A 31-YEAR-OLD doctor was raped and murdered in a most gruesome way when she was on her night duty at a Kolkata hospital on Aug 9. She spoke to her parents shortly before midnight, and a key question being asked is why she was not missed or called for duty between 3am and 10am when her bloodied body was found on the floor of the hospital’s seminar room. Doctors around the country have staged protests at the crime. The media have given saturated coverage to the incident.

The Calcutta High Court has ticked off the state police and handed the case over to the federal investigating agency, the CBI. The chief justice of India has taken suo motu notice of the crime and is expected to pass his observations or an order in the matter.

The catch here is that the CBI works directly under Home Minister Amit Shah. Having been used to harass political rivals and intellectual dissenters in recent years, it has lost credibility as a neutral agency. The state governor, who represents the president of India, and thus follows the orders of the government of the day, has been accusing the opposition-run government of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, of assorted acts of commission and omission in the crime. BJP governors have been accused by several opposition-run state governments of acting as adjuncts of the party.

A truer problem for Ms Banerjee, however, is that she holds the health portfolio and that of law and order of West Bengal. Therefore, when she took out her own rally fiercely slamming the crime that took place under her watch, it didn’t wash. A most grievous crime has been effectively turned into a political slugfest. The BJP by force of habit is eyeing its chance to destabilise a chief minister who in no small way contributed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi needing crutches after his party’s loss of majority in the recent parliamentary polls. The communists who had a glorious run of governing the state for a record four decades seem clueless about how to get into the frame and have joined the campaign against Ms Banerjee perhaps unmindful that it benefits the BJP, not them.

Rape in India is pervasive, and not unexpectedly, the victims are mostly from the lower strata of society.

One suspect has been arrested and reports speak of the likelihood of a gang rape having occurred. The father of the victim says he expects the culprits to be given the severest punishment. This is where the mother of the victim of the 2012 rape horror steps in.

Asha Devi’s 22-year-old physiotherapist daughter, commonly identified in the media as Nirbhaya, or ‘fearless’, was gang-raped on Dec 16, 2012, in a bus as it drove through busy streets of Delhi. Its six drunken occupants, including the driver, took turns to assault her. Giving her up for dead they threw the naked body under a busy flyover. The girl was found still breathing by a police patrol and was sent to a Singapore hospital with indescribable injuries. But she couldn’t be saved. Four men were hanged and one committed suicide. The most vicious of the lot was a minor. He was freed in 2015 from a delinquent’s home.

Nirbhaya’s mother, Asha Devi was asked to comment on the Kolkata rape. She bluntly said nothing had really changed even after her daughter’s killers were hanged. What then can a judge do about the scourge so deep-rooted and so widespread?

Rape in India is pervasive, and not unexpectedly, the victims are mostly from the lower strata of society. What rarely interests the mostly upper-crust media is the widespread prevalence of the sickness beyond their field of vision. According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s data of 2022, there was a 45 per cent increase in reported rapes of Dalit women between 2015 and 2020. Reported rapes, mind you. The data said 10 rapes of Dalit women and girls were reported every day in India, on average. When the Kolkata horror was unfolding assaults were taking place elsewhere, but would likely remain unreported.

According to the National Family Health Survey 2015-2016, sexual violence rates were highest among women from Scheduled Tribes (Adivasi or indigenous Indians) at 7.8pc, followed by Scheduled Castes (Dalits) at 7.3pc, and Other Backward Classes at 5.4pc. For comparison’s sake, the rate was 4.5pc for women who were not marginalised by caste or tribe.

If the judges have to intervene, they need to look within the judiciary. The highest judiciary could stop the business of giving parole to convicted rapists, for example, those close to the rulers. But what could any well-meaning judge do when a former chief justice of India, heading a three-judge bench, asks a 23-year-old man accused of raping a girl whether he would marry her? “If you want to marry [her] we can help you. If not, you lose your job and go to jail,” he said.

According to a letter from 5,000 outraged women activists to Justice Sharad Bobde, the man “is accused of stalking, tying up, gagging, repeatedly raping a minor school-going girl, and threatening to douse her in petrol and set her alight, to hurl acid at her, and to have her brother killed …The rape came to light when the minor school-going victim attempted suicide”.

There is something else the judges can do. They can cancel the furloughs convicted rapists with political clout get. Two godmen were given paroles in the wake of the Kolkata horror. And the supreme court has done so in the past. Bilkis Bano’s rapists were sent back to jail after a curious premature release. And what can the judges do about culturally supported crimes against women? A Dalit woman was retrieved from her rapists by her husband who then asked her to prove her purity by picking up a coin from boiling water. India needs a social upheaval, not grotesque laws to protect its women from an intractable evil.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 20th, 2024