “insurance” money to ULFA, a separatist armed opposition group that has been classified as a terrorist organization by India. ULFA funds its operations primarily through extortion and kidnappings.
When a kidnapping involves a high-profile or a wealthy victim, the family or the company rarely reveals the actual amount paid for ransom. However, as much as half a million US dollars - a figure that was reportedly paid by the family to release a Kolkata-based industrialist kidnapped in July 2001- is not unknown. But it can be as little as $500 for poor victims.
Ransom is almost always paid up front to release a high-profile or a wealthy kidnapped victim, although when the kidnappers get nabbed, the money is usually recovered. But very often, when a kidnap involves a victim from a comparatively poor family - mostly in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh - that cannot pay the ransom demanded, the victim either gets killed or sold to a brothel. This is especially true of children and women.
Government officials say that between 1999 and 2005, about 40 people working in the tea industry were kidnapped in the northeastern states, comprising Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and Meghalaya. Most were released after a ransom was paid, but some were killed.
But the problem is not just in the northeast. With India rushing to open its economy to global forces, some of the world’s major organized-crime businesses, such as kidnapping and drug trafficking, are emerging as lucrative activities in the country. Experts say that over the past two years, kidnapping has become more lucrative than drug trafficking.
“We have certainly seen high-profile kidnaps over the last couple of years in India,” said Clive Stoddart, managing director of Asset Security Managers, a division of London-based Aon Ltd, a financial-services consultancy that handles insurance-mediation activities. It says India now ranks among the top 10 countries for kidnapping worldwide.
“Our numbers suggest that the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal recorded the highest number of kidnaps for ransom in 2005,” said Stoddart. Kidnaps also occur to a lesser, but still frequent, extent in Indian states such as Maharashtra, Punjab, Karnataka, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh.
And, although kidnapping has reduced somewhat in Jammu and Kashmir and Assam over the past year, Asset Security Managers feels that the risk of kidnap in those states still runs high because militants in these states are fighting for independence, and have traditionally used abduction as a way of garnering funds and making political demands.
Over the past 12 months, however, Delhi has become the kidnapping capital of India. The National Crime Records Bureau reveals that more than one-third of all children below the age of 10 kidnapped in the country were abducted in Delhi. With about 102 kidnappings for every million residents, Delhi’s abduction rate is even higher than in Colombia, the infamous kidnapping capital of the world, where 83 kidnappings were reported per million people in 2001.
Kidnappers in India have turned entrepreneurial, say police, and operate just like professional kidnappers elsewhere in the world. For instance, most follow the target for days and gather details about the target’s strengths and weaknesses such as financial status, daily habits and qualitative information.
“They usually work as a team, with clear-cut roles for each member,” said a police official. One who makes the threat calls does not hold the victim as a hostage, and usually the gang that kidnaps does not come forward to receive the ransom. Many gangs work through a network of middlemen who specialize in collecting the ransom and can even wire the money out of the country through illegal fund-transfer channels.
Although increasingly professional criminals are conducting kidnapping these days, “The kind of kidnap that happens in India is still different compared to some of the South American countries,” said Stoddart. In South America, gangs kidnap for money, negotiations take place, and the victim is usually released after the ransom is paid. In India, on the contrary, many of the kidnaps involve small amounts of money, as little as $500, but often end in death. Stoddart believes this means “kidnapping is driven more by poverty”.
The state Bihar is a good example. Considered the poorest state in India, Bihar, with a population of more than 82 million, had the highest rate of reported kidnappings in the country until 2005. Experts say that an ineffective police force and an effectively bankrupt local government creates a favorable climate for kidnapping for ransom. According to government figures, there were 102 cases in Bihar between December 2005 and February 2006. Between 1992 and 2004, 32,085 incidents were recorded by police.
One reason kidnapping is flourishing, said Kishore Bhatnagar, a just-retired deputy director of the Border Security Force who has spent a few years in the borders of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, is that there are other payoffs besides ransom. “There have been instances when kidnapped victims - teenage children, for example - were sold to brothels because the kidnappers couldn’t extract the desired amount of money from the family,” he said. “Similarly, kidnapping for selling of body parts - kidneys, mainly - and even adoption are also common.”
Nevertheless, with the booming Indian economy and the influx of foreign companies and expatriate professionals, the corporate sector and its employees are the most vulnerable today, say experts. According to Howden Insurance Brokers of the United Kingdom, particularly vulnerable are companies that have employees based or traveling overseas, or have high-profile people handling cash, sensitive information and technology.
In fact, according to the insurance company ICICI Lombard, which has just introduced a kidnap and ransom cover in India, key officers of high-tech companies dealing in information technology, telecommunications and biotechnology, and even some of the teaching staff of Ivy League institutions, are now considered high-risk targets of professional kidnappers by insurance companies.
“Although ‘kidnap and ransom’ coverage has been in existence for a while, over the last three or four months there has been a sudden spurt of demand for such policies,” said Sushant Sarin, head (casualty) of Tata-AIG General Insurance. “Enquiries have started coming from not only multinational corporations operating in Indian but also from Indian companies that send their employees to high-risk countries.”
Indeed, India is fast turning into professional kidnappers’ heaven, but many feel that the reasons behind the spurt are not purely economic. According to a former National Security Guards chief, the biggest reason crimes such as kidnapping and robbery are increasing in the country is the lack of an efficient police system.
While the United Nations recommends a ratio of one police officer for 450 residents, India has about 122 police officers for every 100,000 residents: that’s about half the UN-recommended ratio. Moreover, according to Ajai Sahni of the Institute for Conflict Management, Indian forensic facilities are woefully ill-equipped.
India has just two forensic laboratories equipped with DNA testing, whereas in the United States, every district has a DNA-testing laboratory that can gather clues and concrete evidence from minute samples such as a single strand of hair or a drop of sweat. “Inadequate infrastructure and training and orientation in the police forces are big reasons behind the increasing incidence of crime in the country,” said Sahni.
This is why Control Risks, a UK-based provider of kidnap or extortion incident management services, suggests that prevention may be better than cure. Recent kidnapping incidents “indicate that criminal groups have become more capable and bolder in their targeting and more interested in international companies”, it says. “We therefore advise companies to regularly review security around their high-profile management and expatriate personnel in light of the range of possible security risks to their operations.”
