Liberalisation’s killing machines

The Porsche involved in the accident that claimed two lives in Pune on May 19. PIC/X

Last week's hit-and-run incident in Mumbai, involving a BMW and its inebriated driver who mowed down a woman, yet again shows that more than three decades after the Indian economy was liberalised, a distinctive pattern of living, and dying, and killing has emerged. This pattern has been spawned by a class of citizens possessing enormous wealth to purchase luxury cars and sports utility vehicles, which pack ample power to allow their drivers to race at extraordinary speeds.

These hurricanes-on-wheels were conceived for highways with high or no speed limits, such as Germany's autobahns, in the hope of shrinking space and time. But urban India crawls, imposing a natural constraint on speeding. Swanky cars and SUVs have values other than speed: these are undeniably comfortable to ride, and ostensibly bestow upon their owners a high social status.

For their children, though, the extraordinary speeds these vehicles promise are an irresistible temptation. As night falls and roads empty out, they get behind the wheels, often after partying hard, and thunder down city roads, mistaking them, in their inebriated condition, for the fast lanes of the developed world. The rush of blood, the thrill of speed! Excitement has always been an aspect of liberalisation.

Bang, the accident. Mangled vehicles, dead pedestrians. The driver walks out of his SUV, its protective mechanism having shielded him from injury or death. He runs away. He knows his wealthy papa will work the system, as papas always do, to try to save him from the clutches of law.

It is a collision of two worlds, orbiting at two different speeds, with contrasting economic statuses. Kaveri Nakhwa, who died under the wheels of Mihir Shah's BMW in Mumbai last week, was a fish-seller. She and her husband were on a motorcycle. In May, in Pune, a builder's son, intoxicated and underage, driving a Porsche at 150 km/hour, smashed into a motorcycle, killing two young IT professionals. His father was allegedly working the political network to save his child.

The nightmare-on-wheels sensationally crashed, arguably for the first time, into media headlines eight years after liberalisation. In 1999, Sanjeev Nanda, son of an arms dealer and grandson of a former Indian Navy Chief, returning early morning from a party, drove his BMW, at 140 km/h, into a police checkpoint in Delhi, killing six. Media stories about payouts to an eyewitness and a public prosecutor surfaced. Although convicted, many thought Sanjeev got away lightly.

Since then, the 1999 Delhi hit-and-run case has been replicated elsewhere. In December 2013, a black Aston Martin Rapide, registered with Ambani Ports, swerved into an Audi and a Hyundai sedan at high speed. The Audi's woman driver was quoted seeing a young man rush out of the Aston Martin and jump into one of the SUVs escorting him. It was furiously speculated whether the driver was one of Mukesh Ambani's sons. Next day, a 55-year-old Ambani employee claimed he had taken out the car for a test drive late at night.

In September 2002, film star Salman Khan's Land Cruiser ran over four homeless men sleeping on the pavement, before ramming into a bakery. It was alleged he was drunk and at the wheel. Khan was, in 2015, convicted by a Sessions Court, but its judgement the Bombay High Court overturned. The star was exonerated because his driver claimed it was he who was driving the Land Cruiser at, believe it or not, 30 km/hour.

Forget city roads, the national highway, as smooth as runways, with multiple lanes, is emerging as a veritable death lane. Former Tata Sons Chairman Cyrus Mistry died when the Mercedes he was in crashed at 100 km/hour. Actor and activist Deep Sidhu rear-ended a truck with his Mahindra Scorpio and perished. An internet search reveals a depressingly long list of incidents that bear out the adage - speed thrills but kills. Here is an incredible example: in 2022, one of the three passengers doing a Facebook Live in a BMW, hurtling at 230 km/hour on Uttar Pradesh's Purvanchal Express, urged the driver to clock 300 km/h. Next moment, they were dead as their BMW crashed into a truck.

Look also at the statistics provided by a report of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways: although national and state highways constitute just five per cent of India's total road network, they together accounted for 56.5 per cent of the 4,61,312 accidents in India in 2022. Of the 1,68,491 fatalities in road accidents that year, 60 per cent were on these highways. Over three lakh accidents occurred on straight roads, in contrast to around 55,000 on curved roads. Not surprisingly, over-speeding was the single biggest cause of accidents on national highways - a whopping 72 per cent.

Post-liberalisation India could as well adopt rock group Deep Purple's 1972 song Highway Star as its anthem. The song's opening lines, accompanied with furious guitaring, go: "Nobody gonna take my car/I'm gonna race it to the ground/Nobody gonna beat my car/It's gonna break the speed of sound/Ooh, it's a killing machine…" This song celebrates individualism, which in India is often without restraint, without a concern for others, in disregard of rules, as is so evident in the economic sector.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.
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