The Bombay police have arrested some well-known individuals on the charge of supplying incendiary articles for use in recent communal riots in the city. It is not for us to say whether the evidence in the possession of the authorities can stand scrutiny in a court of law, if and when the cases come up for hearing. Some of the arrested persons have in the past been charged with being smugglers. This again is not an issue on which we can or wish to pronounce. But we would wish to draw attention to the larger problem which no one interested in the survival of the Indian state can any longer ignore. Smuggling into and out of the country has on all accounts assumed such dangerous proportions as to threaten not only a number of industries but also the nation’s social and political fabric. It is widely believed that smuggling equals India’s official trade. The profits can easily be imagined. They run into hundreds of crores of rupees. So the capacity of smugglers, even relatively small ones, to bribe politicians and administrators is obvious. This capacity is fully utilized. The psychology of criminals is different from that of businessmen, however keen they might be to buy their way into corridors of power. The former tend to be far more “generous” than the latter, as has been established by any number of investigations in the West.
The kind of evidence that can stand scrutiny in a court of law of the connection between smugglers on the one hand and officials of various kinds and politicians of different hues on the other is naturally thin. Such evidence is hard to get and our investigating agencies have neither been sufficiently enthusiastic nor sufficiently efficient. Perhaps they have been hampered in their work by officials and politicians well disposed towards smugglers. But it cannot be seriously contested that among the economic crimes, smuggling has had the most deleterious effect in certain states such as Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Bihar and Bengal. Punjab, as we pointed out some months back, was converted into a smugglers’ paradise long before it was sought to be converted into a human slaughter house by Akali extremists. Finally even the government has woken up to the fact that smugglers provided the means for the purchase of weapons abroad by the extremists and channel for their transfer to Amritsar and other important centres of extremist activity. Similar elements are said to have been active in the recent communal disturbances in Bombay. Having collected substantial sums, some of the criminals too crave for “social acceptance and respectability” and one of the means they are known to adopt is to espouse extremist communal causes. Punjab and Bombay provide the illustrations regardless of whether or not specific charges against specific individuals are true. The position cannot be different in other parts of the country.