Transnational Gold Smuggling in Chennai International Airport: A Content Analysis

Gold smuggling is a fancy word which everyone comes across in cinema, TV and newspaper. It is a transnational crime that happens via land, sea and airways. Transnational gold smuggling is an unorganized crime which is executed by the smuggling syndicates internationally by recruiting carriers/couriers – in Tamil ‘kuruvi’ or ’kokku’ as code word. These carriers all are not smugglers by profession. The gold smuggled in to Indian territories are mostly from West Asian countries like UAE, Saudi Arabia, etc; South and Southeast Asian countries like Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, etc. Chennai city international airport is one such hot spot, prone to rampant transnational gold smuggling. The modus operandi (MO) handled by the smugglers to hide the gold in this transit crime are seriously self-harming such as smuggling inside human body (rectum, stomach, etc). Gold smuggling cases in the Chennai airport has become a series of endless crime, even during the corona pandemic emergency lockdown. The gold smuggling cases through airports are caught and dealt by customs inside the airport according to Customs Act 1962; and by DRI officials in and outside the airport. The objective of this paper is to profile and analysis of the MO of this transnational crime. This paper is based on latent content analysis a qualitative methodology. The authors have collected secondary data published in newspapers (Indian dailies) from the October 2018 to March 2020. The data collected are ascertained and presented for readers to infer profile and analysis of the MO of the gold smuggling in India.