Protests have erupted over Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College rape and murder incident throughout India. Even many Bengalis living in the West have participated in women’s night vigils in solidarity with the main rally held in Kolkata and different parts of West Bengal on the night of August 14th.
However, amid the cacophony demanding justice for the victim of RG Kar Medical College rape and murder, what’s happening is that a lot of similar cases aren’t getting any attention, providing leeway to other state governments that have failed to protect women as well.
Incidents that remain out of popular discourse
The Dalit teenager’s story
A 14-year-old school dropout girl in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district was allegedly gang-raped and murdered on Sunday, August 11th night.
Her body was found on Monday, August 12th near a pond. The villagers have staged a protest at the Paroo Police Station demanding justice.
The parents of the girl, who belong to the ostracised Dalit community—considered outcastes in the Hindu caste hierarchy—have blamed a man named Sanjay Rai for the incident.
The victim’s mother was quoted by the media saying that their daughter was abducted by Mr Rai on Sunday night, and he threatened to rape her.
The reason?
The girl refused Mr Rai’s advances and his desire to marry her. Mr Rai is already married.
The victim’s mother also told the press that they couldn’t do anything to stop Mr Rai or save their daughter that fateful night.
The police, despite having a name on records, couldn’t act until August 15th.
Bihar is ruled by a coalition of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) [JD(U)] and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s federally ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
After failing to gain an absolute majority for his BJP in the recently-concluded Lok Sabha elections, Mr Modi is surviving on the support extended by Mr Kumar, who is infamous for his political acrobatic stunts.
Most of West Bengal’s BJP leaders have origins in Bihar.
The party, known for its inclination towards the non-Bengali population and surviving on their support in the state, has remained mum on the gory incident of Muzaffarpur gangrape and murder while amplifying the demand for Chief Minister Mamata Bandopadhyay’s resignation.
Supporters of Ms Bandopadhyay’s All-India Trinamool Congress (AITC) allege that the brutal gangrape and murder of the 14-year-old teenager in Bihar has been ignored and concealed over the fact that the BJP won’t cause any inconvenience to Mr Kumar’s government.
Coincidentally, the Indian mainstream media has ignored the plight of the mother of the victim of the Muzaffarpur incident and has only focused on the RG Kar Medical College rape and murder incident.
The Uttar Pradesh horror
In the BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh’s Bijnor, a 22-year-old was gangraped by five suspects and they also filmed her. The incident took place on August 9th.
Although Uttar Pradesh under Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath tops the country in crime against women, no movements have been organised demanding justice for the victim.
The English and Hindi-language mainstream media don’t even highlight the plight of women in the state who feel insecure due to the impunity with which the criminals act.
Several instances of gangrapes in Uttar Pradesh, especially targeting the Dalit community have taken place in the last few years, and every time Mr Adityanath has escaped the heat because of a lack of any strong Opposition in the state.
Uttarakhand: Another medical staff assaulted
On August 14th, the police in the hilly state of Uttarakhand, also ruled by the BJP, arrested a daily wage earner for the rape and murder of a nurse in Udham Singh Nagar district.
The woman was assaulted and murdered on the night of July 30th. However, there were no movements or demands for justice for the victim. The mainstream media also remained mum about the issue.
The Indian medical fraternity has been agitating over the tragic RG Kar Medical College rape and murder incident but didn’t take any step to condemn the incident in Uttarakhand.
Odisha: Where patients are under threat
Dr Dilbagh Singh Thakur from Madhya Pradesh is a resident doctor at Odisha’s premier SCB Medical College and Hospital in Cuttack. He’s accused of raping two patients on the hospital campus.
Dr Thakur has been admitted to the hospital after enraged relatives of the patients, including junior doctors, beat him up. The police have booked Dr Thakur on August 11th based on the complaints.
However, despite Dr Thakur being accused of violating a sacred bond between a doctor and a patient, no major movement took place in Odisha demanding the resignation of the health minister and home minister.
As the BJP is now ruling Odisha, therefore, there are no visible movements, even by the medical fraternity against the Cuttack hospital’s horror involving Dr Thakur.
Understanding rapes in India
Sexual violence is quite common in India. According to the 2022 report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which happens to be the last one, a total of 445,256 cases of crime against women were registered in India.
It’s a 4% increase vis-à -vis 2021, when 428,278 crimes against women were registered.
Number of crimes registered is often higher than the number of crimes committed.
Among them, there were 31,516 cases of rape in 2022 (2023 numbers aren’t available now), which means nearly 87 rape cases were reported daily, or over three such incidents took place each hour—one in every 20 minutes.
However, despite such high numbers of registered cases of rapes—and most of the rapes that take place within families go without reporting, claim women’s rights activists—the conviction rate has been quite miserable.
Out of a total of 24,637 cases of rape that went on trial, convictions were secured in only 199 cases. This shows the poor prosecution system and the police’s inability to build strong cases against the accused or their reluctance to nab the real culprits.
In such circumstances, while West Bengal has a fairly high number of rapes registered per 100,000 population, however, it still lags behind BJP-ruled Assam, Haryana, Tripura, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh.
Also, though the state’s toll of rape victims and cases happens to be higher than Karnataka (ruled by the BJP in 2022), Kerala (left-ruled) and the BJP-ruled Tripura and Uttarakhand, it lags behind BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Assam.
The politics over Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College rape and murder incident
In such a circumstance, it’s comprehensible that the BJP-led protests over Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College rape and murder incident are driven by an agenda more than the party’s concern for women.
Moreover, the government also fears that the BJP, which has suffered serious setbacks in West Bengal during the 2021 Assembly and 2024 Lok Sabha elections, has been using the occasion to utilise the anti-incumbency waves.
However, the common people’s strong reaction to Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College rape and murder incident is a testament to their frustration over Ms Bandopadhyay’s AITC’s alleged role in the incident and its patronisation of hardened criminals to retain hegemony.
Kolkata has been hitherto considered a safe city for women, despite some of the gory atrocities against women.
While sexual violence against women in the countryside of West Bengal is quite quintessential, especially involving political figures affiliated with the ruling AITC, it’s uncommon for a woman from the status of the victim to face it in Kolkata, inside an institution.
This has provoked Kolkata’s influential middle class, which is polarised between the AITC and the BJP, with a small fraction supporting the left.
The ruckus was created after RG Kar’s ex-principal Dr Sandip Ghosh tried to cover up the crime. It’s doubted by several students of RG Kar that there is a concerted effort to hide the involvement of anyone influential, and the probability of such a person belonging to the AITC is high as the administration wouldn’t have been involved in whitewashing the crime otherwise.
Their allegation gained currency when Dr Ghosh resigned, two days after Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College rape and murder incident but was immediately promoted to the principal of National Medical College.
This sudden promotion caused a major upheaval demanding a thorough investigation and people also questioned the Kolkata Police’s version, which laid the blame on a civic volunteer.
As Ms Bandopadhyay, who generally use monetary compensation to gag the rape victims and their families in rural West Bengal, was caught unaware and her compensation amount was rejected, the AITC found itself in a quagmire.
Now, as the movement continues, all over India, demanding justice for the victim of Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College rape and murder incident, the BJP has managed to successfully convert it into a mass movement seeking the resignation of Ms Bandopadhyay, who is also the home and health minister of the state.
Whether Ms Bandopadhyay, who has faced and successfully survived several storms in her political career, can successfully navigate this treacherous trajectory and retain her hegemony can be seen in a few days.