It began with a scandal that should have shamed the state, not its women. First a girl brutally gang raped in a Kolkata hospital by a politically connected thug. More recently another medical student, this time from Odisha, raped in Durgapur. The response of power is “women shouldn’t go out at night.” This was spoken not by some patriarch from the past, but by Mamata Banerjee, the modern Durga of Bengal politics as if the chief minister has become her own moral policeman. Echoing the vibe was her minister, again a woman. So history circles back: Sita sent to the forest, Ahalya turned to stone, Draupadi stripped in the court; and now, in 21st-century Kolkata, women told to stay home “for their own safety.” The script is ancient; only the speaker has changed. Pause. Rewind. Did the only woman chief minister in India just blame women for walking in the dark? Yes. Yes, she did. What makes her remark chilling is not merely its content but its context. It came under her watch; a state governed by a woman who rose from the pavements of protest to the pinnacle of power, who defied police batons, political mafias, and masculine derision. For decades, Mamata embodied defiance. She was the woman who would not be told to sit down. Yet power, it seems, has its own grammar and in that grammar, women too can become enforcers of the very silence they once broke. The truth is simple: the state had failed to protect women, and its leader asked women to protect themselves by disappearing. A woman in power had spoken like the oldest kind of patriarch. When a man says such a thing, it is familiar, almost predictable. But when a woman who built her politics on rebellion repeats it, the words cut deeper.
Here’s the tragic hypocrisy: the BJP publicly flaunts its patriarchal credentials with moral policing and misogyny from its cow belt netas and a woman politician from the Opposition repeats the same “advice,” what is the difference? None. Bengal is the land of Begum Rokeya, who dreamt of a “Ladyland” ruled by women; of Mahasweta Devi, who wrote of tribal women who tore open the belly of oppression itself. This is the soil where women joined food processions, freedom marches, and peasant movements not as symbols, but as revolutionaries. When a woman chief minister echoes the language of control, she betrays that inheritance. The deeper tragedy is the chief minister’s hypocrisy. Bengal celebrates Durga Puja every year worshipping a goddess armed to the teeth, a mother who slays demons, and yet the leader tells its mortal daughters to stay indoors. We have elevated our women to pedestals so that we never have to see them on pavements. Let’s be clear: “don’t go out at night” is not care. Translation: Shrink. Hide. Be small. Across centuries, this line has come in many languages: Purdah. Hijab. Codes of honour. Manu wrote it in verse; the Taliban enforce it with guns; Indian politicians deliver it with maternal concern. The form is tender, the effect the same: the woman reduced to an object whose safety depends upon her absence. Mamata, who built her career by marching through tear gas and barricades echoes that ancient voice; she doesn’t just contradict her own past, she reveals how thoroughly power can absorb rebellion. Patriarchy does not need men to survive. It only needs women who have learned to speak its language fluently. The deeper tragedy of Mamata’s words is that they make the ancient sound reasonable again. They remind women to be careful instead of reminding men to be accountable. That is how patriarchy renews itself through the mouths of those who once fought it.
Fear is easier than reform. Retreat is easier than imagination. And yet the night is not male territory. It never was. It was only stolen. Every woman walking home after dark is reclaiming space. Not heroically, nor dramatically, but simply by existing. That is defiance, revolution and freedom. It is one thing for a patriarch to preach caution. It is quite another for a woman in power to perpetuate the same fear. When Mamata Banerjee echoes that old refrain, she turns from symbol to symptom, a reminder that power alone cannot dismantle patriarchy if it is internalised in thought. The real revolution begins not in policy, but in perception. Women do not need protection; they need justice. They do not need curfews; they need courage from those who govern and those who walk beside them. The night is not male by nature. It was abandoned to men by centuries of warning. Every woman who walks through it reclaims a piece of human territory, not as victim, not as heroine, but simply as a person.
