Bengaluru is only just recovering from the latest murder to have emanated from its silicon fabric, that of a woman by her techie husband. Experts say that with the IT revolution, Bengaluru may have got global recognition but the change has come with a lot of social upheaval which has catapulted this jewel of the south to the top of the crime graph. KESTUR VASUKI talks to a cross section of localites to make sense of this rising madness in its well-heeled population
Bengaluru was always known for its cool climes and cooler people. A warm-hearted, lovely-weathered city with cosmopolitan ambitions, something it savoured for a very long time till the IT revolution came knocking at its door, to eventually change its world forever — and not in a good kind of way.
Today, Bengaluru is reeling under serial crimes by its well-heeled population, strangely but mostly emanating from the IT sector, the bread and butter industry for Karnataka. Its roads are clogged, its celestial temperature has risen several degrees on the met scale and there is more pollution than greenery dotting its sylvan surroundings.
“The enchanting ambre that used to hue our evening skies is today bloodier, bolder and more wantonly dripping with shocking murders, the kind we had never conceived could happen in our city. And quite alarmingly, it has taken less than a decade for Bengaluru to spiral on the list of lawless cities,” Bengaluru localite K Rao says with a lot of regret.
He is not alone in being regularly shocked by the news of murders hitting the local newspapers, the latest being the one planned and executed by MG Gokul of his wife. That Gokul is not a one-off case is what has been worrying the locals who are even today trying hard to adjust to Bengaluru’s changing economic and social fabric which many locals say, is being steadily being torn apart by the likes of Gokul.
The love saga of MG Gokul “Baba”, a Bengaluru-based techie who sent passengers of three aircraft into panic by making a hoax call, turned out to be a story of love and betrayal — betrayal by his wife and his obsession for his friend’s wife who lived next door in a posh apartment at HSR layout.
The 34-year-old techie plotted and posed as a baba, an astrologer and even an Archbishop as he sought to uncover his wife Anuradha’s extra-marital affair and get rid of her so that he could reunite with his beloved from high school.
The police tell you that he stole the passport of his friend and bought a mobile on which he sent messages to the Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) in Bengaluru and to IGI, Delhi, saying: ‘Islamic State Wins. Air France to Paris and Haj Flight to Jeddah will be blasted on air’. ‘Third target for today: lufthansa to Germany’. ‘IS wins, will spoil India. Stop if you can Allah’. ‘Get ready to see the fireworks above the sky today’. ‘Three bombs kept at Airport Cargo sector are ready to blast at 3 am, IS wins’. ‘Not for today, it will be tomorrow at 3 am’.
He has since confessed to killing his wife in July. As the love story goes, Gokul, a native of Kerala, fell in love with Prema (name changed) in school. They joined an engineering college in Trissur. later, Gokul shifted to Delhi and Prema to Tiruchirapalli. While working in Delhi, Gokul fell in love with Anuradha, got married to her and they also had a baby.
Meanwhile, Prema married Siju Jose and moved to Bengaluru. A few months later, Gokul and Anuradha, too, moved to Bengaluru and got a house in the same colony as Prema-Jose.
The two couples’ marital bliss didn’t last long. Gokul found out that his wife, a teacher, was having an affair with her student but chose not to go for a divorce because of their two-year-old child. It was then that he emotionally reconnected with Prema who had been contemplating a divorce.
Gokul made his wife confess about her affair in writing, using fake religious e-mail IDs and conversing with his devout wife whom he even persuaded to send nude photos of her and her partner.
He then got into the good books of Anu’s father by disclosing his daughter’s affair to him. On a July evening, he got Anuradha drunk, smashed her head with a Ganesh idol and killed her. In initial investigations, he got a clean-chit with his father-in-law vouching for him.
The second part of the story started when Gokul could not stop his yearning for Prema and saw her husband Jose as a hindrance. He stole his passport, bought a sim card and made hoax calls to the airports in Jose’s name. He was caught within a day after making these calls.
When the police started the trace, they first caught a shocked Jose who denied any involvement. A detailed pinpointing of location led them to Gokul. After 10 hours of questioning, he not only confessed to making the hoax calls but also to murdering his wife.
This story has sent fresh shockwaves among Bengaluruians but the city has, for a decade now, been simmering with all kinds of crimes earlier unknown to its DNA.
Gokul kind of murder stories are being reported regularly. Experts insist that this cosmopolitan city has undergone a metamorphosis beyond identity or reason. Bengaluru’s growth beyond borders has exerted tremendous pressure on the population. Its original 850 sq km radius is spreading faster than one can imagine, gobbling up many towns and villages in its quest to accommodate lakhs and lakhs of incoming people from across the globe.
With no base in the city, and a stint away from any kind of familial responsibilities, restrictions or values, first-time crime by the well-heeled and well-educated population with loads of money and stress has started festering only a knock away.
“With the IT revolution has also come the emotional revolution where stability is a stranger to existence,” says a local anthropologist, blaming the torn social fabric for the city’s growing woes which have doused the shock value of the serial crimes of passion being reported from the city.
Here are some which convulsed Bengaluru by their audacity. A 31-year-old stabbed his estranged wife, also an engineer, 11 times after she refused to jointly apply for a loan. A 30-year-old suspected his wife, a banker, of an affair, so he smothered her and hanged himself.
A 25-year-old raped and strangled his wife, an HR manager, because, a week after their marriage, she refused him sex. A 32-year-old believed his wife, a school teacher, was not being nice to his parents, so he strangled her and slit her throat. A married 31-year-old software engineer-turned-yoga-instructor killed his Israeli lover and kept her body in a refrigerator for 18 days.
After a woman killed her techie husband, she took help from her parents Ramachandra Reddy and Vijayalakshmi and a 22-year-old cousin Vasudev Reddy to dispose of 36-year-old Keshav’s body next to a lake near Sreenivasapur in Kolar district. The police arrested her later using the mobile tower location data.
In September 2013, Madhusudhan YG flew into a murderous, psychotic rage, grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed his wife Roopa 49 times and then tried to hang and burn himself, When that failed, he jumped from a balcony to death. Madhusudhan was a software engineer.
These are only some of the horrible crime stories Bengalurians have witnessed around their fabled techies who are primarily responsible for making Bengaluru a global brand name.
Many come from modest backgrounds and small towns, vaulting from crammed up schools to be plugged into a global 24/7/365 workplace of extreme pressures. The reward is a piece of the great Indian dream — to be able to buy a flat and a car by the time they turn 30.
The story of the calm and serene pensioner’s paradise Bengaluru, known for its pleasant climate throughout the year, transformed along with its changed population.
As the city got the name “IT hub” outsiders slowly made Bengaluru their home away from home. From being a calm, serene and polished town, in its quest of a new identity Bengaluru absorbed many cultures and ethnic groups who came here looking for a new identity and social strata.
With a population of over 11 million, Bengaluru is now a new town in step with a changing global economy. It is showcased as India’s face of change, a super power in IT and ITES services. Many IT companies both domestic and multinational, have set shop here due to its liberal policies which also meant attracting migrants in search of jobs. In the process, many Information Technology Enabled Service (ITES), Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) and legal process outsourcing (lPO), the sub-segments of the business process outsourcing industry, have set up base here, parking a large skilled population from across the globe. Even though Bengaluru has many industries in other sectors, the IT industry has churned a massive change impacting the social fabric of the city.
Oldtimers will tell you that Bengaluru is a 475-year-old city which is in extreme stress now due to widespread socio-economic and cultural changes. These have impacted not only locals but also posed big challenges for administrators. The growing crime rate apart from lifestyle changes have hit Bengaluru like never before because of the IT influx.
Mohan Rao, a resident of old Bengaluru in Chamarajapete, feels terribly hit by the changing cityscape. He says that the IT revolution has changed the landscape of his city and created more monsters than can be handled.
“The IT industry has brought in a neo-rich middle class with huge lifestyle issues. We have to pay more for everything, including house rent and essential commodities. Apart from facing an increased crime rate, we have to face the problem of unending population influx,” he points out.
Even though there are no official statistics, more than four million people are directly and indirectly depend on IT and ITES sectors in Bengaluru.
Karnataka is the IT hub of India and home to the fourth largest technology cluster in the world. As of 2014-15, a total export from the State aggregated $52.02 billion, which is approximately 13.01 per cent of India’s total exports. Karnataka has 47 IT/ITES SEZs, three software technology parks and dedicated IT investment regions. In fact, more than 40 per cent of Bengaluru’s population directly and indirectly depends on IT and other related sectors. The city has more than 5.5 million cars and every second person owns a four-wheeler today which has completely clogged the roads.
According to Professor RS Deshpande, former director of Institute for Social and Economic Change and Rajiv Gandhi National Fellow of ICSSR, Bengaluru acquired the tag of India’s Silicon Valley but not without the negative externalities. He says the composition of the workforce in terms of age, gender, place of origin, education levels as also skill sets, flow of money, wealth preferences and lifestyle, have changed significantly over the last decade.
“These lifestyle changes have increased wants and ambitions wantonly. One established paradigm that from ambition stems stress, and resultantly social stress, is fast increasing in Bengaluru. Palpable inequality in income sources, wealth accumulation and consumerism have polluted the minds of even good individuals. Top that with work deadlines, work place social tensions, peer competition and inflated personal ambitions and it’s the best case scenario for criminalisation of good minds. Bangalore is undergoing these travails that have no parallel in human history, it’s that chip of brain which remains beyond understanding”, he adds.
Krishna Kannur, an IITian, feels that Bengaluru has lost its culture and needs to be revived. “The differences in culture have become apparent. There is no effort from the migrants or locals to mingle and bring in any kind of uniformity,” he asserted.
Krishna argues that due to the IT revolution, the economic profile of Bengaluru has changed. People have more money to spend. This has resulted in migration of other service categories to Bengaluru, further complicating the social fabric.
“We have working couples. They work at different times. Thus, the family culture is slowly disappearing. This has resulted in estranged relationships and an increase in crimes related to murders, drugs, extra marital relationships etc. This is a vicious cycle that increases the crime rate,” Krishna explains.
A senior police officer who is involved in the investigation of high-profile cases here quotes NCRB figures to show how crime in Bengaluru has steadily climbed, that too in categories hitherto unknown to Bengaluruians. He says, the sheer load of criminality has made policing difficult and complicated with first-time murderers surfacing every now and then.
The officer says that crime of passion emanating from extra-marital affairs is particularly burgeoning. Most, he points out, have nuclear families and come here to settle down.
He attributes the increasing crime to eroding family values and rising ambitions. He says all men involved in recent crimes were married and worked in companies that techies aspire to join and most of them had problems dealing with a working wife.
Academic studies of the tech sector reveal how the bountiful employment it offers women is circumscribed by old gender roles. Nearly half of all IT employees recruited are now women, but by middle management that figure falls by half; in top management, no more than 8 per cent are women, according to industry data.
“It has not been possible for the women in the IT sector to challenge the structural inequalities and gender relations respectively at the workplace and at home,” says a 2012 study by the Indian Statistical Institute.
Professor R Siva Prasad of the Anthropology Department at the University of Hyderabad, says eroding family values has impacted the change on societies, especially in growing cities like Bengaluru. He says, these changes lead to cultural conflicts with traditional society and in the new culture (corporate) conflict becomes very apparent. “Naturally, it also affects the way of life of the neo-rich which is not natural looking at their backgrounds. It is a cultural vacuum of values. Bengaluru has always accepted migration with a cosmopolitan outlook. But the new IT culture with money and intense consumerism is the culprit that increases the unrest in the mind reflecting on society,” he says.
“These IT professionals are settlers and most of them live in apartments in city extensions away from their families hoping to do many things. They have neither traditional values nor other values. They always want to live in a free world,” he adds.
Once a peaceful haven, Bengaluru now has become a victim of the new IT culture which has exerted a lot of pressure in the process of transformation. The question that remains in the mind of every native Bengaluruian is why should he or she pay a price for this new economic order which has stirred the hornet’s nest of development.