A violent rape, a murder that is so brutal that it is literally the decimation of a human body. The most primal of all violations, a disruption of all social contracts of civilisation, but also the most final one. Not a violation of property, position, or aspiration of any other kind, even though they often remain connected. As they very possibly are with the nightmarish murder of the 31-year-old trainee doctor in RG Kar Medical College Hospital in Kolkata on August 9. While we await legally established evidence of connection with other interests, for the shocked humanity of Kolkata, and the world, this remains an act of crazed vengeance against the body and life of a human being.
It is a brutal and final decimation that echoes devastatingly with the reality of West Bengal, a state where there is nothing left to violate. Industry is gone. Revenues are depleted to the sorriest plane. A place where white collar corporate crime might just feel absurd as there doesn’t seem to be enough capital left for such violations. What seem to be left in this state are just bread, cement, cactus – as the writer Annie Zaidi named the impoverished, dried up and rough remains of roti, kapada and makaan. As the joke runs among those born in Calcutta – the only professionals who still thrive in the city are the lawyers who profit from property squabbles, and doctors who feed off ailments of the body. Nothing is created in this city anymore.
I was a neighbour to R.G. Kar Medical College during my years in the city. I’ve visited the men’s hostel a couple of times, hanging out with a school friend who was medical student; I remember spending a night in the hostel that still played nest to alumni looking for a city shelter. The narrow thoroughfare outside crawled with creaky traffic and sweaty humanity, and there was a country booze theka right across where I’d sampled an atmosphere of naked rowdiness that, in those days, I had no idea could even exist. Of course it was a government hospital, and of course hapless crowds thronged at its crumbling gates, corpses sprouting on the way.
News of the surreal violence done to the life and body of the medical trainee at R.G. Kar brings the grimy walls of its corridors and washrooms crashing around me. So what if more than 20 years have passed – the slimy squalor, the jagged violence, the systemic failure and inhumanity, that smothered the place like smog, has deepened many times over from the rule of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) to that of the Trinamool Congress.
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An alum, now a senior physician, tells me that the infrastructure was just as broken earlier but there was still a coherent community among the students, interns and doctors – a semblance of a contract of trust and support. The current political regime, and most pointedly the tenure of the controversial former principal of the college, Sandip Ghosh, has managed to decimate that community altogether. Nothing bespeaks this decimation like this horrific violation that immediately takes us back to the 2012 rape of Nirbhaya in Delhi.
But when a dying state turns criminal, it feeds on its own body. That is perhaps why our most vocal and radical of political leaders and the most admired of our sports stars have refused to take serious cognisance of this crime. They continue to place their faith on a criminal justice system that seems to have strategically and deliberately failed at every step of the investigation, destroying evidence with the same brutality with which the perpetrators attacked the victim. But the accusations against Ghosh, former principal of the college, are legion: corruption and bribes over exams and medical seats, bullying and blocking administrative transfers, even running a wide network of illegal trade in pharmaceutical drugs. In spite of the wide and persistent string of accusations – including administrators quoting bribe amounts on television – nothing has been conclusively proven, so legally, all of it is speculation. But Ghosh’s connections with the ruling party in the state are far more than blatant. No matter what the allegations are, the man keeps bouncing back, even bagging the top post in another leading medical college in the city after being let go from RG Kar. The move was stalled only by students refusing to have “garbage” on their campus.
Oh, wait, is there another thing still left in Bengal? Education? Once the seat of colonial modernity and cultural, scientific and social progress, this state was home to some of the best institutions of higher education in the country. Jadavpur University still limps ahead in a leading position among state universities nationwide. The unrelenting tussle between the governor and the chief minister has cost public universities their due administrative and faculty appointments while students flee the state in large numbers whenever they can. But a unique Bengal brightness still lingers in the student body of the best institutions, residually perhaps. That never fails to stand out over the years, through my lectures and discussions in Jadavpur, my alma mater.
The victim, whose body was allegedly cremated under the anxious tutelage of the state police and the local medical authority, and who, as speculations go, had unearthed a cycle of corruption so vast that it cost her life, was that sad and dull jewel of Bengali middle class life: a good student. If you had the nerve and stomach to watch the video where her family and friends described the decimation of her body, you’ve also heard of her academic dedication and brilliance – of the way she cleared the competitive medical entrance exam without any political sponsorship or inside support. In a nation where entrance exam questions leak through the holes of corruption, she was that anachronism – a meritorious candidate. How could the state of West Bengal possibly allow her to live and thrive? Like a destructive mother who eats her own progeny, a party regime led by a powerful, charismatic woman played nursemaid to an alleged gang of thugs who would purportedly brook no resistance from a woman. That the inevitable consequence of this mechanism would be chilling masculine violence to a woman’s body and life was already cast in the script.
Saikat Majumdar is a novelist and a critic. His most recent book is The Remains of the Body (2024).
