Devangshu Datta: Payoffs of an open society

VIEWPOINT

Between four and five people die in road accidents on the streets of Delhi everyday. London logs about 10 road fatalities — but that’s every year. By that reckoning, the streets of London are roughly 180 times as safe as the streets of Delhi. Since London has higher traffic densities, it is even safer in terms of the number of kilometres between fatalities.

We can make this judgement with some confidence because millions of people travel daily on various modes of transport in London and Delhi. So we have large, reliable samples. Nevertheless, I suspect that most residents of London and of Delhi would be surprised at the orders of magnitude of difference in road safety.

When it comes to terrorist attacks, how much more likely is it that a resident of Delhi will get blown up than a resident of London? This is a much more difficult assessment. Terrorists have hit Delhi more often than they have hit London but still not often enough to make statistical assumptions and quantify the likelihood of being blown up.

Similarly, it’s difficult to make quantitative judgements about the likelihood of terrorist attacks in Islamabad or Madrid or Bali. All these places have seen terrorist attacks in the recent past. But terrorist attacks simply don’t occur with sufficient frequency to number-crunch with actuarial confidence.

Yet the public at large does have clear perceptions about the relative dangers of these places. Most people believe that Pakistan is more dangerous than Bali and Bali is more dangerous than Spain. This includes official assessments.

Government travel advisories and tourist traffic numbers suggest that Pakistan is rated more dangerous than Bali and Spain less so than Bali. Neither Bali nor Spain is flagged as seriously dangerous. Far more tourists visit Bali and Spain than they visit Pakistan. However, the Bali bombing actually killed four times as many people as the Marriot assault last Saturday.

Travel advisories are presumably distilled from qualitative judgements formed by diplomats posted in the respective countries. These diplomats would have a fair idea of the level of security, the mood of the local populace, etc. Nevertheless, the advisory reflects an opinion and it isn’t necessarily borne out by statistics. For example, Britain doesn’t warn its citizens that it is 200 times as risky to be on a street in Delhi.

That difference in perception is starkly evident when it comes to global reactions to the Delhi and Islamabad bombings. Pakistan was already flagged as dangerous. Post-bombing, the reaction from would-be travellers has been panic.

The Delhi bombings, on the other hand, have been shrugged off, much as the Ahmedabad and Jaipur bombings were. Tourists continue to come to India and multitudes of expats continue to live here.

Further, the Australian cricket tour to India is on despite the timing of the recent assault just before the tour. The Champions Trophy was cancelled on the basis of perceptions even before the Marriot was bombed.

Now, India has at least two dozen actively violent terrorist groups operating across the country. There are daily shootouts and bombings, CEOs are lynched by their employees, communal riots occur at regular intervals. These are all diligently reported on both by the local press and foreign correspondents. India then may well be just as dangerous a place as Pakistan.

The difference in perception is one of the payoffs from an open society. It translates into better quality of life — assuming that one doesn’t actually become a morgue statistic. If India wins, an Aussie pal of mine will foot the bill for an evening of Shiraz, spare ribs and drunken beef. Or else, I’ll have to reach for my wallet. It would all cost a lot more and have to be done clandestinely in Islamabad.