R.G. Kar: Five Lessons From an Urban Power Struggle

I

After the ghastly rape and murder of a young female junior doctor in R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, Kolkata, on August 9 2024, the junior doctors of the city mobilised for justice. The city also erupted in fury and solidarity with the murdered doctor.

For the first week following the murder for about the next fifteen days, there was a spontaneous upsurge of emotion, grievance, fury, and a fervent desire for a new chapter in the collective life of the city which would be henceforth free of the maladies of the urban. The upsurge overwhelmed the city. Women “captured the night” of Kolkata, youth occupied roads and major junctions, and medical colleges were virtually non-functional with the entire community of junior doctors on strike. The condemnation by the city populace of the alleged negligence and incompetence of the government in preventing rape and murders of women was nearly universal.

Newspapers, established news channels, established political parties belonging to the opposition (initially included among the political activists on the roads were even cadres of the ruling populist party of West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress), do-gooders, militant feminists, and radicals for all seasons occupied the city. Holy declarations, pious wishes, determined proclamations, “hot” news produced each hour of the day with generously mixed dosages of unfounded information and specialists’ comments, and – not to be left behind – rumours in large measure, decided what was to be included and excluded from the “public sphere.”

The city had not witnessed such a mood in recent memory. 

This was the first phase of the “movement for justice.” Yet, no one knew exactly what this phrase and the rallying cry, “we demand justice” meant – legally, ethically, and politically.

To some it meant avenging the death of the murdered doctor by hanging the accused; for some it meant safety of working women; for some others improvement of the medical college and hospital environment; for still some others an end to a seemingly all-pervasive corruption in the administration; and for the determined Left and the Right parties, justice meant an immediate resignation of the chief minister and the populist government.

The phase also saw the build-up of a mix of “non-political” claims and “political” claims of the slogan for justice. Women protesters and some among the junior doctors claimed that their slogans and demands were not politically targeted against the ruling party or the government and they did not represent any political party. Left and the Right activists and leaders avowed that this was indeed a political mass movement against a government which survived on rape and murders of women, loot of money and wealth, hooliganism, and outright maladministration.

At the same time this second group said that they respected the desire of the masses to stay out of openly political claims. The ambiguity of the situation and the not unexpected ambivalence of the urban society towards “politics” helped the cry for justice to grow at a fast pace. It meant everything to everyone, or at least offered space to protesters of various kinds and dispositions to articulate their own ideas and prescriptions of justice.

The movement for justice was a classic case of “counter-conduct.” People, as if, wanted to say that they disagreed with the conduct of the government. By occupying the nights, streets, squares, coining new and innovative calls, and raising moral questions they had signalled their own ideas about conducting life.

Solidarity and the cry for justice spoke of their counter-conduct.      

The ambivalence about the exact formulation of the demand for justice however gradually gave way to clarity from around August 25, and certainly from the first week of September, with the intervention of the Supreme Court. The second phase of the movement, crucial to lend teeth to the amorphous feelings and sentiments, had begun.

Demand for justice acquired a legal form. It had four components: (a) establishing culpability for the murder; (b) corruption of the R.G. Kar administration; (c) any possible link between rape, murder, and corruption; and (d) general lessons to be drawn in terms of legal redress of such situation in medical colleges and hospitals in the country.

Thereafter, whatever spontaneous outpouring of grief and sentiment may have followed on the street, the affective character of the movement was gradually superseded by the legal dimension of the demand for justice, and equally importantly the increasingly political character of the conflict between the urban middle classes and the lower classes of the society who suffered due to closure of public health facilities throughout the state. As if the conflict shaped and mirrored two parallel realities: aspiration and desire of the educated middle class of the city and the seeming “unconcern” of the outlying sections of urban society (and of course, the larger society beyond the urban, that is the mufossils, suburban towns, and big villages) to the issues animating the middle classes.   

By late August, the protesting doctors and, distinct from them, various other sections of youth claiming to be “independent”  had used their weaponry with telling effect – embarrassing the police, trying to “storm” the Nabanna, the administrative headquarter of the government, laying siege to the office of the health department, the Swasthya Bhavan, occupying the streets, coining new slogans, coming up regularly with new or revised charters of demand, engaging top notch lawyers in the Supreme Court, building network with the larger medical fraternity, capturing international attention, and mobilising the entire political and cultural brigades of the city – in sum, displacing the old pattern of politics with something that many imagined to be new politics – for a cleaner life, corruption-free society, and responsible government. The Left posed to be the natural contender for such a dream. But the Right was also determined not to be pushed behind. In any case, it appeared as a war between a moral populace and a thuggish populist party. Battle lines were now drawn clear.

Yet, by the end of the first fortnight of September, the arsenal of the agitators and the political forces supporting them stood depleted. With the government firing not a single shot on the occupying forces, no case of lathi change except when there was an attempt to lay siege around Nabanna (August 27), the police force without fuss accepting insult by the young doctors in the form of being presented with the replica of a spine (September 3), and the political force of the populists by and large staying quiet and disciplined, the administration seemed to be recovering some of the lost ground. It stayed put, denied charges of complicity and corruption, but most importantly, took initiative for dialogue as a way out of the impasse (September 13). 

Meanwhile patients suffered, some hospital OPDs remained closed, and the parallel reality of the exclusive nature of the demands of the medical community in contrast to the latter’s loud claim of representing the society emerged as part of the undeclared social war. Gradually, the demand for justice for the murder of the young doctor lost prominence, safety and security of working women lost out totally in terms of public attention, and stoppage of health services for the poor patients was acknowledged only in a round-about way and that too when pressed for a response. 

Senior doctors, junior doctors, and legal fraternity – all focused on the righteous character of the junior doctors’ charter of demands. As doctors’ demands crystalised, clarity replaced ambiguity, and the political spirit eased out the social spirit, the battle reached a deadlock. The Supreme Court could not rescue the holy warriors, who now resorted to the last weapon left in their armoury. The fast unto death by a few representatives of junior doctors (from October 5) raised massive concern. Pressure on the medical community mounted, the government again offered a dialogue (October 19). Some demands were met. Hunger strike was withdrawn. Doctors went back to work. The third and the last phase ended in this predictable way. The city heaved a sigh of relief.    

Lesson one

It is important therefore to mark out carefully the phases of a movement, watch for the critical moments, and shape tactics accordingly. Patience is important. Though, acting on moments of conjuncture is equally necessary.            

II

Yet, we may ask, what ordained the pattern of mobilisation and its dynamics? Here class analysis is unavoidable. 

Protest in the wake of the rape and murder of a caregiver, a young lady doctor, in her workplace – a public health facility – was spontaneous and cut across social barriers. However, the protest was typically urban, which is to say that those who protested had possibly ignored similar violence against women of working classes, and the fact that the victim now was from a middle class educated family and was a doctor, a respected figure in society, had now shocked the middle classes. The general question of insecurity of working women crystallised around an “urban” figure. As indicated earlier, the murder signified all the misdeeds and calumny of the popular classes and the desire for a clean life where men and women could pursue their vocations without fear or a feeling of insecurity. The popular classes had experienced such violence on their bodies all through their histories. To them, it was a part of what we may call the daily violence on embodied lives. The regime of urban biopolitics opened up with its internal contradiction stemming from different meanings of violence in everyday life, and therefore the untold question: was this death exceptional? 

The consequential build-up of arguments meant a lot in terms of the class nature of the movement. In some sense, this was not a unique situation, for after all, classes have their respective utopias of a clean and virtuous life. The feature of this situation lay in the ambition of the articulate classes to ride on the wave of the movement to topple the government and capture power, and make society clean by getting rid of the popular classes. These popular classes by educated reasoning are involved in occupations like smuggling including cow smuggling, drawing rent-income from construction and other activities, living off chit funds, hawking, and peddling goods by occupying streets and pavements, and engaging in illegal sand mining, coal mining, tree felling, timber sale, unauthorised fisheries, and living off in the service sector by engaging in domestic work, unlicensed auto-rickshaw driving, waste disposal work, and the like. The educated class terms this as “parallel economy” and no longer thinks of this as “informal economy.” Thus, the black-market economy or the tax dodging economy is not a parallel economy anymore; or, we should not say that national debt operates in a country’s economy in the long run as a parallel economy; but these petty occupations make the “parallel economy.” (See for instance, Sekhar Mukhopadhyay, “Sankhya ki bole, kotota bole” [“What numbers tell and how far they tell”], Anandabazar Patrika, 25 October 2024).

Educated reasoning went further: There must be a correlation between incidence of rape and the extent of this parallel economy. Frustrated, unemployed, angry men rape women. If men are unemployed and still are not raping, then crime figures must be wrong. There were other variations of this sort of reasoning. Nobody said that this is exactly the way racist logic worked. If a member of the civic police force has raped a woman, then hospitals cannot have civic police as part of the protection force. In this way, a new criminal race was born in front of our eyes in the past two months. From the court to the medical fraternity to radical feminists to finally the left-liberal intelligentsia – all agreed that civic police cannot be entrusted with the duty of protecting public health facilities. No one said that we had given birth to a new underclass, a new race – the civic police or civic volunteers. The populists were universally damned. They had created a civic police force made up of lumpen youth. They had patronised rapists and murderers.  

The urban conflict that Kolkata witnessed was thus not one as the liberal-Left would have liked us to believe between on one hand an authoritarian, murderous, and corrupt government and on the other citizens in opposition rallying in defence of life, liberty, and values. It was also not a struggle waged jointly by feminists and a community of ethical practitioners like the doctors. It was and still is a social war among groups and classes – mostly conducted underground, but at times raising its head with a ferocity that takes the society by surprise. The social war is a civil war, where the middle classes and the popular classes are arraigned against each other. This is the new twist brought in by neoliberalism to the story of class struggle. The uneducated and uncultured populists will never be respected by the middle classes, in as much as the metropolis thinks, it is self-sufficient and has no need for small towns and the vast hinterland beyond. Yet the irony is that populists and the popular classes cannot do without the middle classes who have gained most from neoliberal investment in education and health of the society. The middle classes everywhere have contributed to the deterioration of the condition of the toiling classes. Yet the latter will have to co-exist with the former and try to reorient it, in the process reorienting itself.    

Lesson two

The urban is thus at once a transcendental as well as a class story. The cleavage between the middle classes and the working classes is deep. Any popular government will have to negotiate this rift towards strengthening the popular will that has been the basis of its existence.

III

Education and health bring the social question headlong in the story of the urban and complicate the struggle. At the same time, we must not be surprised that this new twist to urban struggle has once again materialised around what historians have termed as the “women’s question.” In country after country (Afghanistan in the wake of US withdrawal and Gaza in Palestine being the two recent instances), the most conflictive moment during any major transition in this neoliberal age has been marked by the “women’s question,” particularly by issues of their education and health. Women’s security and protection have crystallised around these two issues. It will not be an exaggeration to say that biopolitics in Southern countries is taking shape around the body of the woman. For the neoliberals, women’s emancipation is the war cry. Women must be freed from obscurantists. For the liberals, developing women’s condition and ability is the ethical goal of democracy. For the Left, it is an embarrassing situation, for they cannot oppose the neoliberal twist to the issue, while they know that this “emancipation” and “development” of women hardly touch the lives of women belonging to the popular classes.

The social and the political are thus the eternal jostling duo in the liberal annal. In this scenario, the old notion of “Left” and “Right” no longer makes sense. When we analyse the politics of our time, we have a natural tendency to copy and paste the political map of our past and place it onto our time which is a different time. It is a useful shortcut on certain occasions, but not always. What was “Left” fifty years ago is not so in face of new realities and new contradictions. The social is assuming a new form. It baffles the “Left.” The “Left” persists with old politics. It has no answer to new features. In this context we may remember how the social/political dynamics played out in the colonial past. Recall the social reform legislations in early and mid-nineteenth century in India over widow burning and widow remarriage. These and other reforms strengthened the social basis of colonial rule, and these hardly touched lives of peasant women, for in low caste societies these were not the major issues of life. When the nationalist leaders were speaking of “reforms” of a caste-bound society, Ambedkar the Dalit leader spoke of “annihilation of caste.” Who were the “Left” and the “Right” in those days? 

And today, how shall we relate the question of the popular classes with women’s safety, security, education, and health? This appears to be a non-question for the “Left.” Hence, their almost total failure to comprehend the social/political dialectic and integrate the dialectic in their transformative strategy is apparent.    

Also read: R.G. Kar: An MD Thesis I Could Submit, an MD Thesis She Could Not

On the other hand, the need to decolonise the security question is more urgent than ever. Efforts are on in many countries of the South to decolonise the security question and relocate it in the context of the post-colonial societies – their problems of underdevelopment, issues of basic rights such as of food, shelter, education, work, and health. The security question in the South is entangled with issues of life – life of the nation, people, and in particular lives of the vulnerable population groups in society, who face a generalised state of insecurity of life. To look at the question of security from the biopolitical angle is to disengage it from the colonial paradigm and to decolonise the security problematic.

Remember, the traditional approach to the security issue has been unable to reflect on the massive transformation in the last few decades, consequent to the impact of globalisation on countries of the South. It has thereby failed to achieve a deeper understanding of the insecurities and vulnerabilities of marginalised people and the emerging new underclasses of society. These insecurities require attention, analysis, and call for a proper approach that is suffused with a new approach to justice. The more the macro security of State, polity, and the big institutions has been reinforced, the more it has produced micro insecurities in society, leading to clashes, spread of homeland demands, conflicts over resources, public health disasters, and not the least – mob lynching in the wake of the spread of racial, religious, community, and caste hatred. They have also resulted in making women from the impoverished classes the permanent underclass who find it particularly difficult to get out of that condition. Probably this is the question of women’s security in a post-colonial world. The issue of security is now at the crossroads of rights, justice, and vulnerabilities. 

In the wake of neoliberal reforms and relentless urbanisation, crime and urban insecurity have joined to become an interlinked theme overwhelming the public mind. Crime has become synonymous with the growth of the city. Urban governance structure, increasingly shaped by global governance norms, is geared towards managing and pacifying claim-makings of urban population groups with tools of surveillance and coercion. The overriding aim of urban governance is to ensure conditions of reproduction, including reproduction of an unjust urban order characterised by a growing impoverished and criminalised underclass. Cities world over have had experiences of urban governance creating mayhem in the city in the name of abolishing crime. Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York City (1994-2001), was not only trying to free New York City of crime. That figure of a cleaner of crimes has been part of the contemporary history of many cities of the South. And, almost everywhere the assumption has been that immigrants are the root cause of crime, or, in general the underclasses. They are the scourge. Prostitution, drugs, trade in illicit goods, corruption, trafficking, gang warfare, and mafia activities… The crime line is straight. We are told, all that a city needs is a determined and ruthless cleaner who can order his/her forces to press triggers to save the city. On the other hand, everyday life of the lower classes in the city is marked by for instance lack of safety of female commuters in public transportation system, lack of drinking water, housing, fuel, even lack of minimum sanitation facilities, various consequences of repressive approach to street vending, and insecurity associated with street level economic activities resulting in two parallel figures of the policeman and the street vendor or the sex worker – each watching the other as the typical margin of a society marked by disorder, crime, and informality, yet constantly interacting with each other. The question of security emerges at this intersection of issues of daily life. Security cameras, civil guards, anticipatory arrests, creating a race of habitual offenders, and repressive techniques of surveillance and crowd control – these are marks of an urban biopower geared towards controlling the lives and bodies of the popular classes. Not unexpectedly, several of the demands of the doctors focused on the security technology, and thus the wrangling over the number of CCTVs to be installed.

Lesson three

Urban contentions congeal the dialectic of social and the political. Migration, new frontiers of work, new boundaries, new professional classes, new subaltern groups, and new insecurities of life define the urban. Any transformative strategy must build on these new realities and new contradictions. The insecure woman of the society is the congealed figure of these new realities and contradictions.

IV

For long, the urban form had been taken as an open, liberating form of human existence. Yet this is a near-mythical history, as every incident of insecurity has been used in urban history to kill that assumed openness. Thus, civic police – the new group of rapists and dangerous people – is to be thrown out of hospitals and other institutions. They cannot be entrusted with protecting the latter. Among others this is an indication of the city taking a camp form. Like the civic volunteer or the civic police, in cities across the world immigrants or suspected immigrants have been declared as illegals. Court-inspired as in the case of civic police or administration-ordered drives, verification campaigns, etc., transform the city to a camp or an assemblage of protected places, which are camp-like existences. The camp is a form of existence always on the margins of protection, detention, and illegality. The “camp form” symbolises the always temporary, precarious, and informal zones of a city. These zones create fractures in the political, spatial, and temporal relation between citizens as legal subjects and their proper representative rulers. The insecure medical college like the R.G. Kar represents the life condition of the confined and the differentially included in the urban world. Such a place is present, like an ulcer, with which the city as an organism will have to live. It cannot be surgically separated, because in that case the city will die. Hence is the question for city rulers, namely, how can these settlements be governed? Almost everywhere the urban response has been in the form of creating the demand and riding on the crest of such demand that the insecure place in the city must be turned into a camp, a protected and securitised place. 

The conjuncture of the effect of a specific time, occupation of the space, and imponderables of a physical domain created the insecure place of R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital. In this way, a supposedly healthy district, which is to say, the place where people were nursed back to health, became morbid. As if, the physical existence of the subjects of this place must be morally purified to protect the city and the nation. The government cannot do it; the city will not trust the government; and power in these insecure places must be geographically localised to ensure the safety and purity of these contaminated places. Thus, doctors must be empowered to run the place and clean it. The government must agree to a situation of perpetual conjuncture of a geographical, physical, professional, and ethical milieu and must accept the autonomous existence of an urban populace insofar as the latter has a body and a soul, a physical and a moral existence. This is the neoliberal transformation of a city, where urban democracy will ensure urban peace. Perpetual peace will reign in the city only in this way. We shall have solved the problems of salvation, obedience, and a decriminalised human existence. Sacrifice of openness is the necessary cost towards a decriminalised world. In conventions held in solidarity with the protesting junior doctors, middle class speakers went on to denigrate public health institutions, and alleged that these institutions had completely broken down. One argued, rape in a red-light district is understandable, but in a medical college and hospital?

Middle classes spit on the same bowl from which they eat. Public institutions are unclean and insecure. They call for a big broomstick. This is the known path to privatisation of institutions and no wonder the middle class of Kolkata led the charge.    

Lesson four

The desire we are speaking of here is universal. The same urban form that produces insecurity produces this desire also. Against this desire is the reality of conflicts in a city, which lives like a collection of atoms. City represents the fractured geography of human existence. The propertied, the professional communities, and cultured classes want a city secured from the hazards of precarious existences. But they need the public nature of a city to push their respective sectoral demands. Yet, that public nature must not be extended to the uncertain frontiers and outlying areas of the city. Given the predictable chorus of these groups in defence of their gated existences, as the political experiences of Kolkata in these two and half months showed, the challenge is: How can a politics of social transformation confront the various phantasmagoria that constitute the urban? How can such politics place the popular classes back to its original place as the “heart of the city”? What will be the new urban? Or, should we think of moving beyond the urban towards a politics of transformation of places?

V

As in Kolkata, populist forces run the administration in many cities such as Mumbai, Chennai, or Delhi, where populist administration represents the will of the popular classes consisting mostly of people working in informal economy, living in slums, shanty settlements, and irregular, insecure places of the city. These populist administrations have the stupendous task of managing the city in a new way. They try to turn the police into a “civil force” to be accepted by the lower classes, become accountable to the demands of the inhabitants of the “inner city,” transform the intolerable lives of the precariously surviving people into tolerable ones, indeed improve them, reach the lower classes access to education and public health, and make co-existence of the lower and middle classes possible in an urban form that will tolerate pluralities of urban life. It is easier said than done. With dreams competing in a combustible milieu, the city is often delirious. The administration must calm the frayed nerves, rising temper, and moderate class hatred that at times threatens to break apart the fragile existence called the city. It is doubly difficult because popular classes exist on the margins of legality. A substantial part of their survival practices consists of what a philosopher of the last century termed as “popular illegalism.” Populist government tolerates such “illegalism.” In a sense, the lives of the popular classes are marked by counter-conduct, counter to the prescribed norm of urban existence.

Also read: The R.G. Kar Protests Reveal a Political Vacuum

In such milieu, rape becomes to the urban citizenry a symbol of the illegal, deranged, dehumanised lower classes. Blacks, immigrants, seniors and toughs in camps, child care homes, and hospitals, and all others with no stable earning, become pervert races. They inhabit the “non-places” of a city. Think of the night of 14-15 August 2024, when a group of mostly slum dwellers attacked the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, vandalised, and broke furniture and equipment in one part of the facility. Where did they come from? Who were they? To whom did they pay their allegiance? What was their motive? Whom did they want to scare? They emerged from the shadows and retreated to the shadows. Observers have various explanations of the incident depending on their political views. Yet the fact is that as mysteriously they vanished as they had arrived in the first place carrying various flags and slogans. Their anger against a shut-down place of care was evident. Such incidents will keep on happening under populist administrations as the lower classes will go delirious. The lower classes will remind you of Lukka, the character played by Nasiruddin Shah in Ravindra Dharmaraj’s Chakra (1981). 

Like Delirious Naples (2018), Kolkata reminds us of a city in a delirious state. The populist government because of its intrinsic formation cannot abolish illegality, yet cannot but represent the lower classes in city life. One hundred years ago Antonio Gramsci had thought that intellectuals of Naples under the leadership of the workers of the North will transform the “Southern” city hitherto exploited by Catholic Church, banks, and the propertied classes. The permanently ambivalent attitude of the lower classes of the city to education, morality, and order will be transformed. 

But today? The task is incredibly tougher with neoliberal transformation of the educated gentry and the emergence of a technologically empowered stratum of society. For any emancipative politics, respect for the lower classes will have to be the base from which reconstruction of social life can begin. It is not a pipe dream, for the non-spaces of a city are in effect spaces of reconstruction. In the post-Lefebvre age, space is no longer natural. It is produced. It has an unbreakable relation with sociability.  It is produced through the interlinkages of geography, built-in environment, life practices, symbols, and resistance. Many spaces in a city are non-spaces to the urban, but in their own histories they carry stories of survival and possibilities of self-transformation. 

Lesson five

Events in Kolkata in the last two and half months show that only an awareness of the paradoxical nature of the transformative agenda for a southern city can make radical urban politics possible in this neoliberal age. If the rape and murder of the young doctor can impart such awareness to radical activists, which many other rapes and murders failed to convey, we shall be able to say that society has honoured the murdered doctor in the fullest meaning of the phrase, “honouring the death.” Speaking of Delirious Naples, recall Pasolini who perhaps anticipating his own death had said, “It is only at our moment of death that our life, to that point undecipherable, ambiguous, suspended, acquires a meaning.”       

Ranabir Samaddar is Distinguished Chair, Calcutta Research Group.