The recent case of the rape and killing of a female trainee doctor in the premises of Kolkata’s prestigious R.G. Kar Hospital has drawn all India attention to the murderous hazards that women medical practitioners including nurses, face in our hospitals all over India. There have been several incidents of their harassment by their male seniors in their places of work, and also by relatives of patients who feel aggrieved by what they allege as ill-treatment in different parts of India.
But while this larger issue of the vulnerability of women professionals needs to be addressed on a national level, let us now for the present, concentrate on the latest incident which happened under the benign gaze of a woman chief minister Mamata Banerjee. How had she and her Trinamul Congress (TMC) government been tackling the problem of sexual harassment all through her three terms of chief ministership ?
In her first reaction to the recent case of rape and killing of the female trainee doctor (whose body was found in the hospital premises on August 9), she trivialized the incident by saying that such incidents always happened in other states and recalled the Hathras rape and murder in Uttar Pradesh – as if two wrongs made one right ! She then accused the Opposition for “politicizing” the incident. In a further act of misdemeanor, she provided protection to Dr Sandip Kumar Ghosh, the principal of the R.G. Kar hospital. It was this same person who immediately after the discovery of the body) passed it off as a case of suicide. Under pressure from the students and faculty, he resigned from the hospital. But due to his proximity to the ruling party, Mamata soon reappointed him as the principal of the National Medical College and Hospital in another part of Kolkata. It was only after the High Court intervened that Dr. Ghosh was sent on leave and the Trinamul government was ordered by the court not to reappoint him to any post.
Trinamul Congress complicity in the murder
The rapist and murderer who is now in police custody, is a member of a semi-official outfit of the Trinamul Congress government. The accused Sanjoy Roy (35) is a civic police volunteer who used to live in the barracks of the Calcutta Police’s 4th battalion. The post of civic police volunteer was created by Mamata Banerjee around 2014 to assist the police. These volunteers are recruited mainly from among the unemployed youth supporters of her party, and are paid Rs. 9,000 a month. They usually accompany the police in conducting electoral operations among other similar work. In other words, these are the people who intimidate voters and manipulate their verdict in favour of the ruling Trinamul Congress in panchayat and Assembly elections. They protect the party goons and racketeers by keeping away the police from persecuting them.
Mamata Banerjee’s shameful record of betraying victims of rape
But this is not the first time that such an incident has happened under Mamata’s rule. Way back in 2012 (just a year after Mamata had come to power), one late night on February 5 that year, a 37-year old woman Suzette Jordan (she willingly allowed her name to be used in the media) was gang-raped by five men in the posh Park Street area, when she was coming out from a restaurant. A few days later, she filed a complaint at the local police station. What was Mamata’s response ? She called it a “sajano ghatona” (a fabricated case). When a senior woman police officer Damayanti Sen pursued the case and identified five accused, she was shunted out from her post by a government order.
A few months later, speaking on a television channel on October 15 that year, Mamata said that rape cases in her state were on the rise because men and women now interacted with each other more openly “like (in) an open market with open options.” What a farcical, but shocking, justification of rape – and coming from a woman chief minister !
Next year, on June 7, 2013, a young woman student was abducted, gang-raped and murdered in Kamduni, a spot a few kilometers away from Kolkata. The accused were caught, brought before a judicial magistrate who in January 2016 sentenced some among them to death and others to life imprisonment. But later on October 6, 2023 the Calcutta High Court commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, and acquitted others.
Under Mamata’s rule, incidents of rape continued apace in the year that followed. In February, 2024, the TMC leader Shahabuddin of Sandeshkhali was accused of sexual atrocities, and under public pressure, the police had to arrest him. As late as June 28 this year, a TMC leader in Uttar Dinajpur in north Bengal, Tajmul Islam was found flogging a couple in a kangaroo court trial, accusing them of an extra-marital affair. Thus, a parallel TMC system of strong arm justice is being institutionalized in the rural areas of Bengal under Mamata Banerjee’s rule. According to an NCRP report, Bengal records the highest number of crimes against women, only after Uttar Pradesh
It is ironical that while Mamata has announced a lot of schemes to benefit women with loud-sounding names, they have turned out to be mere butts of popular jokes. One such scheme is termed as Kanya Shri Prakalpa (Project for the Welfare of Daughters), which is now being called by Bengalis as Kanya Balatkar Prakalpa (Project for Raping Daughters), after the latest incident of rape and murder. Ironically again, Bengal under the Mamata regime has recorded the highest rate of child marriage and rise of crimes against women (according to the National Health Family Survey). Further, according to the findings of the NCRB (National Crime Reports Bureau), Mamata-ruled Bengal is only second to Uttar Pradesh in the registration of crimes against women with 36,439 incidents.
Mamata Banerjee in popular Bengali perception
Although Mamata Banerjee has managed to bounce back to power after every election – this being her third term – public perception of her record as a leader varies from an ambivalent appreciation to total rejection. Let me narrate my personal experiences. During her second term as the chief minister, when everyone was praising her shouting: “Didi, Didi..”, I heard a few skeptical voices. I was visiting a friend in Kolkata, and I asked the elderly female domestic help who came from a village, how she evaluated Mamata. She burst out with an expletive, saying: “O ek jhagrate magi” (She’s a querulous shrew), accusing her of picking up fights with people who came up with grievances and asked her to solve their problems.
Mamata’s image fell further with each passing day. One of her closest colleagues, Partha Chatterjee was caught in a scam in school teacher recruitment, and arrested in May 2023. He is still in jail. Another henchman of hers, Anubrata Mandal was caught in November 2022 in a cross border (across Bangladesh) cattle- smuggling case. Thus the law is now catching up with her notorious record of performances.
Mamata Banerjee’s cunning strategy
But being a street-smart politician, Mamata has carved out a strategy that combines an uncivilized mode of ruthless suppression of protests within Bengal on the one hand, with the projection of a civilized and sophisticated image of herself on the national parliamentary scene on the other. She has therefore nominated to the Rajya Sabha some intellectually well-equipped and articulate figures like Derek O’Brien, the ex-bureaucrat Jawahar Sirkar, and out-spoken women like Mohua Moitra and Sagarika Ghosh. They are eloquent in participating in debates by attacking Modi and his policies. But at the same time, they remain cringingly obedient to her. It is not surprising that they remained silent immediately after the public news report of the R.G. Kar incident. It was only after four days or so, following Mamata Banerjee’s public statement condemning the heinous act, that the Trinamul Congress MPs Mohua Moitra, Sushmita Dev, Sagarika Ghosh and others began to tweet their statements that echoed their leader’s statement.
But how long can this dual strategy of repression at home in Bengal and public stance of democratic behavior through her spokespersons in the Rajya Sabha sustain her rule ? The people, disenchanted with her, are coming out in protest in the streets, blaming her for the latest incident of rape and murder. In order to counter them, Mamata in a hypocritical move, organized a demonstration of her followers in Kolkata demanding the hanging of the culprit Sanjoy Roy, covering up the fact that this person was recruited by her own government as a civic police volunteer. But such demonstrative acts of hers are not cutting ice any more with the common people. They are getting antagonized by her arbitrary and authoritarian actions, like the recent bulldozing of some 2,500 homes and casting 16,000 people into streets – all in the name of development (Re: The Wire. August 16, 2024)
Searching for an alternative
With this growing popular disenchantment with the Mamata regime and frequent outbursts of public anger, it is yet to be seen which alternative political party will lead them to overthrow her government at the next assembly elections due in 2026. There is the alarming sign of the BJP jumping into the scene taking advantage of the anti-Mamata popular sentiments. It is up to the INDIA alliance of Opposition parties (of which Mamata’s Trinamul Congress is also a part – but from which Mamata had distanced herself on several occasions) to launch a popular movement with the aim of dislodging her from power. Instead of maintaining an uneasy alliance with the Trinamul Congress, and remaining silent about her misdeeds, the INDIA block should dump her and come out in open confrontation with her by leading a mass movement against her. It is only in this way it can pre-empt the BJP from usurping the leadership of any popular anti-Mamata demonstration in Bengal.
Let me end this article by making an appeal to the courageous Trinamul Congress members of the Rajya Sabha, who had been playing a major role in exposing the misdeeds of the Modi government and protesting against every anti-people measure taken by it on the floors of the house. Will they rethink the continuation of their association with Mamata Banerjee’s party, in view of the latest shameful incident perpetrated by a recruit of her semi-official outfit, and her efforts to whitewash the crime ? My special appeal to my friend, MP Jawahar Sirkar and the women MPs Mohua Moitra and Sagarika Ghosh in particular – please dissociate yourselves from this party led by a godmother of ruffians and racketeers.
Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008); The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and ‘Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization.’ (2016).
