Let there be noise

Revelry aside, the puja pandals which dotted West Bengal in early October were also an occasion for philosophical extrapolation. Watching Durga slay the demon Mahishasura was a reminder of an uncomfortable truth — evil has an endless capacity to metamorphose and return. Mahishasura is believed to have taken on the form of a buffalo, a lion and an elephant in his epic battle with the goddess. Confessedly, a believer in the supernatural, the validity of this myth wouldn’t be lost on Mamata Banerjee. Like the monsters of folklore and scripture, sexual violence in Bengal continues to mutate, shaking foundations of worlds, both intimate and public.

The West Bengal chief minister should naturally be invested in this issue. It was on January 7, 1993, that Banerjee, then a Youth Congress leader, had reached Kolkata’s Writer’s Building with a pregnant, deaf and mute Dipali Basak by her side. Basak had been raped, allegedly by a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM). After Chief Minister Jyoti Basu refused to meet them, Banerjee and Basak were beaten and arrested. Banerjee swore she’d next enter Writer’s only with her head held high. Basak, unfortunately, was reduced to a footnote.

Twenty one years is admittedly a long time, but in Nadia, the district where Dipali Basak was raped, the threat of sexual violence continues to be a detonative volleyball, lobbed from one political side to the next. On June 14 this year, Trinamool leader, Krishnanagar MP and yesteryear Tollywood star Tapas Paul chose the crudest words from the Bengali lexicon to warn his rivals in Nadia — “If any opponent touches a Trinamool girl, father or child, I will destroy his family. I will unleash my boys. Rape kore chole jaabe. Rape kore chole jaabe.” They will rape them, he said repeatedly. Caught on camera, the nation had heard him. Visibly annoyed by the resultant outrage, Mamata Banerjee too thought that bombast was her best line of defence — “He has been asked to tender an unconditional apology. What would you have me do? Kill him?”

Banerjee had tirelessly earned the epithet ‘Didi’. The case of Tapasi Malik proves that. After the raped and charred body of the teenaged activist was discovered in Singur on December 18, 2006, Banerjee didn’t take long to step in as the aggrieved elder sister. Addressing a rally in 2008, she had said, “We will not forget how CPM leaders had raped and killed her.” Unveiled by Trinamool leaders in 2011, a Malik statue in Singur is testament to the firebrand’s promise, but three years on, it is also an indication of opportunist tokenism and institutional forgetting. The CPM government’s reaction to Malik’s death was similar to its dismissal of the brutal 1990 Bantala gang rape, of three health officers. Crying conspiracy is a trick that Banerjee seems to have learnt from her predecessors.

For Banerjee, the gang rape of Suzette Jordan on Park Street in February 2012 was a matter that had been fabricated to malign her state. A year later, on June 8, there emerged from the village of Kamduni in Bengal’s Barasat district yet another story of terrible sexual cruelty. The autopsy report of a second-year college student revealed that she had been gang raped over several hours. Her legs had been torn apart, her body ripped to her navel, her femur broken in several places and her throat slit. Enraged activists soon began organising rallies in Kolkata. Statistics released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) only helped legitimise their protest. According to the NCRB, West Bengal had recorded 30,942 cases of crime against women in 2012, the highest in the country. On June 23, the CM looked embattled at a rally. She asked those assembled, “Are all the women in the state being raped?” Didi was fast losing that sisterly edge.

While hearing the grievances of women in Kamduni, the West Bengal CM had historically silenced them with a fierce “Chup!” Sexual violence in the state still remains a rock that Banerjee wouldn’t have anyone look under. Trinamool MLA Deepak Haldar was purportedly being earnest when he said that “as long as the world exists, so will rape”. Banerjee ended up comparing Haldar’s critics to rabies-ridden victims in August. The causal affinity between governmental apathy and societal excess is always questionable, but the large-scale proliferation of sexual violence in West Bengal does seem to have been impacted by the supercilious attitude of its leader.

Less than a month after three students of Shantiniketan’s illustrious Visva-Bharati University were arrested for stripping and molesting a junior, an undergraduate at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University alleged that she had been dragged into a hostel by a group of boys who then molested her. The campus too has now been rendered treacherous.

State action

As Jadavpur students began protesting against the inaction of their interim vice chancellor in September, intervention from the state did not arrive in the form of mediation, but predictably manifested itself in a charge of lathis. Once police atrocities were added to their litany of complaints, the students took to Kolkata’s streets. A procession of 30,000 protestors made Banerjee’s “petty matter” chant seem laughable. Even more ludicrous was her nephew Abhishek Banerjee’s ill-advised query — “Is this protest due to the banning of drugs, liquor and charas?” Though Jadavpur seems to have relatively quietened down in the past weeks, it would be hard for the CM and her cohorts to forget this public outcry. Mass mobilisation isn’t the monopoly of politicians. The Jadavpur agitation’s networking hashtag, ‘hok kolorob’ (let there be noise), has proved that.

The trouble with noise isn’t just that it can be short-lived. It can also discriminate. The nation was rightly appalled when the bodies of two teenage girls were found hanging from a tree in Uttar Pradesh’s Badaun on May 27, 2014. But two months later when the raped corpse of an 8-year-old was found hanging from a similar tree in West Bengal’s East Midnapore District, there weren’t many whimpers of empathy. In August again, an East Midnapore village reportedly saw a woman being dragged from her house and paraded naked. She was found hanging in her home the next morning. Her husband, a CPM leader, alleged she had been raped and murdered by Trinamool workers. The police, however, asserted this was a case of suicide.

The idea of eternal damnation is perhaps frightful because the horrors of hell are repetitive. In the first week of September this year, the naked body of a Class X student was found near the railway tracks close to her home in West Bengal’s Jalpaiguri district. She had last been seen during the proceedings of a self-appointed village court that had taken to beating her father. He had not been able to pay rent for a power tiller. When the girl intervened, she was asked by the court to lick spit off the ground. She refused, was taken away and returned raped and murdered. The kangaroo court which had taken it upon itself to dispense justice was convened by a Trinamool councillor. Sourav Chakraborty, Trinamool’s Jalpaiguri district president, went on record, parroting his party’s preposterous defence. “Rape is a social malady. It will continue happening and so will the accusations. The more the accusations grow, so will our membership,” he said.

Mamata Banerjee, who also holds the all-important home portfolio, can of course be condemned for ignoring the safety of her state’s women. Regrettably, however, the catalogue of her follies is longer and more menacing. Her callous indifference to sexual violence is having a top-down effect. Not only are the men of her party condoning, defending and abetting rape, they are also now being accused of being active participants in these acts. In her days as a leader of the Opposition, Banerjee saw the world in shades of black and white. Having hit roadblocks like the Saradha chit fund scam, she is now being forced to invent those murky moral greys. Crimes against women, unfortunately, require a bipolar view. On an issue that is always defined by one right or a wrong, the West Bengal CM has consistently seemed to favour a corrupted lens.

Banerjee’s complacency could well be a result of simple electoral math. With the Left and the Congress virtually forgotten, her new boisterous nemesis, the BJP, is still a fledgling entity in the state. Besides, gender sensitivity hasn’t yet resonated with Bengali voters. Despite his juxtapositions of electioneering and rape (“You can either enjoy it or scream”), actor Dev won the Lok Sabha constituency of Ghatal for Didi with a margin of 5 lakh votes. Kolkata displayed its own lassitude on September 15. An eatery refused Suzette Jordan entry because she was the ‘Park Street rape victim’. The Bengali camel’s back, it would appear, can withstand many more straws.

Only in a breathing dystopia can gender activists take some comfort in the fact that 13 men were recently sentenced to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment for gang-raping a 20-year-old woman. Precarious optimism, though, is being provided by the likes of Ainur Bibi. After hearing that her son had raped a minor, it was Bibi who first filed a complaint against her offspring in Kolkata. In a state where the law-and-order machinery is often riddled with lacunae, it is assuring to see a mother’s dispassionate justice prevail, but not all interventions in Bengal are as beneficent.

Earlier this month, some residents of Durgapur reportedly caught Bhola Mondal sexually brutalising a 12-year-old girl. News footage showed him being stripped by an angry mob. He was beaten with sticks and rods. By the time police officers could arrest him, he was heavily bleeding. Though perilous, there are several factors that explain such vigilantism. Bhola’s brother Babu is a local Trinamool leader and it was to Babu’s house that Bhola had taken his victim. The building, neighbours claim, doubles as a party camp office. The age of the victim makes Bhola’s purported crime appear even more barbaric, but it is the prevalence of such depravation that carries with it a threat of future violence.

Bhola Mondal is said to have abducted the 12-year-old child from Durgapur’s City Centre area. It was precisely in this vicinity that a 32-year-old woman was gang raped two years ago. According to police records, she was molested by 11 men and raped by five. One of the starkest pieces of evidence found was the victim’s pair of jeans, hanging from a nearby tree. The obvious trouble with West Bengal is that such signifiers are now commonplace and easy to forget.

With too many dates in the Bengali calendar coming to resemble December 16, no horror is catalyst enough. The state government, it seems, is playing a cruel waiting game with its people.

( Shreevatsa Nevatia is a Kolkata-based writer )