Last Friday, when Di’s body was discovered, authorities of Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College & Hospital tried to pass off the murder as suicide to the victim’s family. The police initially did the same. After all, why on Earth would a state-affiliated institution’s authorities lie?
Trying to pass off homicide as suicide is SOP if you want to put a lid on things. Self-sexual assault – self-rape – is, however, far more difficult to spin. So, a case of rape-murder it has officially become.
RG Kar principal Sandip Ghosh resigned three days later – ‘I can’t take this insult anymore’ – from post and government service. But a conscience can be like ill-tended bougainvillea – it blooms and then suddenly dies. Within hours of his resignation, the government transferred him to Calcutta National Medical College and Hospital. That’s like punishing a hotel manager for bad service by shifting him from Taj Lands End to Taj Santacruz.
His misdemeanour? Allowing Sanjoy Roy, a member of Civic Police Volunteer Force – currently a 1,19,916-strong informal system of policing introduced by the TMC government in 2012, largely to facilitate party cadres – to have unlimited access to the hospital. Roy had a reputation of collecting hafta, prevalent in most state hospitals here. But he was a ‘party chap’. Much like the principal.
Roy has been arrested, even as it’s suspected that he wasn’t a lone wolf, if one of the ‘wolves’ at all. Rumours of a racket of ‘hospital supplies’ involving RG Kar insiders that Di may have become too vocal about is also doing the rounds. But what takes the breath away in terms of chutzpah is the speed with which evidence near the crime site has been tampered with. PWD ‘renovation’ work near the seminar room where Di was murdered had started on Saturday – a day after the crime came to light. ‘The renovation… is for creating more amenities for PGTs and junior doctors as demanded by them. This should not be seen as an attempt to tamper with evidence. The seminar hall where the crime took place is sealed,’ said a hospital administrator. So much for all those Netflix episodes of CSI. Let the expected DNA test results not also get PWDed into the blue. In this context, Mamata Banerjee‘s ‘order’ to the police on Monday (Aug 12) to find the perpetrator(s) by Sunday (Aug 18) or else she would have the case transferred to CBI, sounds like a deadline to clean up evidence. But with Calcutta High Court forcing her hand by transferring the case to CBI on Aug 14, she upped the stake by demanding the central investigators complete their probe by this Sunday (today) and ensure the guilty are ‘hanged’. Sundays seem to be Didi’s ‘Catch ’em if you can’ challenge days. Incidentally, the CBI stopped the ‘renovation’ work on Tuesday night.
On August 14 night, thugs infiltrated protesters at RG Kar and went on a trashing spree for more than half an hour – strangely targeting standing fans in particular. One wonders who they were and what they were venting against.
Meanwhile, red herrings are being strewn from various corners, sections of a ‘cynical’ public included:
What was the real purpose of the ‘Women, Reclaim the Night’ protest marches in which lakhs participated on August 14-15 night, eh? Wouldn’t it have been better if there were silent candle-light vigils instead of angry sloganeering? Would it have been more effective if only women, and not also men, had come out that night?
Didi, and her nephew, TMC MP and ‘Dada’ Abhishek Banerjee, have already found a ‘conspiracy’, linking the citizenry’s anger and anguish with CPI(M) and BJP attempts to trigger a ‘Bangladesh-like mass movement to capture power’. Yes, perhaps people would have stayed home singing ‘Ekla cholo re’ on their own if they weren’t egged on by political plotters.
In all this fog of deception, appropriation, whataboutery, protest aesthetics, two things mustn’t be lost sight of: the need to build a case that puts away the perps. And removal of an administration doing its best to make a horrifying crime, its perpetrators, and their facilitators vanish.
If this doesn’t make a people demand a ‘poriborton’, nothing should.