It is a sad bit of news that India has now been featured in the 12th rank of the 2010 Impunity Index of unsolved journalist murders.
The brazen daylight killing of veteran crime reporter Jyotirmoy Dey of Mid-Day Times has shocked that city. While riding on a motorcycle, he was surrounded and shot five times. This means that organized crime is no longer operating by its own rules: Avoid harm to female relatives of rivals. Don't kill police officers. Keep off journalists. The stakes are getting bigger and established crime-lords who are in 'exile' overseas are less able to control their operations. This was experienced in the US after the Italian Mafia weakened and ceded power to the central and south American gangs, the Jamaican posses, the Russian and East European mafia and several lesser outfits. Goa is ripe and ready to suffer fallout from the Bombay criminal chaos for the following reasons: Funding for crime comes from Bombay. The Land mafia is seeing the vast areas in Goa they can grab. The Mining Mafia is raking in untold wealth and will not brook any popular opposition. The Digambar Kamat Govt is impotent in key areas of administration. The politicians in Goa comprise of well known criminals and abettors. The classical politician-criminal-police nexus. The Goa police have been ineffective against crime from liberation time. Lately they have indeed become part of it. The Goa CID has a conviction rate of zero percent. It will start with the murder of one courageous journalist (I mean the section that cannot be bought) to intimidate the entire press fraternity. That always works and democracy will suffer as a consequence of that threat. If Aires Rodrigues can be attacked in a restaurant in broad daylight, why not a journalist? Without any delay, prominent citizens should form a statewide "Committee to Protect Journalists" and save lives that are important to the functioning of democracy. Roland Toronto.
