This is no country — or state — for young girls. Their childhood is as devoid of protection and attentive care as their adult life is shorn of value and the sense of being human. A young mother confesses to killing her two infant daughters, presumably driven by the torture in her in-laws’ house for having borne only girls. Another woman leaves behind her two young daughters when she commits suicide after being branded a ‘woman of loose morals’ by an informal ‘court’ convened by United Central Refugee Council, the local representative body in the refugee colony of Khudiram Pally in Manicktala. In the first tragedy, society is faceless, its condemnation locked in the memory of the miserable mother. But in the second, society has a face, and a voice, in the form of a local body, which, amazingly, is allowed to function like a shalishi court within the city of Calcutta.

Ratna Saha burnt herself to death after the ‘court’ had condemned her and insisted that her husband leave the locality with his family. She had allegedly eloped with a local bully, reportedly a criminal who has connections with politicians. But her husband, who had informed the police that she was missing, had found her at his in-laws’ place, and brought her back. But his sensitive treatment of his wife, his objections to the neighbours’ intrusion into what he felt was a private matter, his plea that his daughters needed their mother, had no effect on the ‘sentence’ of the ‘court’. A ‘loose’ woman was undesirable as a neighbour; if her husband would not dump her, the colony would turn the whole family out. The man with whom Ratna is supposed to have eloped was neither questioned nor penalized. Her husband suggested that this man had coerced and threatened Ratna, but like everything else he said, it was made irrelevant by the collective aggression against the woman.

What has now happened to the two little girls and their father is an exact measure of the cruelty and aggressiveness with which Indian society treats women. But there is a local and regional colouring to the story, which should not be overlooked. The kangaroo court succeeded in claiming its victim within Calcutta, and its functioning is being condoned by the local member of the legislative assembly and the councillor. The former is of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the latter of the Revolutionary Socialist Party. The incident makes visible exactly those connections, cowardices, abuses of collective power and the political endorsement of all this that have made West Bengal top the list of states in crimes against women. Ratna is now part of the list of women who have killed themselves, the number being the highest in West Bengal in 2007. In torture against women, the state is third, in rape, just second. In trafficking no one can beat West Bengal. Being a woman in this society is enough to be put in the dock and be deprived of a voice. There is no one to fill in the silences.