KOLKATA: The mishandling of the RG Kar rape and murder case has become a flashpoint for broader dissatisfaction with the Mamata Banerjee government.
Like an avalanche that starts small and then picks up volume and terrifying speed as it thunders down, it was a small Facebook post by research student Rimjhim Sinha that has now triggered widespread protests against Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s rule in West Bengal.
The innocuous post had given the call to “reclaim the night” in response to the brutal rape and murder of a 31-year-old trainee doctor at Kolkata’s RG Kar College and Hospital on the night of 9 August.
“When we celebrate the independence of the country, I would like to celebrate my independence as a woman and reclaim what is ours—the city, night, public space that patriarchal forces would rather throw us out of,” Sinha wrote in her post.
The gatherings at 11:55 pm on 14 August, originally planned at three Kolkata locations—College Street, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Jadavpur 8B Bus Stand—expanded by the evening to other parts of Kolkata and towns such as Siliguri in the north and semi-rural Canning in the south.
A striking poster depicting a red hand holding a crescent moon against a night sky went viral on social media and galvanised people across the globe.
Lakhs of women, and men, participated in numerous demonstrations across Kolkata, Salt Lake, other districts, cities and countries, including Delhi, Mumbai, Goa, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Patna, Silchar, Poland, Scotland, Munich, London, Leeds and Atlanta, vociferously seeking justice for the victim of the heinous crime at RG Kar. In Kolkata, the mood was electric.
The rallies reverberated with slogans like “the night is ours” and “meyera, raat dokhol koro (girls, take control of the night),” as women united to reclaim their right to safety and security during the night and sought freedom from fear with demands like secure all-night transport system for women and marginalized gender and safe resting rooms for professionals working at night.
Even the midnight rain on the marching women and men failed to dampen their spirits.
The organisers had emphasised that no political party flags would be allowed at the rallies, maintaining the movement’s non-partisan nature. However, groups representing marginalised communities, including the LGBTQ community, were welcome to participate with their flags.
“Tonight is the night of freedom for women inside and outside West Bengal. A new freedom struggle begins tonight,” said Rimjhim Sinha, who made the first call to this movement in a Facebook post.
Those who gave a call for women to “reclaim the night” were stunned by the turnout.
It seemed all of Kolkata, if not Bengal, certainly all its women, were out on the streets, literally, at the cusp where 14 August turned into 15 August, looking for some kind of liberation.
Since then, there has been no abatement in public outrage—campaigns, memes and posters have filled the Bengali social media sphere; fresh citizen coalitions are being formed overnight, apart from rallies and protest marches that are inundating newer corners of the state every day. Every segment of society—students, teachers, alumni associations, working classes, artists, actors, doctors—is coming up with its own protest march.
Even as the marchers made a powerful statement, the demonstrations triggered the outburst of protest against the ruling dispensation in West Bengal, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government.
An immediate trigger was the storming of RG Kar Hospital by a group of about 40 people who ransacked the Emergency building even while the Reclaim the Night gathering was on.
Even as credible information suggested that the goons were from nearby slums that were closely aligned with the local Trinamool councillor, the police, which did not try to prevent the group and ran away, tried to blame the Reclaim the Night protesters. It also claimed that the goons numbered an astounding 7,000.
The initial investigations into the rape and murder and the storming of the hospital were seen as lacklustre, with accusations that the police were either incompetent or deliberately downplaying the severity of the crime. This further fuelled public anger.
The next day, Mamata Banerjee, who is both the state’s Health Minister as well as Home Minister overseeing the police, blamed the “Ram-Bam-Shyam” Opposition parties—the BJP, the Left and the Congress—for the fracas.
What she managed to do was coalesce the anger of the people against the way she is running the state.
As the details of widespread corruption and venality at RG Kar spilled out, so did details of her party’s involvement. The closeness of RG Kar principal Sandip Ghosh to her party and the myriad ways in which Mamata Banerjee’s dispensation had mollycoddled Ghosh and covered up credible corruption charges, fuelled public anger.
All these revelations, plus the Supreme Court and Calcutta High Court taking cognisance of the ill, gave rise to further protests across Bengal and from all classes of people.
The Calcutta High Court slammed the Mamata Banerjee-led West Bengal government for the vandalism at RG Kar Hospital, describing it as an “absolute failure of state machinery.” A bench led by Chief Justice T.S. Sivagnanam demanded to know why permission was granted for public protests on such a volatile issue. “Normally police has an Intelligence wing… similar things happened on Hanuman Jayanti. If 7,000 are to gather, it is hard to believe police did not know,” the court said. “Police usually have intelligence on these matters. If 7,000 people gathered, it was hard to believe that state police did not know. For all and sundry, you pass 144 (CrPC) orders. When so much commotion is going on, doctors on strike, you should have cordoned off the entire area. If suppose 7,000 people have to come, they can’t come walking. Absolute failure of state machinery. A sorry state of affairs.”
The cries of “We want justice”, became a leitmotif for the protests. But the underlying tone was that the state’s citizens had had enough of the corruption and degradation that the Trinamool Congress has institutionalised.
Says veteran journalist Shikha Mukherjee: “For the protestors, alienated by revelations of monumental corruption involved in the jobs-for-cash in the teachers’ recruitment case, the cattle smuggling and coal smuggling case, the ration distribution case, the land grab and sexual exploitation of women by Trinamool Congress bahubali in Sandeshkhali, the flogging of women ordered by kangaroo courts in Uttar Dinajpur and South 24 Parganas by men like Tajmul alias JCB and Jamaluddin Sardar, the demand for justice was not limited to the RG Kar Medical College gang-rape and murder case. It extends to all the crimes that have been committed in recent years because the government, its bureaucracy and its police flagrantly violated fundamental rights, a rule-based administration and the dignity of the people. The organic spread of the message and the number of rallies are a measure of how fed up people are with the prevailing order of things.”
Last Sunday evening for example, hundreds stood outside the Salt Lake Stadium, where a sold-out Durand Cup derby between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal football clubs was scheduled, and then was abandoned for “security reasons”.
The supporters of these iconic clubs, along with those of Mohammedan Sporting, stood in the rain, undaunted, against hundreds of policemen—protesting together, holding hands and club flags, one carrying the other on their shoulder, drenched, singing slogans. They were not aggrieved because the derby was dismantled. They were there to send a message, that in hours such as these, old “rivals” can and will come together—a message which carries substantive symbolic threat to any regime in power.
Clearly, the death of the young doctor has touched a raw nerve.
Bengal is now genuinely angry and disturbed.
And it is not just the nature of crime; it is also not just about how Mamata Banerjee and her government have handled the situation since hour zero. From the hospital authorities to the officials of the state government, it was dealt with a toxic mix of incompetence, insensitivity and misogyny. Banerjee has shown little understanding of the gravity of the situation. And since then, the government has only managed to plough new depths of depravity, including the police letting a riffraff crowd vandalise the hospital site on the same night when Kolkata was out on the streets.
RECLAIMING THE STATE
People are out there across social and gender divides, across financial standing, and across neighbourhoods because the idea of “justice” is now no more about a single case, or even women’s safety in general. Safety of women is non-negotiable. But if that night or everything that has happened afterwards was about to reclaim something else. It is now about saving the state from the tentacles of Mamata’s “cartels”. And for her betrayal.
That is why this moment in Bengal is unrivalled in the recent history of the state.
As Sayandeb Chowdhury, a professor at Krea University, wrote: “For it is now well-known how the state functions under Mamata Banerjee’s TMC. Over her rule of 13 years as a chief minister, Mamata has let, if not led, a capite ad calcem cartelisation of everything from health, education to infrastructure. The rank and file of Mamata’s party and officialdom are fully involved. Locally it is called a ‘syndicate’, an organised and illegitimate network that functions as a quasi-state when it comes to any service or operation in Bengal, including in the hospitals. Speculation is rife on whether the young physician had been exposed to one or more of their illegitimate businesses.”
“Two of Banerjee’s Ministers are in jail for having criminalised what is a regular Government work, and several Trinamool Congress henchmen are facing similar charges. But as this case is in danger of revealing, that has not stymied the cartels or their reach, which is astonishingly well-oiled.
“Abject corruption and cartelisation of Government services is not unheard of in either Bengal or in other parts of India, but it seems to have reached perverse proportions, becoming the de facto template of Mamata’s regime. In other words, Bengal is perceived from inside as being on the verge of having become a ‘gangster state’. Is that why Mamata’s Government is so unnerved by the threat of an expose, and why it has been trying, from the beginning, to deflect the case? Speculation runs rife.”
Veteran journalist Suman Chattopadhyay told The Sunday Guardian: “For years, Mamata has sold the idea that there is no alternative but her, who can stop the ‘communal BJP’. The ineptness of the BJP, CPM and Congress leaders has bolstered that opinion. Her welfare schemes, the optics of her populism, and her canny understanding of public mood have also given Mamata heavy political dividends. But this time, Banerjee has been astonishingly deaf to the mood on the street. That was her major strength, if not the only one.”
Mamata Banerjee has always managed to foreclose any swelling of antagonism by swinging into action, attended by purposeful theatrics. But this time, she has not understood the scale of public anger, flogging the dead horse of “a conspiracy” being waged against her, and even taking to the streets to demand “justice” for the victim.
This is when she is both the Home Minister and the Health Minister, so anything that concerns the case comes directly under her charge. She has done this before in cases like Sandeshkhali, sabotaging a case by the sheer drama of her numbers and noise. This time, no one is buying it.
The mishandling of the RG Kar rape and murder case became a flashpoint for broader dissatisfaction with the Mamata Banerjee government. It eroded trust in the administration’s ability to maintain law and order and protect vulnerable sections of society. The incident galvanized various groups, including students, women’s rights activists, civil society organizations, and political opponents, all of whom united in their criticism of the government.
This tragic incident and the government’s perceived mishandling of it significantly damaged Mamata Banerjee’s public image and contributed to the growing discontent among various sections of society.
For all her bluster, this could prove to be the hour of reckoning for Mamata Banerjee’s “Ma Mati Manush” government.