Say you’re an Indian psychopath: a child rapist, a cannibal serial killer, a kidney thief, vagehra vagehra. Here’s how your racket works. You do something so evil that few are willing to compete. Naturally it generates healthy cash flow. But over time, it inevitably comes to public notice. So what do you do? You just pay off the cops to look the other way and keep letting you go under one pretext or another. It’s little different from being a white-collar businessman who invests in political cover. Like Mrs. Lovett’s mince pies, it’s just more revolting.

[Suspect Amit Kumar] was arrested in 1994 on suspicion of running a kidney transplant racket in Mumbai, but jumped bail, changed his name and set up work again from several clinics hidden in residential apartments in Gurgaon… The police raided one of his clinics in 2000, but somehow he was allowed to continue working. Officials neglected to investigate further even after at least one television investigation exposed his work… Apparently tipped off to the raid, Dr. Kumar escaped arrest. Only one of the four main doctors implicated has been detained… the Times of India called on the government to investigate “the nexus between the organ traders and the police…” [Link]

“The police booked him several times, but he kept escaping.” [Link]

Those were no escapes, my friend. Those were freedom bounties, a mere cost of doing business. And we’ll keep getting cops complicit in the most gruesome of crimes until the base pay of the average constable rises to a level remotely related to his/her actual monthly costs.

He flipped through the stacks of [bribe] money… It was all cash, and none of it came from state funds, which weren’t enough to pay for the paper the investigating officers wrote the panchanamas on, or the vehicles that they drove, or the petrol they used, or even for the cups of tea that they and a thousand visitors drank.

–Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra

The cops weren’t the only ones looking the other way. They included pillars of society like doctors, hospitals and the fabled wealthy New York NRI:

Although several kidney rings have been exposed in India in recent years, the police said the scale of this one was unprecedented. Four doctors, five nurses, 20 paramedics, three private hospitals, 10 pathology clinics and five diagnostic centers were involved… The officials suspect that several private hospitals in Delhi and its suburbs were quietly complicit in Dr. Kumar’s work…

“I knew that these people meant to do evil to me. When I woke up, a doctor said my kidney had been removed. He said I would be shot if I ever told anyone what happened.” [Link]

Another problem is the organ industry’s lack of regulation:

“In much of the country, dialysis facilities are poorly developed. [Transplants are] a cheaper alternative [to] recurring expenses for the family…” Some analysts say trafficking is made worse by the absence of regulation of legal donations… [One pair of buyers were] a couple from New York who are of Indian origin…

“How can I support my family now and bring home the bread? I cannot do heavy construction work now — I feel weak and dizzy all the time…” [Link]

The organ snatchers reflect the same phenonemon as the Taliban’s rough justice in frontier Pakistan and the gangsters of Bombay. Where government doesn’t function, entrepreneurs will step in — and not the kind who sit in Aerons, hacking away at PHP.