WOMEN'S WORLD
by Nirupam Hazra
According to the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) report, 30,942 cases of crime against women were reported in 2012 from Bengal, the highest in the country. Bengal accounted for 12.67 per cent of the total crime committed against women in India and for the second year in a row Bengal was burdened with the distinction of being the most unsafe place for women. What ails the State which is known for its cultural vibrancy and progressive intellectualism and led by a feisty woman Chief Minister?
Since the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamul Congress (TMC) came to power in 2011, whatever went wrong in the State—from farmer suicides to recent incidents of rape—was termed as conspiracy of either the main Opposition party, Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), or the Maoists. But, today crime against women in the State has become a serious crisis not only for the new government, but for the entire Bengali society. Like other parts of the country, incidents of rape and other violent crime against women have increased at a disturbing pace. But the alarming rise of such crimes in Bengal points towards a deeper malaise in the society which goes beyond the convenient ritual of demonising modernity and blaming the culture of malls, multiplex and migration.
The modern progressive Bengali society, in its dark underbelly, nurtured a culture of misogyny which is irreconcilably alien to its elite intellectualism and refined cultural sensitivity. The series of sexual crimes against women in rural Bengal is a manifestation of this misogyny which has long been overlooked. Sexual crimes, accompanied by barbaric violence, are an attempt of perverse patriarchy to reassert its control over the female body. The recent incidents of rape, reported in the last two months, share an uncanny similarity among them. In all these cases the victims were young college or school-going girls who dared to reject or defy the advances of the perpetrators and as a consequence, all of them were raped, brutalised, murdered and dumped. When these incidents are analysed in a larger context, they tell a story of violence which is systematic, of an attempt to perpetuate the patriarchal domination. The defiance or resistance of the victims is always taken as an insult to the masculinity of the perpetrators, while their pursuit of education and subsequent emancipation and empowerment is perceived as a threat to the patriarchic mode of social control and subordination. Under the circumstances rape along with misogynistic violence becomes the only means to satisfy the ‘wounded' masculinity and save the ‘threatened' patriarchy. But the story does not end here.
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In Bengal, crime against women, especially rape, has the significance beyond the misogynistic manifestation of the male ego and patriarchic mode of subjugation. Rape in Bengal has always been an event of political significance. Even Mamata Banerjee's political journey was based on her protest and politics of rape. Mamata Banerjee's first tryst with rape protest came in 1993. Her gritty and extraordinary demonstration in front of Chief Minister Jyoti Basu's chamber in Writers' Building was a landmark event of her political career. The demonstration was against the rape of a hearing and speech impaired girl.
Then in 2006, the rape and murder of Tapasi Malik, a member of the Save Farmland Committee of Singur, triggered a huge political protest against the ruling Left Front. Tapasi was in the forefront of the movement against forceful land acquisition for the Tata Nano plant in Singur. Her raped and half-burnt body was found in a pit near the fence of the Nano plant. (another example of misogyny). Members of the Opposition, namely, Mamata Banerjee's TMC, along with civil society members and intellectuals staged a spirited protest and demonstration.
But unlike the spontaneous protest that followed the Delhi gangrape, protests against rape in Bengal have always been sporadic and disparate in nature, especially under the present government. One of the main reasons for this is the silence of the civil society. During the Assembly elections in 2011, the Bengali civil society and intelligentsia unconditionally tendered their support for Mamata Banerjee and her party. Now, the predicament of most of the civil society members, who once enthusiastically supported Mamata, is that their open or direct criticism of the present government would not only put a question-mark on their own credibility as intellectuals but also immediately turn them into political renegades. So, most of the civil society members have been reluctant to stage a demonstration or organise a protest march. In the highly polarised political landscape of Bengal, even a spontaneous protest against gruesome rape invariably becomes a political statement. It is not a predicament of Bengali intellectuals alone; it is equally true for the common Bengal, people. In Bengal, especially before the crucial panchayat elections, every public act, every protest could take a political overtone. So, a protest against rape does not necessarily mean one's identification with the cause, but what it inevitably stands for is reconfiguration of one's political alignment and allegiance.
This leads to another crisis of Bengal politics and that is the rapidly shrinking space for democratic protest. Though demonisation of dissent is nothing new in the State, a number of recent incidents in the State showed how deep the rot has spread. The State has already witnessed that satirical cartoon or a mere demand for one's own right can put people behind the bars. The democratic right to peaceful protest has been criminalised. Today all the crimes in the State are attributed to the CPM's conspiracies and all the protests are allegedly fuelled by Naxal propaganda. Even during her visit to the family of the Kamduni rape victim, the Chief Minister publicly proclaimed in front of angry villagers that all the perpetrators were CPM supporters. Not only this, she even spotted Naxals among those angry villagers seeking justice. Earlier one of her Ministers made an unsuccessful attempt to buy the silence of the victim's family by offering a government job, which was promptly rejected by the family. Such politicisation of crimes or attempt to hush-up and ignore them has only bolstered the perpetrators. Instead of facilitating speedy justice, the government's priority has been on determining the political affiliation of the victims and perpetrators.
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But this is not the only way of responding to the incidents of rape. In February last year an Anglo-Indian woman was raped at gunpoint inside a moving car on Park Street. The first reaction from the government was of denial. The Chief Minister herself termed the entire event as ‘cooked up' with an intention to malign her government. A woman MP of the TMC went a step further and called it a misunderstanding between ‘a woman and her client', insinuating that the victim was a prostitute. Apart from indulging in character assassination of the victim, this insensitive statement also implied that a prostitute cannot be a victim of rape. Such disparaging and insensitive remarks from women politicians—a Chief Minister and an MP—reflect the deeply entrenched patriarchal mindset of the society. But the insensitivity and intolerance did not stop here. The woman IPS officer who solved the case and proved the Chief Minister wrong was immediately rewarded with a transfer to the police training wing. Instead of giving exemplary punishment to the perpetrators, the investigating officer was pulled up and punished for carrying out her duty.
Like the government, the administration also lives in a state of denial and faithfully echoes the dismissive stand of the government. The recent incidents of rapes were termed as isolated incidents by the Principal Secretary. The Director General of Police challenged the figures released by the NCRB and claimed Bengal was much safer than other States while the State Women's Commission argued that more crimes were being reported nowadays in the State, without admitting the obvious that more crimes are also taking place nowadays. Actually no one is ready to accept the reality—neither the government nor the administration—and the frightening reality is that no woman is safe in Bengal.
The author, who hails from West Bengal, is presently a scholar at the Department of Social Work, University of Delhi.