More Drug Crime?

Seeing these people in the streets so poor, all these people setting up their shabby stalls hocking whatever they can, these road workers shoveling concrete with their bare feet, not to mention these massive slums, as the Indians call their shantytowns, and the little slums set up on sidewalks and in alleyways – seeing all of this on my way to work, I was thinking of how my Mumbaiker acquaintances and my guidebooks are so fond of saying how little street crime there is in Mumbai, how we’re not in danger when walking down the street, how these suburban kids in Lockhandwala are joking with each other as they walk right past a slum.

Why aren’t these slums overrun with drug crime like the favelas of Brazil or the inner cities of the U.S.? Is this just not the Indian way? Is it that the Indian way is to work hard instead of pursuing crime’s quick buck? But isn’t selling drugs also hard work? I mean, it’s risk your life work. Maybe it’s because Indians don’t take as easily to recreational drugs as do, let’s say, Americans. All these Hindus, Muslims, and even these devout Christians aren’t traditionally of the variety to take drugs – to do so is to pollute one’s body. To pollute one’s body is to destroy different ideas of universal harmony. Of course Americans take easily to recreational drugs. There was a lot of pot smoked at my high school, and I know that the cheap schwag marijuana smoked in my high school was trafficked through inner city St. Louis. Dudes are dying down there in inner city St. Louis over trash bags full of schwag. So if Indians tend to not take to recreational drugs, there won’t be a large domestic market for these drugs. If there’s no domestic market, there is no immediate incentive to sell drugs, or to traffic in the drugs to be sold.

Maybe morals are just too deeply rooted into the Indian psyche to do drugs, or to sell drugs and kill in the name of. Your dharma, in Hinduism, comprises the rights and obligations of a person in a perfect society, and to act according to one’s dharma contributes to this ideal, harmonious society. It would be a stretch to say that wasting time on the selfish pursuit of getting high contributes to this ideal harmonious society – doing drugs is and always was a selfish pursuit, not an altruistic one. Selling drugs and killing in the name of, these hardly contribute to a harmonious society – but then again, neither does the brand of Hindu nationalism that involves slaughtering Muslims.

There are no easy answers, but I do believe that the crime rates of the slums of Mumbai are much lower than the crime rates of the slums of St. Louis or Rio de Janeiro. There are the high profile gangsters of Mumbai – like Dawood Ibrahim – but they’re in the business of extorting money from rich people, not drug trafficking.

Comments

JHerina said…
This is really good. I like it.