Kolkata has been on the streets for a month now demanding justice for Abhaya, the 31-year-old doctor raped and murdered in a hospital in the city on August 9. Its protests have brought people out in all of West Bengal, across the country and in many parts of the world. But in the end, Kolkata has failed miserably, it would seem, to communicate its anguish to chief minister Mamata Banerjee.
The last word from the Supreme Court this Monday, after punching holes in the data presented by the West Bengal legal team, was to set a deadline: junior doctors must return to work by 5 pm Tuesday.
Mamata went a few steps further. She urged a return to duty by the junior doctors who had struck work after the murder of their colleague. And to Kolkata, anguished by the doctor's death, she said, "Return to the pujas, return to the utsav." In short, enough is enough, it's time to drown your sorrows in Bengal's annual extravaganza, the Durga Pujas, now 30 days away.
Piercing the stunned silence of the protesters that followed, the voice of Abhaya's mother rang out.
"We used to do Durga Puja at home. My daughter used to do it. Now, we will never do it again. How can I ask people to celebrate Durga Puja. If this had happened in her family, would she have been able to say, return to the pujas and the utsav?" she told a TV news channel, her face blurred.
"The lamp at my home has gone out forever," she added. "They throttled my daughter to death. They are now trying to throttle the demand for justice."
When people across India spilled out on the streets on August 14 in response to a call to reclaim the night, I was at Jadavpur in south Kolkata -- at the 8B Bus Stand near Jadavpur University, which has long become a popular address for protests in the city. I thought the protests that night at 8B Bus Stand and across Kolkata and beyond were unprecedented, cutting across age, gender, geography and rural-urban divides.
Of course, it was all overshadowed by the attack by vandals at RG Kar Hospital at midnight and the ransacking of the Emergency wards and more. But still, August 14 was unprecedented.
August 14 was overshadowed by September 2, last Monday. When the junior doctors marched to the Kolkata Police headquarters, Lalbazar, holding aloft red roses and miniature replicas of the human spine in their hands and, after camping out in the open on the street through a hot muggy night, forced the police the next day to remove the barricades they had put up on the street, I thought I had never seen anything like that before.
But the protests hit another peak this Sunday, on the eve of the gruesome anniversary of the junior doctor's death. All night, Kolkata's streets teemed with people of all ages who turned the surface of the black-tarred roads into canvasses on which they painted brilliant white slogans calling for justice and sketches representing Abhaya -- portraits that looked like Goddess Durga. Celebrity singers and bathroom singers took to handheld mikes and sang their hearts out.
Foremost among the many anthems this fight for justice has thrown up over the last month is Aar Kobe? by Arijit Singh, which raises the question How much longer? When?
Injustice is piling up into a mountain
A burden of unbearable wrongs
We are silent, preoccupied with our lives, while, unnoticed, they pile up.
Our backs against the wall
Accepting it as fate, clinging to a glimmer of hope.
Yet it hurts, living in fear
Feeling helpless and immobilized
When? But when?
When will the voice rise in strength
When will the mind be liberated
When will the heart find its cry
When will the head be held high?
When? But when?
There is more, capturing the pain of injustice, the shroud of silence in the response and the need for change in that four-letter word.
But, going by the response of the chief minister, you may be forgiven for thinking she thinks it is nothing but a lot of self-indulgent nonsense, best wound up sooner rather than later.
The chief minister is, of course, also the chief administrator in charge of the greater good of the people of the state and she has every reason to seek a return to work by the junior doctors and normalcy in health services. Her government has quoted media reports and said 23 people have died in the last one month due to the cease-work protest. No specifics were shared of the people who lost their lives. But, even one death is a death too many. No question.
Will her exhortation to the doctors to end the protests and to Kolkata to return to 'utsav' then work? At the time of going to press, the response from the junior doctors to the Supreme Court's orders to end their month-long cease-work protest is awaited. It is hard to believe that they will now give up on justice for Abhaya, don their white coats to return and, in a month from now, join the rest of Kolkata in the revelry that traditionally welcomes Goddess Durga on her four-day visit to earth.
Will Jawhar Sircar be celebrating the Pujas with friends and family? This former bureaucrat who joined the Trinamool Congress three years ago and went straight to Rajya Sabha has announced his resignation from the post and will be in Delhi to submit documents to Parliament. He has also said he is resigning from politics. In his letter to the chief minister, he says, "I have not seen such angst and total no-confidence against the government… Please do something to save the state."
Back in 2021, the poll consultancy company, IPAC, had coined a slogan that went a long way to ensure Mamata Banerjee's thumping victory in the Assembly elections. It was 'Bangla nijermaye kay chaye' -- Bengal wants its own daughter.
That slogan could now come back to haunt the chief minister.
