What Does it Take to be Murdered in India? Authored By Sherin Sunny

In 2018, I watched “Ratsasan”, a tamil film and was convinced one needn’t be at the receiving end of someone’s anger or dislike to be murdered. The movie revolves around a cop investigating gruesome murders committed by a psychopath, who targets teen girls to avenge his past trauma. I was convinced that even if I didn’t do anything illegal or immoral, I could be a murder victim. While I go about with my daily activities, I might be checking off every criteria in a psychopath’s reason to murder someone.

According to the 2020 report by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 1241 murder cases were Blind murders or the motive was unknown. This is a solid 4.23% of all the murders reported in 2020. Bihar alone had 220 murder cases and had the most number of cases, followed by Jharkhand in this category.
In absolute numbers, Uttar Pradesh (UP) has been emerging as the state with the most number of murder cases between 2017 and 2020, with an average share of 13.76% in all the murders in the country. This is largely attributed to the volume of the population in the state. Thus, a good measure to observe the incidence of murder is to look into the murder rate. According to the NCRB, murder rate is the number of murders per one lakh population. In simple terms, it explains the number of people possibly being murdered in a group of one lakh people.
The murder rate across the country has been a constant 2.2 murders per one lakh population between 2017 and 2020. All the four years saw Jharkhand with the highest murder rate averaged out to 4.3 for all these years. In 2020, Jharkhand emerged as the state with the highest rate of murder with a murder rate of 4.2 murders per one lakh population. This was followed by Haryana and Assam with 3.9 and 3.3 murders per one lakh population, respectively.

 

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The key victims or murder across the country are adult males. Below is a representation of the distrubution of victims across states and union territories.

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Although around 4% of murders in 2020 had no motive or motives are unknown,the remaining cases can be categorised in 19 different categories that the NCRB has identified. Murder often arises from deep seated emotions. These emotions could be instantaneous as in a murder arising from road rage or one that has been nurtured by the killer for months. Dispute is the most common reason for murder. This includes property / land disputes, water disputes, road rage and accidents, family disputes, money disputes and petty quarrels. If we consider reports since 2017, dispute has been the main reason for murders and a significant difference in the number of cases can be observed compared to other reasons.

 

 

With respect to motives, the following states had the highest number of cases under each category of the movies :

As per report by NCRB, the chargesheeting rate in India, in 2020, for murder cases is 85.3%. This means only 85.3% of the total reported cases have been chargesheeted. A chargesheet is an official document in which a police officer includes details of a crime that a person is accused to have committed. One can be brought under trial in the court of law only if a chargesheet is filed. And this brings us to the conviction rate in murder cases. The conviction rate for murder cases under IPC in 2020 was 44.1%. This implies that the remaining 55.9% of cases aren’t addressed justly. Either the wrong person was arrested or the right person was arrested but was not punished due to lack of evidence.

 

While we’ve identified motives of murder, it is important to understand what can be done to reduce the murder cases in the country.
“Crime is a highly complex phenomenon that changes across cultures and across time. Increased population, technological advancements and heightened competition for economic resources have brought about change in crime and its pattern as well and this has thrown new challenges to the law enforcement agencies.“, explains Vivek Gogia IPS, Director of NCRB in the 2021 report by NCRB.
Discussions could lead us to believe increasing literacy, standard of living from a socio-economic perspective and making laws more stringent could be deterrents to commit murder. We could also take a philosophical route and factor in the level of morality existing in the society to this equation. However, this is not an exhaustive list. Consider the infamous Sr. Abhaya murder case from 1992, in which the prime convicts are a priest and a nun - both who are highly educated, expected to have a better moral compass and are aware of the stringent laws in place. The verdict for this case was passed after 28 long years.
Improving the standard of living can be a key way to reduce crime amongst the economically vulnerable sections of the society. A study by IMF in Central America identified that increased economic activities leads to higher productivity, which increases the overall income of individuals and thereby their standard of living.

With an improvement in their standard of living, individuals are incentivised to engage in more and more legal activities. They are more aware of the repercussions of being involved in illegal activities. However, in the most common reasons listed out earlier we can observe most of the murders occur out of deep rooted emotions and it is not solely out of economic reasons. In the Indian Penal Code (IPC), Under Section 302, punishment for murder includes the death penalty or life imprisonment with a fine. Under this section the offence committed includes both intention and knowledge. There is another section 304 that deals with culpable homicide wherein offences may include both intention and knowledge or only knowledge without any intention. Under Section 304, punishment includes imprisonment for life or imprisonment for a term of ten years and fine or rigorous imprisonment depending on the gravity of the offence. Despite having such stringent laws, a main reason one can still engage in violent crimes like murder is the low conviction rate as mentioned above. The probability of an individual to repeat an offence or the recidivism rate was 4.8% in 2020. The delayed process to close a case due to lack of evidence or poor bureaucracy or the loopholes in the system is a strong reason to commit and repeat violent offences such as murder.

 

Disclaimer : All statistics relating to murder in India have been collated from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) and has been visualised by the author. The statistics provided by NCRB are include only the reported cases across the states and union territories. There is a possibilty that there several unreporterd cases and the author acknowledges this limitation. This could be discussed in another article in the future. Further the NCRB statistics do not reflect any socio-economic or political factors in place. However, the author has tried to draw possible insights and connections in the light of existing literature which are cited in the article. In the data used, Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh have combined statistics. Similarly, Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu have combined statistics.