NEW DELHI: The hypocrisy on display in the RG Kar case is galling and people are seeing through it.
It was unbelievable drama on Kolkata’s streets on Friday. The sitting Chief Minister of a state—the Supreme Leader of her party, the lady who claims to rule with an iron fist—was out on the streets with a posse of her “feisty” female MPs. They were demanding justice for the victim of a rape and murder at one of their own government’s medical-college-and-hospitals. It’s a case where the state machinery is being accused of botching up the investigation to the extent of covering it up. Such has been the mishandling of the investigation into the rape and murder of a young doctor at Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College and Hospital by the Mamata Banerjee government, that the Kolkata High Court described it on Friday as an “absolute failure of the state machinery”. But Bengal’s “Didi” thinks that she can shape the narrative in a case that has outraged the entire nation and is international news, to somehow pin the blame on the opposition parties in the state, the BJP and the Left. Her focus seems to be on diverting attention to the CBI and thus accuse the Central government of not giving justice to the victim. It’s a different matter that she delayed handing over the case to the CBI and it was the court that did so. But why let go of the opportunity to play politics with such a heinous crime now that things are going out of hand? Hence, she and her women leaders were heard making the ludicrous demand that the CBI must complete the investigation by Sunday and hang the culprit by Monday—or something to that effect.
If shamelessness had a face, it was on full display on the streets of Kolkata on Friday.
Mamata Banerjee’s contention is that her party should not be taught women empowerment considering it has sent 38% women MPs to Parliament—women MPs who initially stayed silent on the case and then started condemning the incident on the trot as the people of Bengal rose up in anger. So empowered are they, that not a single one of them spoke up against the fallacies of the path adopted by their Supreme Leader. They could not even emulate their own Rajya Sabha colleague, Dr Santanu Sen, who was horrified enough to warn that “the news related to the Health Department is not sent accurately to CM and Health Minister Mamata Banerjee”. He was removed from the post of party spokesperson as punishment, but at least his conscience is clear.
Meanwhile, what are Mamata Banerjee’s empowered, feminist, feisty MPs doing? One of them, Mahua Moitra, was seen in a video on the social media site “X” lecturing the media on being “responsible while reporting”. “Genuine concerns need to be addressed. Fake news needs to be busted,” tweeted the lady who is always at the forefront in Parliament, attacking the Central government and more often than not mocking the Prime Minister. Her fan clubs—she has a few—on social media cannot stop talking about her “razor-sharp” attacks in the Lok Sabha on Manipur. The microblogging site “X” is littered with her invective on what she imagined to be the Prime Minister’s silence on Manipur. So contemptuous is her language about the Prime Minister of the country that they cannot be dignified by quoting them in a responsible newspaper. But then even abuse comes to Ms Moitra easily—not many have forgotten the way she trended on X for days for using, on camera, an extremely abusive term about her rivals in Parliament. Surprisingly—or perhaps not so surprisingly—none of that concern she showed for Manipur is visible now in the RG Kar case. She can only lecture the media on “fake news” and has nothing to say about the actual news that hoodlums tried to destroy the scene of crime, when they attacked the protests at RG Kar on the intervening night of 14 and 15 August; or that Mamata Banerjee reinstated the principal of RG Kar, who was forced to resign under public pressure, in another medical college inside four hours, and it took the court to drag him out of his new post. It is an endless list, but when political compulsions are involved, all that fire breathing turns into a damp squib. So much for women’s empowerment! So much for feminism!
Similar is the case with all the other MPs that Mamata Banerjee has sent to Parliament.
Another lady MP, a recent import into the Trinamool Congress from Delhi, Sagarika Ghose, too is busy busting “fake news” on “X”. She is quoting NCRB statistics to claim that Kolkata has the lowest crime rate. “STOP PLAYING POLITICS. FOCUS ON JUSTICE”, she thunders on “X”.
That’s exactly what the nation wants—justice. But what were Mamata Banerjee and her women leaders doing on Friday, rallying in Kolkata? Playing politics or focusing on justice?
The hypocrisy on display is galling and people are seeing through it. If Mamata Banerjee thinks she is popular enough to make people believe anything and everything that she wants to say, she is sorely mistaken. She is losing touch with the ground. The anger is real.