When a young Anglo-Indian mother named Suzette Jordan was picked up on a February night of 2012 from a watering hole on Park Street, Calcutta’s popular entertainment zone, and repeatedly raped inside a moving vehicle by five young men and the matter became public knowledge following the victim’s report to the police, Mamata Banerjee had said that nothing of the sort happened and dismissed it as a conspiracy to malign her government and her administration. She had said all this without making any effort to find out what had actually happened, thereby betraying an amorality that was as saddening as it was enraging.
However, subsequently, thanks to the exertions of Damayanti Sen, a fearless IPS officer in the rank of deputy commissioner, the rape was confirmed. Unfortunately, there was no concerted public demand for an apology from the West Bengal chief minister, who had so brazenly tried to assassinate the character of a hapless victim in a despicable attempt to save the image of her government. Clearly, Mamata could do what she did and get away with it because Suzette belonged to a community that is numerically so small and economically so insignificant as to be almost invisible to “mainstream” view. On Suzette’s part, she was in no position to give visible shape to her anger and sadness apart from reporting to the police.
Somewhat characteristic of her style of doing things, the Trinamool chief had called Suzette a liar and accused her of trying to embarrass her government. Yet, nothing was to be heard from her when, on December 10, 2015, the City Sessions Court, Calcutta, found all five accused guilty of rape. Alas, it was destiny’s way of denying satisfaction of justice to the victim that some nine monthsearlier, on March 13, 2015, she had succumbed to an attack of meningoencephalitis, at the age of forty. Meanwhile, for her pains, the upright police officer who had helped to prove Suzette Jordan’s allegations to be true, was transferred to a lesser posting outside Calcutta.
The popular myth that every woman is full of “the milk of human kindness” was roundlyexploded one more time by the way Suzette was made to suffer during her last days on earth. Again, the Bengalis have an expression in frequent use, mayerjaat, which attributes all things beautiful and true to the nature of women. Suzette’s experience both upholds and quashes the expressions mentioned here. One woman caused Suzette’s torture, this time on the mental plane, to increase manifold; but another risked her career prospects trying to reach justice to an unjustly demonised sister.
In conclusion, where were the rightly outraged Calcutta crowds of the past weeks when Suzette Jordan was first brutally violated and later hauled over the coals? The poor woman did not have a single shoulder, apart from her family, to cry on.
Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes on cinema, society and politics
