Women in Metiaburuz do not often take to the streets to protest the culture of rape, yet they did this time in large numbers,” said Noor Mahvish, a criminal lawyer and activist, who joined Kolkata’s Reclaim the Night protest from Metiaburuz in Garden Reach, a low-income dock area on the banks of the Hooghly. “Women’s safety is not a political tool, it is a fundamental right,” she told Frontline. “We will fight anyone, regardless of party, who fails to protect it.”
The fact that a woman doctor could be raped, brutalised, and murdered in her own workplace, the State-run R.G. Kar hospital, and that the State subsequently seemed to take steps to protect the culprits and cover up the crime have sent a chilling message to the women of Bengal, ironically India’s only State today with a woman Chief Minister.
Even as women in the State and elsewhere are up in arms demanding equal rights, justice, and dignity in a powerful wave that goes far beyond the politics of protest that Mamata has always known how to harness, the Chief Minister herself led a rally on August 16 using her party’s electoral war cry “Khela hobe” (Game on), showing perhaps how out of touch she is with the reality.
The irony was not lost on the people of Bengal where Mamata, who was first sworn in as Chief Minister in 2011, is also Health Minister and Home Minister. During her protest march, Mamata demanded justice for the doctor who was raped and murdered. Whom exactly was Mamata demanding justice from?
On August 13, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) took over the case following an order from the Calcutta High Court. Mamata, who had previously issued her police force with a deadline to solve the case, threatening to otherwise transfer it to the Central agency, welcomed the court’s decision. “This move,” said Pratik, co-founder of the independent Bengali website, Nagorik.net, “works well for her, as it helps her shake off any accountability.”
Mamata Banerjee leads a protest march, seen largely as a face-saving gesture, in Kolkata on August 17. | Photo Credit: Sudipta Banerjee/ ANI
What people noticed, however, was that instead of immediately acknowledging the gravity of the crime, supporting the victim’s parents, or acknowledging accountability for the failure of the hospital administration and the public health machinery, Mamata resorted to what has become her usual line of defence: first trivialising the crime, then offering a compensation of Rs.10 lakh to the victim’s parents, cracking down on dissenters, issuing summons to online protestors, and hastily issuing a regressive order against women working at night. Amidst all the assertions and institutional cover-ups, Mamata remained in denial and continued to leverage her street-fighter cult and project herself as a victim of witch-hunt hatched by the Bam-Ram (Left-BJP).
Unfortunately, this time, “Bangla nijer meyekei chay” (Bengal wants her own daughter), Trinamool’s 2021 campaign song, has hit the wrong note. Now, Bengal is demanding answers from her own daughter.
Rape as a form of systemic oppression
Rape is not new in Bengal, and indeed not in India, where it is a routine form of systemic oppression. As per national statistics, there is a rape every 16 minutes in India. Yet, incidents of rape hardly trigger any protest. In Bengal too, during Mamata’s own reign of “Ma, Mati, Manush” (Mother, Land, People), protests against rape have hardly moved beyond splintered local voices. Wider protests have been suppressed.
Also Read | Delhi rises in outrage against the rape of Kolkata doctor
One harks back to 2012, when Mamata dismissed the “Park Street rape victim” Suzette Jordan’s gang rape as a “shajano ghotona” (fabricated incident), aimed at tainting her new government. The then Sports Minister of Bengal questioned a single mother’s presence in a nightclub. Another Trinamool leader, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, said that what happened was not “rape” but a ‘transaction’ between a sex worker and her client that ‘went wrong’.
The very next year, addressing a gathering in Kamduni, Barasat, where women were demanding justice for the brutal rape and murder of a local girl, Mamata shouted: “Keep quiet. Shut up. You are all CPM supporters.”
A protester walks over a poster of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee during the Nabanna Abhiyan, the protest march to the Secretariat held on August 27. | Photo Credit: ASHOK NATH DEY/ ANI
In 2022, after a 14-year-old girl was gang-raped in Hanskhali in Nadia district of West Bengal, Mamata said, “This story they are showing that a minor has died due to rape, will you call it rape? Was she pregnant or had a love affair? Have they [media] enquired? I have asked the police. They have made arrests. I was told the girl had an affair with the boy.” Ultimately, Trinamool panchayat leaders were arrested for the crime.
Unravelling the invisible threads that connect the “landmark” rape cases during Mamata’s reign, one of the Reclaim slogans read: “Park Street theke Kamduni/shajano ghotonar hisheb bhari/Mukhyomontri jobab dao/noyle lorai toiri hoyo” (From Park Street to Kamduni/the weight of “fabricated incidents” is getting heavier/CM, you must answer us/or be prepared to fight).
Breaking the silence of the desensitised
Now it is 2024. And clearly nothing has changed as far as Mamata and the Trinamool are concerned. But the public mood has changed. “This crime shook us,” said Tota, an Auxiliary Midwifery Nurse (ANM) and frontline healthcare worker in Jhargram, Paschim Medinipur. “Women and men, young and old, including school students, joined the protest, united by a shared sense of shock and anger. It is as if a long standing rot has come out in the open.”
According to Archee Roy, a queer visual artist, queer rights activist, and one of the Reclaim organisers and protestors, the crime directly attacked the soft spot of middle-class aspirations and this explains the widespread anger. A doctor is still looked up to as a respectable figure despite the rising instances of violence against them. Hence, perhaps the thought that this could happen to an on-duty doctor—inside the premises of a government hospital—has hit the public imagination, breaking the silence of people who seemed to have become oddly desensitised to violence against women in their State.
Highlights
- The brutal rape and murder of a doctor at R.G. Kar hospital has shattered Mamata Banerjee’s carefully crafted image as a champion of women’s rights, sparking widespread protests that cut across party lines and social strata.
- Protesters are demanding fundamental changes to address systemic issues of gender violence, corruption, and authoritarianism, rejecting Mamata’s attempts to trivialize the incident or deflect blame.
- As the movement gains momentum, it exposes the hollowness of Mamata’s women-centric policies and threatens to upend the political landscape in Bengal, with even Trinamool sympathisers joining the chorus for change.
West Bengal-based Titas Dutta, theatre practitioner and gender rights activist, who joined the Reclaim protest at Birati, a neighbourhood in North 24 Parganas, agreed, adding that unfortunately it was also because the victim fit the definition of a “good girl” and so it was as if the Chief Minister, the State, the system, and society ran out of victim-shaming tropes.
What initially started as a doctor-led and student-led protest spread like wildfire with citizens across social strata and age profiles—nurses and ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) workers, elderly women, domestic helps, sex workers, football fans, IT sector employees, and so on—sharing the outrage.
On the night of August 14—the eve of India’s 78th Independence Day—as the clock struck 11, women across Kolkata took to the streets, reclaiming the night that has long been a tool of patriarchal oppression. Initially planned at three sites—Jadavpur, Academy of Fine Arts, and College Street—the march soon spread across the city, with people joining it spontaneously.
The protest resonated across Bengal. Here, tribal women march in Balurghat in South Dinajpur, West Bengal, on August 24. | Photo Credit: Mansur Mandal/ ANI
Although sparked by the rape and murder, the “Girls, Reclaim the Night” (Meyera Raat Dokhol Koro) protest soon transcended the singular tragedy and has since evolved into a powerful statement against systemic gender violence, echoed not just in Bengal but also countrywide.
On August 25, the Reclaim the Night protest, which morphed into Reclaim Rights, further broadened its scope to include three clauses, three demands: “Dofa teen, dabi teen, Mukhyamantri jobab din” (three clauses, three demands, CM, give answers). A different version of this slogan too began to do the rounds: “Dofa ek, dabi ek, Mukhyamantrir podotyag” (One clause, one demand, CM must resign).
The slogan seems to have sprang from the one raised during the recent riots in Bangladesh that culminated in the ouster of Sheikh Hasina: “Ek dofa, ek dabi, Hasina tui kobe jabi” (One clause, one demand, when will you go, Hasina?). According to Sabir Ahamed, National Research Coordinator at Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s Pratichi (India) Trust, if one looks at the historical context of protest in Bengal, the Bangladesh inspiration could be sensed. Jhelum, a researcher and one of the Reclaim organisers, said that a lot of the linguistic flavour of Reclaim’s sloganeering has indeed been impacted by the Bangladesh protest.
The August 25 citizen’s march had three other broader demands: elimination of the Syndicate Raj from Bengal’s public health system; infrastructural reforms in public spaces, including 24/7 public toilets and 24/7 free or cheap public transport for women and trans persons; and rejection of control and surveillance of women, queer and trans persons in workplaces while seeking equal dignity for all.
Normalising crimes against underprivileged women
On the very night (August 14) that women occupied the streets across West Bengal to reclaim their rights, a young Adivasi woman was brutally raped and killed in Shaktigarh in Bardhaman district. “We are part of a system where a Muslim, Dalit, Adivasi, or any marginalised woman struggles even to get an FIR lodged,” said Mahvish. Crimes against less privileged women are often normalised, rarely ever resulting in any mass outcry. The Reclaim’s charter of clauses includes the demand for an FIR (First Information Report) in the Shaktigarh case.
The depth of the protests is also seen in the fact that the demands have been framed through the lens of breaking the nexus between the state, patriarchy, and rape culture. It shows the understanding that gender justice cannot be achieved in isolation, or in a society dominated by corruption, authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, party politics, and undemocratic practices.
“This is the right time to talk about gender justice through the critical lens of queer-trans intersectional politics. Queer feminist politics rejects caste oppression and Hindu Brahminical patriarchy and offers a deeper and rigorous scrutiny of structural inequalities,” said Archee Roy. This becomes pertinent because in India, institutional power is overwhelmingly held by Hindu, able-bodied, cishet males whose joint privilege often limits women’s movements.
“The depth of the protests is also seen in the fact that the demands have been framed through the lens of breaking the nexus between the state, patriarchy, and rape culture. ”
In the backdrop of Mamata and her party’s allegations that the protests have been hijacked by the right- and left-wing parties which form the Trinamool’s traditional opposition, when a rally was called by so-called “students” on August 27, Reclaim.Our.Rights posted on social media: “We have learnt that this call is given by those very forces who had previously felicitated the rapists of Bilkis Bano, who marched with the national flag in support of Kathua, Unnao…We therefore urge people to oust forces like RSS-BJP who have actively nurtured rape culture in this country and been complicit in keeping the system in place and isolate them from this movement.”
Priyadarshini Chitrangada, a gender sexual rights activist and one of the Reclaim organisers, pointed out that it was important to question the system and bring structural changes rather than fall prey to any one political party’s agenda, as all parties have vested interests. “Demanding resignation is the easier way out; through Reclaim we are demanding long-term systemic reforms,” she said. This sentiment was echoed by another Reclaim organiser, Sudeshna Dutta Gupta, who said that the protests have been demanding “drishtantomulok shasti” (exemplary punishment) and not capital punishment, as the latter is hardly ever a deterrent.
Governments everywhere perpetrate rape
According to Pratik, one reason why people of Bengal have not raised their voice earlier—whether against gender-based violence or against the numerous scams in their State—could be that a certain section of Bengal wanted to be seen as a proponent of a “secular liberal brand of politics and therefore feared that critiquing the Trinamool would empower the BJP and its right-wing ideological mentor, the RSS. This fear seemed to have created a sort of quasi tolerance for the Trinamool among the public. “It created a long-term layer of impunity for the Trinamool, which was further emboldened by the 2024 Lok Sabha poll verdict,” said Pratik.
A law student holds a poster resembling the cover of the Constitution of India during a protest march in Kolkata on August 24. | Photo Credit: Swapan Mahapatra/ PTI
In 1990, when the Bantala incident, which involved the gang rape of three women returning home at 11 pm, hit the headlines, the then West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu had said, “E shob toh hoeyi thakey (Such things keep happening).
In response, it was Mamata, then an opposition leader, who had taken to the streets in protest, only to be dragged off by the hair by the Kolkata Police. As the city’s streets erupt in protest again, it is a reminder of how governments everywhere perpetrate rape and only the colour of power changes.
Sample this. Trinamool spokesperson Kunal Ghosh was quoted as saying, “Those who wish to refrain from availing of Lakshmi Bhandar [under the scheme, pronounced Lokkhir Bhandar, women beneficiaries aged 25 to 60 receive Rs.1.000 each month directly in their bank accounts; if they belong to SC/ST groups, they get Rs.1,200] or any other scheme of the State government can do so using forms we will provide. Instead of posing as distorted revolutionaries on Facebook, such people can fill in these forms.” As Ahamed said, the idea that any woman who avails of a scheme run by the State government cannot protest or exercise her freedom of speech is outrageous and demeaning and against the very essence of democracy. Ghosh’s colleague, the Trinamool Minister Udayan Guha, threatened to “break the fingers” of those accusing Mamata.
Also Read | No freedom for victims of sexual violence in conflict
So much for Mamata’s electoral politics where she has time and again positioned herself and her government as women-friendly, centred around women-centric schemes, and working for women’s empowerment. Is it all optics then, without any real representation, equality, and dignity for Bengal’s women? How does Mamata crack the whip on the same women who constituted her significant voter base and gave her rich electoral dividends only a few months ago? Is she taking her women voters for granted?
“Mamata’s image—hitherto seen as separate and distinct from that of her party—has taken a hit for the first time,” said Pratik. What Bengal is witnessing now is the “cumulative anger” of the people, with even Trinamool sympathisers not shying away from the protests. On August 27, a massive march was taken towards Nabanna, the seat of the Bengal Secretariat, which was held at bay by the police. As Kolkata continues to boil, Mamata Banerjee and her government are looking at an uncertain political future. If a change does occur, what will it really mean for Bengal’s women and people from disadvantaged sections?
Sanhati Banerjee is an independent journalist and content consultant.
COMMents
SHARE