Fourteen years after IPS officer Damayanti Sen found herself at the intersection of policing and politics during the Park Street rape case, Bengal's changed political landscape has brought her journey to a full circle in a state where shifting power equations often rewrite careers and alter destinies.
Back then, Mamata Banerjee's TMC government was still in its honeymoon phase after ending the Left Front's uninterrupted 34-year rule a year before, when a crime in Park Street, Kolkata's famed nightlife hub, triggered what would become its first major political storm of the TMC government.
But the controversy that followed was not just over the crime; it was also over whether it had happened at all.
On February 6, 2012, a woman alleged that she was gangraped inside a moving car after leaving a nightclub on Park Street. As outrage grew, Banerjee publicly dismissed it as a "sajano ghatana"- a fabricated incident orchestrated to malign her newly elected government.
The remarks triggered a national uproar. Women's rights groups protested. Television studios exploded in debate. Editorials questioned the government's handling of the case. For an administration barely a year into office, the Park Street episode became perhaps the first serious political turbulence confronting Bengal's new ruler.
As political noise grew and the ruling establishment battled criticism over its handling of the case, a senior police officer at Lalbazar was quietly following a trail of evidence pointing to a very different direction.
Damayanti Sen, then joint commissioner (Crime) of Kolkata police and the first woman officer to hold the post, was piecing together an investigation that eventually challenged the then CM's "sajano ghatana" narrative and established that the assault had indeed taken place.
Within days, investigators under Sen tracked down the accused. The findings sat uneasily beside the "fabricated incident" theory dominating public discourse.
The contrast acquired a political life of its own. As criticism mounted over comments made by sections of the ruling establishment, Sen's investigation increasingly came to be viewed by critics as an uncomfortable reminder that facts had moved in one direction while politics had moved towards another.
Soon after the case was cracked, Sen was shifted from Kolkata Police's prestigious Crime Branch department to the Police Training College in Barrackpore.
Officially, it was a routine administrative decision. But Bengal's political memory rarely treats timing as routine.
Critics and the opposition then questioned whether the officer had paid a price for pursuing an investigation that effectively contradicted the public line taken by the state's most powerful political figure.
No such link was ever officially acknowledged. Yet in Bengal's bureaucratic and political folklore, the sequence acquired near-mythical status.
"The perception became larger than the order itself," recalled a retired police officer.
For Sen, many believe, the transfer marked the beginning of a long period on the margins of administrative spotlight.
A 1996-batch IPS officer, Sen carried formidable academic credentials. An economics student from Jadavpur University, she graduated first class first and repeated the feat in her postgraduation.
An upright officer, she rose steadily through the ranks and broke another barrier by becoming Kolkata police's first woman joint commissioner (crime).
Yet many in administrative circles felt that despite her credentials and reputation for methodical investigation, she never quite occupied the space expected of an officer of her stature during the TMC years.
Though she later returned as special commissioner of Kolkata police, she was seldom entrusted with politically sensitive investigations.
In 2022, however, the Calcutta High Court stepped in. Acting suo motu, it entrusted Sen with investigating four rape cases and the widely discussed Rasika Jain death mystery — a move interpreted in bureaucratic circles as judicial confidence in her credibility and investigative skills.
But by 2023, she was moved again -- this time as ADG (Training) -- largely away from public attention.
On Monday, Bengal's altered political landscape delivered one of its more striking moments of symmetry.
Suvendu Adhikari, Chief Minister of the BJP government, announced a commission headed by retired Justice Samapti Chatterjee to investigate alleged atrocities against women and children during the previous TMC regime, with Sen as member secretary.
The commission, Adhikari said, would examine incidents ranging from Sandeshkhali to Kasba, Bogtui and other cases involving alleged crimes against women and children, including those from SC, ST and minority communities.
For political observers, the symbolism was immediate and impossible to miss.
The officer whose name entered Bengal's political consciousness during one of the earliest controversies of the Mamata era was now being asked to revisit some of the most politically contentious chapters associated with its later years.
According to political observers, the message carried layers for Adhikari too. Once Mamata Banerjee's trusted lieutenant and among the principal architects of the TMC's rise, he has since built his political career around challenging his former mentor and ultimately defeating her and her party in the elections.
By placing Sen at the heart of a politically sensitive exercise, he appeared to reopen a chapter that had once become deeply uncomfortable for the previous dispensation.
Political veterans often say Bengal remembers its battles long after governments move on.
And Damayanti Sen's journey perhaps captures a peculiar truth about power in the state.
If Park Street became the first difficult chapter of one regime, Sen's return suggests that in Bengal politics, some stories do not end. They simply wait for another government to continue the next chapter.