In August 2024, a young doctor was raped and murdered in R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, Calcutta. Horrific in itself, this incident proved to be the tip of an iceberg of corruption and misrule, extending even to medical education with chilling consequences for the future. Episode after episode pointed to a comprehensive cover-up. Far too many questions persist to this day. One man was convicted of the immediate crime. Some knee-jerk administrative measures were taken but poorly implemented. We are as far from a genuine closure as we were a year ago.
The incident sparked unprecedented protest in civil society. The state was in turmoil as common people hit the streets in thousands week after week. Political parties were marginalised, to their chagrin. For a brief moment, ordinary citizens had found their voice.
Last month saw a spate of crimes against women in Bengal’s hospitals. Little, it seems, has changed in a year. Yet this time there is no public protest to speak of. Perhaps people are disillusioned after the failure of last year’s movement. Perhaps they are exhausted after the gruelling delights of the Puja season. Again, though systemic failure is clearly indicated, it has not appeared so blatantly in multiple forms as in the R.G. Kar incident. Whatever the reason, public protest is not a factor this time.
Opposition parties, one in particular, have rushed to recover lost ground. This is natural and expected of the Opposition. (The chief minister has not helped matters by suggesting women should stay indoors after nightfall.) What might disgust and dismay us is the nature of the protest.
Crimes against women are not confined to Bengal. A day after the Durgapur incident, a Dalit woman was gang-raped in broad daylight in Lucknow. A doctor’s suicide in Maharashtra has revealed systemic rot of scarcely credible yet all too credible extent. Other incidents are continually reported from across India, including two recent ones in Delhi where the survivors were doctors.
I cringe as I cite these cases, since I may appear to endorse a no less sordid trend that in fact I deplore, as any decent citizen must do. We are witnessing a sickening tussle or competition between two political camps over women’s safety in the states where they rule. Offences in enemy territory are blown up even beyond the actual horror, undermining the victim’s dignity and privacy. Those on one’s own turf are played down (where they cannot be denied outright) beyond fact, shame and reason, trivializing the evil and jeopardizing the victim’s legal rights.
Needless to say, such callous wrangling is devoid of all concern for the victims or for women’s rights generally. It is blind to the human torment at the heart of the offence. It constitutes an insult to women in general and the victims in particular, exploiting and objectifying their plight in a craven scramble for votes. We know about so-called ‘corpse politics’ where politicians propagandize party members’ deaths in political violence, displaying or even hijacking their dead bodies. Earlier, society’s traditional secretiveness about crimes against women prevented them from being publicized. Today many women are overcoming their inhibitions to expose the wrong done to them. But this welcome development is debased and abused by such grotesque political slugfests.
The electronic and social media are willing facilitators. A deplorable number of TV channels work up such incidents with banal comments, prying camera shots and ‘debates’ to no purpose. Equally, a channel might totally suppress such news to guard its own political stakes.
Public life has turned toxic from the quick fix imperatives of party politics. Crimes against women may be a specially troubling area, but there are others. This Kali Puja saw an exceptional number of cases where citizens were assaulted and their homes invaded for not paying enough puja money or for protesting against loud fireworks and unsocial behaviour. Such attacks persist round the year to silence protesters against goon rule. The Bengali word pratibadi, ‘protester’, has acquired this special context in the last few years. Goon rule itself has become more reckless and invasive through unstinting political patronage, including appointments as home guards, civic police and security staff. All these outcomes are both cause and effect of a casual, mindless yet total surrender of the civic system to party politics
at the quotidian level of the common citizen.
Calcutta has emerged as India’s safest city for four years running. The last Crime in India report recorded a miraculously low rate of 83.9 crimes per lakh of population. The next best cities, Hyderabad and Pune, clocked four times as many. Let us accept these figures without question. If Bengal can fudge data, so might other states. The question remains: what is it beyond cognizable crime that vitiates Calcutta’s urban milieu?
Crime in India itself has “A Word of Caution”: crime results from a warped socialization overthrowing the sense of right and wrong. Social disorder, we may deduce, breeds its own mischief that may not translate into formal crime. Is that what afflicts Bengal today? If so, how can it be dispelled?
The answer cannot lie with politicians, police or administrators, but only with the people of Bengal. For an all-too-brief spell last year, their power erupted in the R.G. Kar protests. Obviously, such upheavals cannot become the norm. We cannot block roads and hold meetings round the year: we must get on with our lives. But even an inner awareness of our identity as citizens will find expression in large and small ways, and provide not only a measure of defence but, hopefully, a modicum of action.
Bengal will shortly go to the polls. To ease their path to victory, the chief political parties are out to undermine whatever remains of ordered civic life before that
date. If they succeed, whichever party wins the polls will have disempowered not only its opponents but the people voting it to power. Let us avoid this death trap for ourselves. Otherwise we may find we really cannot get on with our lives.
Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University