The government in West Bengal did not realise that the rape and murder of a postgraduate medical student at one of the premier teaching hospitals in Kolkata would blow up into such a nationwide stir. After all, had followed the standard operating procedure (SOP) that had worked earlier this time too: hush up the incident, shame the victim, intimidate the parents into silence, pre-empt scrutiny by providing a convenient ‘culprit’ and promise “speedy justice”.
Yet this time, it did not work. Maybe because the brave parents refused to accept the police and hospital version that the young doctor had committed suicide. Maybe because too many people actually saw the body—spread-eagled on a hospital cot, naked from the waist down, with grievous injury marks all over—to be “convinced” that it was suicide. Maybe because commiserations from the chief minister and her all-powerful nephew were patently insincere.
Those who do not live in West Bengal (and have not lived there for a long time) are the most shocked and surprised by this heinous rape and murder. Those who live in today’s West Bengal are not. They are angry. Finally. Like the doctors now protesting in medical colleges all over the state, despite the government’s best efforts to tamp down dissent. Because they know practically every state-run educational institution in Bengal is in exactly the same situation.
Which is why the protests over a young doctor’s rape and murder have spread so rapidly across the state, with junior doctors in government-run medical colleges and hospitals again demanding safety and security. Yes, again. Their agitation in 2019 was triggered by two doctors being assaulted by families of patients. But this time it is about the dismal and dangerous conditions within the institutions, not about protection from angry outsiders—a crucial difference.
Matters have obviously been allowed to deteriorate beyond normal tolerance levels. Even for Bengalis, who accepted decades of Communist-driven economic decline and deindustrialisation, persistent bad roads and pathetic civic amenities, not to mention rampant corruption and terror in the hinterland: farmland being commandeered by party goons and dissenters being “disappeared” is the new normal with the police doing nothing, or worse still, complicit.
Every state-run hospital—and attached colleges—is in the control of hoodlums with party affiliations. Most, if not all of them, also have the patronage of the local police as well as higher state government functionaries. How deep the rot runs is evident from the fact that even though the principal of RG Kar Hospital was “forced” to resign by the students, he was promptly reinstated as the principal of another state-run college hospital. Clearly, he has godmothers.
Only when the High Court was seized of the matter was this man prevented from insouciantly moving to yet another institution, presumably with the concurrence of the powers that be. He had been removed and brought back to RG Kar earlier too. The issue is as much about what happens inside the state’s medical colleges as it is about the role of the police in letting matters come to such a pass. And, tellingly, CM Mamata Banerjee holds the home and health portfolios.
Last year a young student of Kolkata’s trendy Jadavpur University was forced to commit suicide after sustained torture by a gang of men with party connections who had free run of the campus and hostel. The boy’s parents were browbeaten into silence, protests by political parties were allegedly disallowed by the students themselves, and remedial measures were supposedly taken by a “proactive” state government. Was there any real change in the situation? No.
That the police and RG Kar authorities had the temerity to try and pass off a clear case of rape-murder as suicide shows how confident both were that the situation could be “handled”. After all, the local media in West Bengal has been remarkably cooperative. Only because the parents and their neighbours refused to be handled and the colleagues of the young victim also decided enough is enough, the government did not succeed in its ploy to hush up the crime.
This begs the question of whether other such abominable incidents elsewhere in Bengal have been buried successfully, giving the perpetrator(s) the confidence to carry out such an astonishingly brutal crime this time within the precincts of a college hospital in Kolkata. Now that the Calcutta High Court has handed over the case to the CBI, there is a chance—just a chance, not a certainty—that the true extent of connivance and complicity will finally come to light.
There is profound public distrust of the state police due to the many instances wherein they have been found wanting. For those who do not live in Bengal or view it from afar with rose-tinted glasses, the most recent case is of the rape and intimidation of women in Sandeshkhali, eerily reminiscent of the 2022 rape in Hanskhali in which the 14-year-old victim later bled to death. Then too, the case was handed to the CBI by the High Court. Hence the déjà vu now.
Even at the start of her very first term in 2012, the CM dismissed the rape of a woman in the trendy area of Park Street as “fabricated” and the police tried to hush it up and shame the victim. On a TV show at the time, Banerjee accused the student of Jadavpur University who questioned her about it of being a CPM cadre. The host of that TV show had criticised the CM for storming out of her show—and ironically that same journalist is now an MP of Banerjee’s party!
Indeed, the usually vocal members of Parliament of West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress have been silent or belatedly shown concern about this reprehensible crime. At least one of those MPs even has a son who is a doctor but took four days to comment on this. Why this reticence when they are quick to scream about outrage elsewhere? Lack of conscience? Amnesia? Or are they so disconnected that they are ignorant about happenings in their own state?
A midnight protest has been planned at three places in Kolkata on the eve of Independence Day to “reclaim the night” for women. It is being taken up in other parts of India too in solidarity with the protestors in Bengal, especially in areas with a sizable Bengali diaspora. But much more than just the night has to be reclaimed, in Bengal. Commandeered institutions have to be reclaimed. The rule of law has to be reclaimed. Civility and decency have to be reclaimed.
The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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