The War Against the Rot Has to Be Fought Not Just for Those That Seem Like Us

A chorus rose from the distance, growing louder and then fading as a small group of men and women holding candles passed by on the street below. “We want,” a bold female voice demanded; “Justice,” the fellow marchers responded. For a brief while on Wednesday night, the chant drowned the sound from the television in the middle-class neighbourhood far from any regular protest site in Calcutta.

The cry for justice has been relentless since August 9 when a 31-year-old doctor at RG Kar medical college and hospital was raped and murdered in the seminar hall where she had to sleep at the end of a 36-hour shift.

31,516. Thirty-one thousand five hundred and sixteen. That is the number of women raped in India in one year – 2022 – according to the National Crime Records Bureau. An average of 86 women raped every day. On August 9, the junior doctor was one of them. In the weeks since, hundreds of more incidents of sexual assault would have been reported in police stations across the country.

Some were spoken about briefly in the media – the two children brutalised in their school in Badlapur in Maharashtra, a young woman in Agra who had to strip in public before the police acted on her complaint and arrested the accused, a 14-year-old gangraped and murdered in Bihar, another 14-year-old waylaid and gangraped while cycling back from school in Assam. Most though will just be numbers on the NCRB database.

But like the paramedic attacked on a Delhi street 12 years ago, the assault on the Calcutta doctor has touched a nerve. For the first time since 2012, women’s safety seems to have become a national public concern.

Some of the protests and protesters are suspect – such as those that wrought havoc in Calcutta on August 27. As is their demand for the chief minister’s resignation.

But the crime has triggered a genuine outpouring of shock and anger, even among the hard-to-move middle class. For once, there is no outrage at the disruption of daily life that the protests are causing. The outrage is directed, as it should be, at the system that has forced the protests. No one is complaining about traffic jams. Even the ceasework by the junior doctors has popular support, although operations in government hospitals have been hit hard. Whether the support would hold up if private hospitals were similarly affected is untested. Still, it is a refreshing change to see the privileged class speak up.

Also read: Flag or No Flag, the City of the Protest March Has Risen

The enthusiasm and sincerity of intent make up even when sometimes the demands do not make complete sense. As it happened with a petition titled “Global Protest – Petition for RG Kar” that landed as a WhatsApp forward on Thursday. The demand: “JUSTICE. J for Justice for RG Kar; U for Unity for the sake of humanity instead of political anarchy marring the truth; S for safety, honour and security of women in all societal spaces; T for transparency at every stage of the investigation; I for initiation of measures for woman empowerment and equality; C for change within the judiciary system through transparent appointments and expedited judicial procedure in order to reinstate the faith of common man; and E for exemplary punishment of the culprits.”

Some of the demands are actionable, such as punishment for the guilty or transparency in the probe. But what does “honour” of women mean? And does any authority exist that can ensure security in “all societal spaces”? Good policing can bring down crime and an efficient and independent justice system can ensure the guilty are punished promptly, but society as a whole has to create the safe spaces by changing its own view of women. For a start, by disconnecting women’s honour from crimes committed against them.

The petition is addressed to, among others, the Prime Minister and the Union home ministry.

The rapists of Bilkis Bano and murderers of her family were freed from jail with the concurrence of the Union government, at whose head sits the Prime Minister. BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh was accused by multiple women wrestlers of sexually harassing them, the sportswomen took to the streets to seek justice as the doctors are doing now, and appealed to the Prime Minister to hear them. And then, in the general election, the BJP gave Brij Bhushan’s son a ticket to contest in the father’s place. A parallel would be if Sandip Ghosh’s son or brother or nephew were made the principal of R.G. Kar after he stepped down. In Manipur, two women were stripped, paraded naked and sexually assaulted by a mob. The opposition had to bring a no-confidence motion to get the prime minister to speak about the state in parliament.

Also read: ‘Where’s the Proof They Were Raped?’, Biren Allegedly Says of Kuki Women Paraded Naked, ‘Reward Those Arrested for Saving Them’

It is a record that could daunt even the most obstinate optimist from knocking on the same door for justice. But the R.G. Kar protesters – doctors, their families and friends, the housing societies they live in and the larger society that sees them as its own – have been plodding on. On the midnight of August 14, Calcutta residents had poured out on the streets in response to a cry to “Reclaim the Night”. But you can only reclaim something you have owned and lost. When did women, or even men, ever own the night?

Like doctors, journalists too work night shifts. I did so for years, returning at 2 and 3 in the morning. The drive home would take no more than 20 minutes, most of it on an arterial road where policemen are posted at short distances, and it never felt unsafe. The city looks beautiful, peaceful, in the warm glow of the streetlights. But I would not dream of getting off the car and walking down the same stretch. Nor would any other woman I know.

Only once did we do it, a friend and I, during Durga Puja when armies of Calcuttans march through the city day and night, turned out in finery, the adults guided by mental lists of must-visit pandals, the kids blowing bubbles or whistles, the biryani vendors and toy sellers doing brisk business at all hours. We got off at Maddox Square, the place to be in south Calcutta, mingled with the crowds happily, ate ice-creams and started walking home. And regretted it. The route did not have big Pujas, so the crowds tapered off after a bit. By the time we got close to my friend’s home, we were almost running. My house was less than a five-minute walk from hers but I did not risk it, choosing instead to wait till daybreak before leaving her place.

The night remains as out of bounds as it was then. The afternoons and evenings though have changed. The Dhakuria Lakes are a lovely green expanse in Calcutta – one of the few pleasant walks in the city. But a couple of decades ago, a young woman crossing that stretch on foot in the afternoon would have to brace for lewd comments. This was true of all quiet neighbourhoods where roads would be empty when residents took a post-lunch nap. After dusk, it was again not advisable to be out alone in residential localities.

Now, in the same south Calcutta addresses, you can be out at any time of day or evening without having to worry about leery glances or comments. This is not because of the government or the police, it is simply because there are many more people out all day now and the roads are busier. More women are out working, many more are living alone. Society has changed. The city feels safer.

This is why when the prime minister came visiting Bengal in 2021, addressing packed election rallies in the middle of the pandemic, and sneered, “Didi o Didi”, it sent a shiver down the spine of many women. If a chief minister was not safe from catcalls, what hope did the rest of us have?

The horrific crime at R.G. Kar reflects not how safe or unsafe Calcutta is, but how hostile the workplace is for women. The doctor was not assaulted and killed on a city street, she was attacked inside her place of work. A workplace where she had to roll out a mattress on a stage to sleep after a long shift. Why don’t hospitals have secure spaces that doctors, nurses or attendants can retire to?

Also read: The Republic of Apathy

It took a rape and murder for the appalling conditions in government hospitals to come to light. But even a swipe-card-access-controlled office can be unsafe, the threat coming from a colleague who knows he can get away. At the Raj Bhavan in Calcutta, a woman employee accused the governor of molesting her. Citing the immunity granted to his office, C.V. Ananda Bose has blocked the investigation. The woman has had to go to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the governor is demanding justice for the R.G. Kar doctor.

It is good to see the Supreme Court take a stand on security in the workplace by deciding on its own to take up the RG Kar case. Not too many years ago, in a troubling decision, the then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had presided over a hearing on allegations of sexual harassment levelled against him by a court employee.

The R.G. Kar ex-principal’s conduct is suspicious. Whether or not he was directly involved in the rape and murder, he is to blame. Why did the junior doctor have to sleep in the seminar hall? How did someone like the alleged rapist Sanjay Roy have free access in the hospital? What was the urgency of a renovation immediately after the crime? The questions Ghosh needs to answer are many. Why did he get a plum posting as soon as he resigned from R.G. Kar? How could he thwart his transfer in the past? Mamata Banerjee, as chief minister and health minister, has to answer this. Do Calcutta police not run a background check before selecting civic volunteers?

The questions that are crying for answers speak of a rot in the system. That the CBI is investigating Ghosh for corruption has surprised no one. He is accused of illegal sale of unclaimed corpses, financial irregularities and trafficking in biomedical waste. A corrupt system has room and need for hoodlums, men of Roy’s kind, and that is how one crime leads to another.

The battle against the rot has to be fought, but it cannot be fought in isolation at R.G. Kar. The privileged class might have woken up now to corruption in government hospitals, but it remains deaf to the allegations of colossal corruption in the Securities and Exchange Board of India, as it was to the revelations on the electoral bonds scheme and to cries of irregularities in the election vote count. But who knows better than doctors that you cannot fight disease in only one finger or one nail and let it fester in the rest of the body?

That Ghosh has been arrested is testimony to the power of protest. Remember, unlike Brij Bhushan, there is nothing public yet that directly links him with the crime. But for once, we are seeking accountability. While the rapist or rapists must be punished, the man at the helm must answer for the rot that enabled the rape. And rot, as we all know, can be tackled only if we make it our business to fight it everywhere.

“We want justice.” Yes, we do. For everyone. For the dead doctor at RG Kar and her parents, for doctors who are forced to work in inhuman conditions, for every woman whose sexual harassment complaint is dismissed by her bosses, for the student of IIT-Banaras Hindu University gangraped on campus, for the ragpicker from Bengal beaten to death and the teenage student killed “by mistake” by so-called cow protectors in Haryana, for the elderly father thrashed for carrying meat for his daughter, for every family that has lost its home to bulldozers, for the three IAS aspirants who drowned in rainwater in a reputable coaching centre functioning illegally out of a basement in the national capital, and for the people of Manipur and the people of Kashmir. For Umar Khalid, too, an educated middle class young man who had dared to protest.

It is only when we step out and speak up for justice for everyone who is wronged, not just for those that seem like us, that we have any hope of securing justice for anyone.

Harshita Kalyan is a Calcutta-based journalist.