Kolkata celebrated India’s 78th independence with an orgy of unprecedented violence at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital which is already in the eye of a storm over the horrific rape and murder of a 31-year-old postgraduate trainee doctor on Friday.
Meanwhile, though there was no mention of West Bengal in his Independence Day address, no one was left in any doubt about what prompted the Prime Minister to speak about continuing violence against women and the need for exemplary punishment of culprits.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s response to the incident came even later, around 6 pm on Thursday.
“The troublemakers were outsiders. I don’t blame the students. They were some outsider political people who want to create trouble in Bengal – baam and Ram (which translates to Left and BJP in local political parlance). They have united to create this trouble…” she said.
“In the videos I saw,” she went on to say, “there were people with the Indian flag who were BJP and others with DYFI’s red-and-white flag.”
DYFI is Democratic Youth Front of India, CPI-M’s youth wing.
The violence at RG Kar came just past the midnight hour as the rest of West Bengal erupted in a heartwarming and united call for justice for the victim doctor when thousands of men and women marched not just in Kolkata but in district towns from north to south. That is when an unconfirmed number of people – some say 35, others 100 and yet others 300 – broke the barricades at the main gate of the hospital and stormed into RG Kar, sending doctors, nurses, medical students and police fleeing helter-skelter for their lives.
The mob first smashed the dharna site right at the hospital entrance where doctors and students have been sitting in protest against the alleged rape and murder of their colleague, since her lifeless body was found from the seminar hall. Plastic chairs lay around in pieces, flower pots broken and posters and banners calling for justice for the victim torn to shreds.
Its next target was the Emergency department on the ground floor of the 7-storey building. The doctor was murdered in a seminar room on the 3rd floor. The mob did not get anywhere near that room. What they did was tear down the iron grill gates at the entry of the building and ransack it indiscriminately: CCTV cameras, bathroom taps, doors, windows, tables, chairs, lights, refrigerators stocked with medicines, cupboards full of hospital supplies and life-saving medical equipment. A police outpost with camp cots, wireless sets and a telephone were smashed to smithereens.
Some policemen who tried to stop the vandalism were chased, they said, with swords and choppers and had to ask nurses to hide them in bathrooms and lifts. The police outside the hospital had stones and bricks hurled at them and had to fire tear gas shells to chase the mob away. It took about 3 hours and the personal appearance of the Commissioner of Kolkata Police Vinit Goel on the scene, in the dead of the night, to control the chaotic violence.
Those 40 minutes of anarchy have left Kolkata, West Bengal, the whole country and the diaspora of doctors from Kolkata who live across the world stunned.
The violence has diffused focus from the investigation into the rape and murder of the doctor to the midnight anarchy. Doctors and students at the hospital are now asking who is responsible for this anarchy. They are wary of naming anybody or any political party, determined to keep politics out of the campus. But their resolve is running out.
There are few buyers among RG Kar’s students and doctors of the BJP-Left nexus behind the incident. In their book, goons backed by the Trinamool Congress were the more likely culprits. The principal of their college -- now sent on leave on orders of the court - had friends in high places in TMC and could run the hospital as he pleased. His unceremonious exit and the anti-establishment nature of the doctors’ protests may have displeased powers that be.
And so, the midnight attack was a tactic to intimidate and brow beat the students and doctors and thereby enforce their eventual silence.
Abhishek Banerjee, TMC national general secretary, has called for swift action against the culprits, irrespective of party links. He could hardly have done otherwise. Even the most casual observer of Bengal politics knows that the Opposition – BJP, CPM or the Congress – just don’t have the bandwidth to get together a mob of vandals with the gumption to storm RG Kar.
Friday promises to be a busy day, politically, in Bengal. The Socialist Unity Centre of India, a Left party, has called a statewide 12-hour bandh from 6 am. BJP will block roads across the state from 2 pm to 4 pm. BJP’s women workers will hold a candlelight march to Mamata Banerjee’s house in the evening.
Mamata Banerjee is not going to sit back and watch the gathering storm. She will take to the roads herself to demand death sentence for the man arrested for raping and murdering the woman doctor one week ago.
Will all these political protests and candle light marches deliver justice to her? Will all this ensure there is never a repeat of violence against women anywhere? One can only hope they will.
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