• Tehelka, Vol. 4, Issue 6, Feb. 17, 2007, New Delhi

Shortly before New Year’s Day, police began to unearth the remains of at least 19 people, mostly children, from a backyard drain of a businessman’s home in Noida, a middle-class satellite city of New Delhi. The homeowner, Mohinder Singh Pandher, and his male servant, Surendra Koli, were jailed after the gruesome discovery. In late March, authorities formally charged Koli with one of the murders and claimed he confessed to 15 others. They added that he dismembered his victims and experimented with cannibalism. The killing spree may have gone on for more than two years. Investigators concluded that Pandher was unaware of the killings, but he was charged with luring prostitutes to his house, one of whom ended up as Koli’s victim.

The shocking tale quickly became the latest indictment of Indian law enforcement. Relatives of the victims claim that the police ignored them repeatedly when they tried to report their children missing. Eventually, one frustrated but determined parent took the police to court. It was only under a judge’s order that the local authorities agreed to investigate. The ghastly remains were then uncovered.

Why did India’s police force show such indifference? Law enforcement there is beset with a familiar set of problems: bribery of underpaid officers, police ties to organized crime and corrupt politicians, and officers’ frequent refusals to file crime reports and launch investigations, because doing so would add to the crime figures in their jurisdictions. Nor did it help that all of the victims were poor. The Noida killers preyed on migrant families from impoverished rural towns who worked as laborers and servants in the city’s middle-class homes. These families had no influential friends or...