Swindling in Style

It is not for nothing that Guwahati has earned the sobriquet of ‘the crime capital’ of India. There are at least two facets to this infamy. One is that there is more crime committed in this city than anywhere else in the country. The other is that the crimils of Guwahati have demonstrated their ability to conjure new crimes and new styles of committing them. Murder, rape, abduction, cheating and stealing of cars is all passé. True, one cannot always conjure up new crimes never committed before. But one can always do the same things with style—to give it a new look. And that is what a young female banker seems to have done. Olivia Dutta Choudhury of the IndusInd Bank apparently maged to open fake bank accounts in the mes of her husband and seven-month-old daughter and to transfer sizeable amounts from the accounts of other people to these accounts. She kept doing this since 2014. At some point of time recently, she realized that it was time to run. And that is just what she did. She fled to Noida and then to inital. She did not fly out from Guwahati. She went out by train. She even left a bag containing a million rupees at the Guwahati railway station because she knew it would be x-rayed and she would have no way of explaining where she got all that money! We have only one submission to make in the me of law and order: The me, surme and sex of the crimil should make no difference in the punishment of crimils.