The Expanding Art of Theft

A news item woke me up out of my soporific sleep on a Sunday morning. Apparently, thieves used gas cutters, perhaps even cranes, to steal an entire bridge overnight. This was a 70-foot-long steel bridge, weighing over 10 tonnes, built more than 40 decades ago, over a canal in the steel township, Korba in Chhattisgarh. As can be imagined, this herculean & bold overnight robbery must have involved multiple people and the offenders who were trying to sell the iron as scrap were apprehended early by the local police. One had heard about currency, liquor, drugs & other psychotropic substances disappearing from police malkhanas and gold disappearing from strong rooms of temples and the Customs authorities, but this was a totally different ‘heavy duty’ ball game.

These days, it is no longer about shoplifting, physical theft, chain snatching, pick pocketing and other kinds of petty thefts. The same went for friends who requested to borrow your books, and later, you are left wondering how to ask for them and, more importantly, whom to ask! Apparently, these days you need to get a kick out of the very act of stealing. And what better than stealing someone’s identity? So there are newer, sophisticated forms of chori like digital arrest, cyber-crimes, money laundering using mule accounts, etc. Apparently, the literate, knowledgeable elite of society find themselves trapped in a covert arrest operation by fraudsters, lasting several days, to be sufficiently scared to transfer their hard-earned funds to the scamsters’ accounts. The amounts being quoted in the press are designed to strike alarm bells in the minds of tax authorities. The law enforcement agencies are themselves grappling with millions of mule accounts, enabling fraudsters to siphon funds in layered financial transactions through these accounts to multiple jurisdictions and through various modes of transfers, to throw them off scent. In fact, once routed through cryptocurrency, it is almost impossible to track the flow and ultimate destination.

Readers would also recall the brazen but slick robbery heist of 8 pieces of historical jewellery valued at USD 108 million, in broad daylight and within a few minutes at the heavily fortified Louvre, Paris, in October last year. Apparently, the thieves not only had thievery in mind but also to cock a snook at the heavy security. INTERPOL’s Stolen Works of Art database has 57,000 stolen pieces of jewellery, paintings and other items. Forged pieces of art, with remarkable likeness to the original, are fraudulently sold every year for millions of dollars. Our temple heirlooms, beautiful and antique artefacts, find their way to private collectors across the world and surface only when the successors place them for auction. Auction houses provide desired certification by following due diligence, such as The Art Loss Register, the leading service provider for the art world that maintains the world’s largest database of stolen art, antiques and collectables. Once registered, you can list a missing piece of art, browse through other stolen pieces and determine if an art piece is stolen or not. This site offers certification services to a potential buyer to validate that the art in question is not a stolen item.

However, all these transgressions seem inconsequential and have been overshadowed in recent times by more brazen geopolitical strategies, after a period of lull, post the Second World War. The President of a country picked up another of his compatriots in a stealth mission and smuggled him out of his country, to face trial for suspected drug cartel and organised crime. In much of the wars that have taken place in the interim period, smaller, targeted missions were triggered when the bigger & more resourceful countries covertly supported independent, democratic governments, or sought to combat what was then perceived to be the scourge of communism through covert means or supported humanitarian missions in countries like South Korea, Taiwan, etc. Some wars were lost, at great loss, not just of face but also men & resources as in Vietnam, Tibet and Afghanistan while some were won.

The reasons for such overt or covert operations may be many, but the real one behind every military action is invariably the greed for resources. In other words, it is a refined version of stealing a country or arm-twisting a country to suit your ends. Uncle Sam has earned itself the dubious distinction, time and again, of most often trespassing blatantly on mineral or oil-rich countries, under the guise of stealth nuclear weapons programs, drugs & narcotics trafficking, terrorism, etc. Based on historical data, although the Russians detonated the most powerful ‘Tsar bomba’ known so far, the maximum number of bombings on other countries has been conducted by the US, and it is the only country to have used nuclear bombs in a war. Not to be left far behind, the Russians have been emboldened in the recent past, with the successful minor transgressions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, to launch a full-scale attack on multiple fronts, which continues till date, entering its fifth year on February 24 2026. The European countries under the umbrella of NATO, China, North Korea, Israel and many more seek excuses, other than self-preservation, to enter the war zone.

Many years ago, Zhuangzi (a collection of anecdotes, allegories, parables, and fables that are often humorous or irreverent in nature, dating back to almost 2,500 years ago), and considered one of the two most foundational texts of Taoism, said, ‘the petty thief is imprisoned, but the big thief becomes a feudal lord. Nowhere does this ring more true than in the act of stealthily stealing countries!

Views expressed are personal. The writer is a retired IRS officer who served as the Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana