Rape and murder in Kolkata – mass protests against state-sanctioned sexist violence

Protests have spread across West Bengal following the rape and murder of a trainee doctor. Ekabali Ghosh explains the background to the protests and the context of systemic violence against women in India. 

Indians are not unused to this sequence of events. A heinous incident of rape happens in a part of India that has an advantage of visibility over the rest of the country. The country takes to the streets, opinions are written in newspapers columns and TV news sensationalises every detail. Such rituals take place once every two years, while many such incidents happen on a daily basis. The country has a serious problem with gendered safety and the right to life and dignity for feminised and queer persons. Its raging patriarchy, casteism, Islamophobia and state-sanctioned violence against disposable bodies are the larger culprits.

On 9 August, the body of a trainee doctor was found inside a seminar hall at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata. Preliminary information amongst trainee doctors suggested that something had gone gravely wrong, and protests erupted around 5pm that evening. It was only after the protests had erupted that the body of the victim was sent to the mortuary for a post-mortem examination. The laxity with which the police initially treated the case raised alarms. News suggests that the family of the victim was initially told that their daughter had died by suicide. Given these circumstances, junior doctors started an unofficial strike in the hospital demanding justice for the victim, their own workplace security and the removal of the principal of RG Kar, a certain Sandip Ghosh.

RG Kar is a well-known hospital under the control of the state of West Bengal, where the All India Trinamool Congress (Trinamool – a 1990s split from the Congress party) is the ruling party. Trinamool had been running a tight ship in the college and hospital, crushing any dissent and placing its own corrupt bureaucrats in key positions.

So what exactly happened at RG Kar?

A female-bodied trainee doctor who had been resting in a seminar hall during a 36-hour long shift was attacked, raped and murdered in the early hours of 9 August. She had chosen the seminar hall as a sleeping spot due to a lack of on-call rooms in the hospital. We do not know how many attackers were involved but one person has so far been arrested. The accused was a civic volunteer with the Kolkata Police, and was very likely working as a middleman to get patients admitted into state hospitals.

Corruption – from a whiff to a stench

Hospital principal Sandip Ghosh resigned on 12 August following the protests. However, the government simply transferred him to another well-known medical college in Kolkata as its principal, a prize posting which fooled no one. The students at the second medical college locked the principal’s office and refused to accept Ghosh’s appointment.

So what is he accused of? Ghosh is one of the bureaucrats involved in shutting down any dissent in RG Kar. Junior doctors on news channels have claimed that various nefarious means were used to shut them down, including withholding registration numbers. The general state of corruption in the state hospital system in West Bengal is definitely a factor that has led to this horrific murder. Rumours of a broken pelvic girdle pointing at gangrape rather than one attacker, and of Trinamool-supported interns holding keys to the seminar hall where the victim was discovered, hint at a completely broken system with no trust between college administration, police and state on one side and students and trainee doctors on the other.

More concretely, the Kolkata police had initially registered a case of unnatural death when the body of the murdered woman was found, and a First Information Report of rape and murder was lodged fourteen hours later, at night. When the case was taken to High Court via a barrage of petitions, Ghosh was strongly ridiculed by the judges. When the Supreme Court took suo moto (on their own initiative) cognisance of the case, the Kolkata police were pulled up on this fourteen-hour delay immediately.

The actions of Sandip Ghosh and the main accused Sanjay Roy, and the pre-existing climate at RG Kar, all point to this being a case of state sanctioned violence.

Sanjay Roy, the one man so far arrested, is a civic volunteer in the Kolkata police. Civic volunteers in policing are the result of a deeply corrupt government adding casualised people into its police force, often members of the ruling party. They are paid the paltry sum of 9,000 rupees a month (equivalent to around £80). They sit around police stations, keep an eye on the police, and act as an informal information channel between police and party. Needless to say, many of them have their hands dirty and are not exempt from the apparatus of bribery and corruption that runs rife in the police force. The arrested man lived in police barracks meant for regular salaried police. There has been no clarity on how he managed to get such accommodation. The layers of corruption run deep.

The media has reported that due to his work as a civic volunteer, he used to frequent RG Kar and assist with hospital admissions. Anyone who has any experience of getting friends or family admitted to state government hospitals in West Bengal knows what this is code for. Our state hospitals are rife with a system of middlemen who use their connections to admit patients into hospital wards. It is nigh on impossible for many working-class people to get their loved one admitted to a state hospital without such a middleman. Everyone in the chain gets a cut from this system, all at the expense of the unfortunate soul who has to pay the middleman money.

This system has been encouraged by political parties that reap the benefits of a favours-run economy. It is no wonder that the Chief Minister of West Bengal and her deeply corrupt political party has done everything in their power to protect Sandip Ghosh. The accused, despicable as he is, is the symptom of a far larger healthcare crisis in the state. The bigger issue is the paucity of beds and staff across state hospitals and the lack of investment in the same. This is not just a problem exclusive to West Bengal; this problem afflicts multiple Indian states. Even the poorest, if they can manage it, go to a private practice. This state of healthcare is a shame but it is state sanctioned. This is not a few bad apples situation.

Violence against women is endemic

This awful case is symptomatic of the larger problem of patriarchy. Reports suggest that the accused had sexually harassed many women before, including one woman who he sought to ‘help’ during her daughter’s hospital treatment. Placing state sanctioned power in the hands of such a man is not an accident. Nor is it an accident that ‘middlemaning’, either as civic volunteers or something else, attracts the worst sort of parasite. West Bengal’s large impoverished working class are in part kept in their place through an informal economy of lumpens that thrive under political patronage from comically corrupt ruling governments.

Even though parties in power change, this lumpen apparatus has remained the same. Not only did 34 years of Left Front rule led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) not help the situation, but it also entrenched the power of this section. The CPI(M) are often blamed as the sole innovators of this system, but the Congress governments before them were no less protective of lumpens. In personal conversations, we refer to the Trinamool government as equally thieving as previous ruling parties, only with less intelligence to cover it up.

Other factors point to state-sanctioned patriarchal violence. In addition to the serious irregularities in the handling of the case, the victim’s body was cremated as quickly as possible. This is a ploy that has been used before in multiple cases of rape, especially gangrape, for instance by the BJP-run government in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh state, in the 2020 case of a gangrape and murder of a Dalit (the lowest stratum of Hindu castes) woman. A quick cremation of a murdered person’s body is the biggest destruction of evidence that a government can pull off. However, family members often want to lay the victim to rest for their own peace, and it would be insensitive to deny families this closure.

Sandip Ghosh has also mentioned the victim by name six times[1], despite rape legislation requiring the names of victims and survivors to be kept anonymous, to protect them and their families from social stigma. Ghosh’s act reeks of arrogance and insensitivity. Furthermore, construction work was started in the room opposite the seminar hall, part of the crime scene. Protesting doctors immediately saw this for what it was – an attempt to destroy any remaining evidence. After protests and media attention, this construction was stopped. However, any evidence that might have lurked in that area is probably lost.

In all these developments, the anxieties and fears of junior doctors, protesters, feminists and the general public regarding past instances of rape are very evident. The rumours about the injuries inflicted on the victim echo reports of a pattern of injuries inflicted on a gangrape and murder victim at Kamduni in 2013, another case which had led to protests by women’s groups in West Bengal. In 2012, the survivor of the Park Street rape case[2] in Kolkata was branded a liar by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, and a police officer was unfairly penalised for pursuing the case when Banerjee wanted it hushed up. More obviously, the reports of brutalities are reminiscent of the Delhi bus gang rape case in 2012 that launched a nationwide wave of protests.

Taking to the streets

By 12 August, a call for women to reclaim the night on 14 August (the night before Indian Independence Day) was circulating on social media, and was widely covered on news media as well. So big was the impact of the RG Kar case that the entirety of the state responded to this call, as small towns and even villages responded by organising Reclaim the Night marches. The scale of this development is unprecedented in the history of mobilisations against sexual violence in West Bengal.

Even as the state was marching at midnight, RG Kar was attacked and vandalised, with attacks on an emergency ward and other wards, the destruction of life-saving medications, medical equipment and many other important utilities. Dozens of police and volunteers stood by and watched this happen, refusing to raise a finger and in fact taking the battering that came their way from the mob. This was recorded on multiple media cameras, with some of the attackers recorded on camera asking for the whereabouts of the seminar hall where the body was found. Ultimately, they did not manage to get to the seminar hall, but they ransacked the ENT department below.

This recalled the occasion when Trinamool-backed lumpens had ransacked Presidency University and vandalised a historic laboratory in 2013, while police stood idle.  It seems probable that the main intention might have been to destroy all lingering evidence in the seminar hall.

To understand the political climate around the case now, we need to understand the various groups behind the protests after the case.

1. Concerned citizens, mostly opposed to the idea of sexual violence, but unwilling to identify with any one political group. These people were rudely roused from slumber by the extent of the violence and the reports of brutalities. They were likely also shocked by the blatant nature of the case, where a doctor has been raped and murdered inside a hospital. They are not necessarily politicised through left wing politics.
2. Convinced communists and other left wingers, people politicised by the left or identifying with different communist tendencies, who are tired of Trinamool’s authoritarianism and corruption. Many of these protesters are queer and trans people, women and other such bodies that are problematic to the state. It is important to acknowledge the communist women who have worked tirelessly for these protests. At the same time, we have to recognise that the ranks of communist organisations are rife with men accused of sexual violence. The various communist parties are in a constant process of negotiation, and feminists within these groups often build common platforms, conferring across different groups and sharing strategies.
3. The celebrities: film stars who have traditionally aligned with the ruling party in West Bengal, and changed colours from CPI(M) to Trinamool to BJP depending on political winds. Some are deeply tied to Trinamool’s structures of power in the film industry, mainly sustained by fielding actors as candidates in state and central elections, and by handing out patronage in cultural committees. These characters insisted that they would not walk if the protests were not ‘apolitical’, delightfully oblivious to the fact that nobody really invited them. Some Bollywood celebrities have also demanded justice, but for them it is easy to jump on the bandwagon, as Bollywood is currently cosying up to the BJP run central government. They have high media visibility but add nothing to the movement.
4. BJP sympathisers, often known as chaddis[3]. As the leading opposition party in West Bengal, the BJP have worked hard to create a pretense of care around the case. Just before the 14 August protests, they amplified a call to blow conch shells in the protests or from people’s homes. Blowing conch shells is as much aesthetically and religiously a Hindu practice as it is a feminised practice. Left organisers in local committees distanced themselves from this communalist call, citing inclusivity. However, conch shells were blown by women in many of the protests. The most malignant trend in the fight for justice in the RG Kar case is the hypervisibility that the BJP is gaining by virtue of being the biggest opposition party in the West Bengal state parliament.

The BJP has developed the strength to issue a call under the name of a hitherto unknown Pashchim Banga Chhatra Samaj (West Bengal Students’ Society) to march to the state secretariat, which led to clashes with the police and Trinamool supporters. It is imperative that activists highlight the BJP’s record on sexual violence, especially sexual violence against. Muslim women. The BJP will always insist on the ‘honour’ of Hindu women and will always burn Muslim bodies at the proverbial pyre of Hinduism. Anyone who trusts their huff and puffs regarding sexual violence is either naïve or deliberately enabling the most egregious violators in India.

At the same time, the fear of the BJP forming a government should not scare us into complicity with the corrupt Trinamool. The left needs to reform its ranks, kick out the dozens of questionable men that they have managed to protect, and create a clear alternative. We need a solid analysis that does not equate the pre-genocidal fascism of the BJP with the corruption of the Trinamool. But we also need to hold on to an independent position without succumbing to a lesser evil logic. Healthy left activism grounded in reality taking into account the lessons of the last few decades can only flow from sensitive analysis and from the sheer mettle of the many. A Herculean struggle lies ahead.

[1]  Worth noting as a particularly vicious post was being shared online in the early days, justifying the rape and murder by claiming she was a reserved category (lower caste) student. Caste can be figured out from people’s surnames in India. It is possible that the victim might have been a Bahujan (broad term used for “lower” caste, dalit, Muslims and other repressed categories) student, more so as her father has claimed that he raised her by stitching clothes, tailoring being a deeply casted profession. However, other dismal posts are doing the rounds on social media claiming that the case is only gaining attention because of the victim’s high caste status. These hot takes are shoddily researched, have no understanding of caste in West Bengal and showcase the inability of many to imagine a professional woman as anything but upper caste.

[2] Suzette Jordan, who refused anonymity legislation and openly talked about the violence, had been attacked by multiple men during a night out at Park Street in Kolkata. These men were young elites, the sons of rich business owners who were believed to have political connections. One of the men in question was the boyfriend of a budding Bengali actor who later went on to become a Trinamool MP.

[3] The RSS are often colloquially referred to as chaddis (shorts or male underwear) because of their uniform which consists of khaki shorts. By extension, chaddi is broadly applied to the Hindu right wing in India.

Disclaimer: The writer only has an outsider’s perspective on the case. Internal negotiations within movements often go unreported when writers take an omnipotent, authoritative voice. This blight is fairly prevalent in academia. I do not want to reproduce such a dynamic and would like to claim no specific authoritative knowledge other than constantly following news and movement developments.