Crime in New Delhi :

Indian Minister blames migrants

INDIA: India's Home Minister Monday blamed migrants for crime in New Delhi after a series of gang rapes in the last month that has shocked residents of the capital.

"Crime takes place because Delhi attracts a large number of migrants," said Home Minister P. Chidambaram, whose ministry is responsible for law and order in the sprawling city of 14 million people.

"There are a large number of unauthorised colonies and these migrants who settle in unauthorised colonies carry a kind of behaviour that is unacceptable in any modern city, so crimes do take place," he told reporters in New Delhi.

The remarks drew fire from political opponents and are likely to cause discomfort in the ruling Congress party, which is out of power in the populous states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where many migrants come from.

Bihar regional party leader Lalu Prasad Yadav accused the minister of "passing the buck for his failure" to control crime in the city. Chidambaram's comments came after an 18-year-old woman in a New Delhi suburb was forced into a car and raped by four men at the weekend before being released.

It was the fourth case of gang rape in a month in the city and comes amid a media focus on other crimes of robbery and violent break-ins in the capital region.

The attacks on women are seen by the media as part of a rising tide of crime in New Delhi, but Chidambaram said that crime rates were actually declining.

Hundreds of thousands of people migrate from other Indian states each year to New Delhi in search of jobs and schooling for their children, with some of the most impoverished finding shelter in make-shift camps.

In India's commercial capital Mumbai, migrants are also routinely blamed for crime and even disease by the far-right and Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena political party, which fights for the rights of local Marathi people. New Delhi, AFP