Introduction: Ways of beating opposition in Bengal
It takes a lot of courage for someone in the CPI-M now to advise one of its outfits to mind its own business rather than bother about how its work, honestly done, might affect the government. Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee did precisely this when he told Ganatantrik Mahila Samiti (GMS) on 25 March that it should earnestly investigate atrocities against women, and pull up the government, if necessary. The advice came not a day too soon after the horrific triple crime of rob-rape-murder at Aishmali in Dhantala, Nadia. It must not be confused with the routine robbery, rape and murder, which rarely get noticed these days.
Woman's Commission
According to Archisman Ghatak, a former Director General of Police, West Bengal, police have but few records that match the horror of Dhantala. Yet the word GMS and West Bengal Women's Commission spread was that the Dhantala incident was just overblown media hype. However, these aren't the only competent authorities that have failed to adequately respond to the enormity of the crime.
Police, for example, kept no tabs on the increasingly violent divisions within the local CPI-M. They had no information either that one of these was ganging up to waylay the guests of the other faction. The gang stopped an auto-rickshaw the first thing as a warm-up for the main deed to be done. They tore down a part of a madrasa and set up a roadblock with the bricks. Arrived a busload of wedding guests. The gangsters robbed them all. They killed the driver and forced the male passengers on to the roof of the vehicle. They raped the women. They inflicted similar indignities on the passengers of the next bus, too. All this went on for hours together with men and women screaming for help within the earshot of the police station. Yet police heard nothing, saw nothing, and rebuffed attempts at lodging an FIR. Next morning police visited the spot, accompanied by the criminals concerned, and the victims were duly frightened into silence.
Next to fail was the Women's Commission, a statutory body, of which all but one member belong to the ruling Left Front. A week after the occurrence, its chairperson told a TV channel: "It's not very late yet for us to visit Dhantala". Surprisingly, she doesn't seem to know that as time goes by, feelings, which are acute immediately after an occurrence, lose their intensity, myths grow, and victims get increasingly fearful of social stigma. So to waste time is to get the victims tongue-tied.
Eventually the Commission did send a team, on 22 February, patently to pre-empt another from Delhi. However, a CPI nominee on the Commission, Shyamasree Das, somewhat redeemed its credibility by frankly commenting, "Never before had the criminalisation of West Bengal politics been so glaringly laid bare". But Shymasree was summoned to the CPI-M local office in Nadia and severely reprimanded for spilling the beans. And Dr Chandan Sen, who had treated some of the rape victims at Ranaghat Hospital, died shortly thereafter under mysterious circumstances.
Cover up
In an article called Narir Morjada Lunthito Holo Byekti Akroshe (Personal Animosity Ends up in Violation of Womanhood) in Kalalntar (12 March, 2003), a CPI daily of long-standing, Shyamasree recounts how on the fateful night of February 5 a gang of 17-18 criminals subjected the women to an "unspeakably disgusting person search". She adds: "A factual account of how the young and unwed women were taken to an open field and behind a plantain grove, and brutalised, is so sickening that civilised society would consider it unprintable". The witnesses informed the members of the commission that the gangsters were actually gunning for another bus, which had left the CPI-M local committee secretary Sanat Dhali's house with wedding guests.
Shyamasree says the crime had stemmed from a factional feud within the local committee of the CPI-M; it surfaced over the nomination of candidates before the last assembly election, and had become increasingly fierce since. Sanat Dhali had fallen out with the two accused, Subol Bagchi and Saidul Karigar, of whom the latter was a former Panchayat Pradhan. "Most unfortunately", says Shyamasree, "police actually tried to cover up the crime involving rape". And Subol Bagchi even tried to give the incident communal turn. The Association for Protection of Democratic Rights reports that the victims had indeed complained to an additional superintendent of police, who in turn met the SPs of Nadia and North 24 Parganas to review the situation. Why didn't they register an FIR on their own?
The CPI-M has fared no better. Alas, says Radhikaranjan Pramanik, a CPI-M MP, that his party has now only "managers and manipulators" but no true politician. What kind of management is it, one wonders, that while Anil Biswas, chairman of the Left Front, exchanges arguments of whodunit with his political rivals, reports of gang rape involving his party men pour in from all over the state - Baranagar, Malda, Murshidababd, Oxytown, Birbhum, North and South 2 Parganas - and South Dinajpur at the time of writing.
Take the case of Chheramari under Ghoksadanga police station. Allegedly, on the night of 22 February, Samiruddin Mian, alias Kalsa, a member of the CPI-M, led a gang of six workers of the local committee to rape Runu Ray (nee Das), a member of GMS. Runu had dared to confront Samiruddin over the appointment of an office worker at a local school. Says Anil Biswas, "Our party at Chheramari has nobody called Runu Ray". Moreover, the neighbours of that woman "have questions about her lifestyle".
But what has her lifestyle ("quite straight". said her neighbours on TV) to do with the point at issue - which is gang-rape inflicted as punishment? Actually, Anil Biswas's aside is intended to wear down the public criticism of widespread depravity among his comrades. It is a well-known tactic of the CPI-M calculated to give someone in Runu's plight a bad name.
Another instance in point is Manisha Mukherjee, a member of the CPI-M, who happened to be an assistant controller of examinations, Calcutta University. When her mother Chinudebi went around complaining of police inaction over her disappearance, Ganashakti, the CPI-M mouthpiece, reported that Chinudebi had earlier complained of ill-treatment by her daughter to West Bengal Women's Commission. As if that disqualified her for police help in finding her daughter out.
Strategy
Yet another instance is the unnatural death of Soumitra Biswas, a final year student of RG Kar Medial College, and a member of the CPI-M's student wing, whose mother complains that he was murdered for exposing a porn racket run by the leaders of that wing. Police have dismissed the case with an admittedly "perfunctory" investigation, on the basis of which the chief minister says that Soumitra himself ran the racket, and having been found out, committed suicide. The disconsolate mother is now out on the mission "to redeem my murdered son's honour by bringing the actual guilty to book".
Well, two terms - tactic and strategy - are central to communism. On coming to power in 1977, Anil Biswas's predecessors introduced "Ek Ghore", a form of social ostracism prevalent in the middle ages, as its strategy for beating political opposition, whereby doctors, grocers, barbers, washermen and so on were mandated not to deal with the opponents of the party. That strategy has since culminated into gang rape.
Anil Biswas in Kolkata may dislike it, but he cannot stop it, for he must win all elections. So he is reduced to okaying character assassination as a tactic of post facto damage control.
The RSP, a Left Front partner that has similarly suffered at the hands of the CPI-M, comes close to admitting this when it says that gang rapes will increase in the months ahead, with the CPI-M now busy drafting anti-socials for the next panchayat election. This is understandable.
In our society, a raped woman, rather than the rapist, is regarded as filth - right across the face of her family, and the community she belongs to. Being practically a CPI-M outfit, the West Bengal Women's Commission shares this view, or why did it dither about rushing to Dhantala?
(The author is former member, West
Bengal Education Commission)