Like millions of Indian women, I am angry, sad, exhausted and haunted. I am haunted by the thought of a young woman brutalised at her place of work, possibly by men she knew.
I cannot shake off the horrifying details we now know about the condition of her corpse. Found half naked, her legs were wrenched open and she was bleeding profusely, including from her private parts and both her eyes. Her body was badly scarred from head to toe.
Like millions of Indian women, I am angry, sad, exhausted and haunted. I am haunted by the thought of a young woman brutalised at her place of work, possibly by men she knew.
I cannot shake off the horrifying details we now know about the condition of her corpse. Found half naked, her legs were wrenched open and she was bleeding profusely, including from her private parts and both her eyes. Her body was badly scarred from head to toe. Doctors are convinced this evidence points to a gang rape. These details have been shared by her father who had to plead three hours before he was allowed to see his daughter’s body.
He took a photograph as proof. Imagine being that father. Imagine that being the last memory you have of your child.
What has unfolded in the RG Kar Medical College in Kolkata — the rape and murder of a young doctor — is a horrific illustration of institutional misogyny and malevolence. And if it is at all possible to think anything could be worse, well, what has happened after the rape has been even more repulsive. Cover-up attempts have compounded the crime.
To understand this case, we have to speak about a man called Sandip Ghosh, the (now removed) principal of the medical college where the rape took place.
First, as the captain of the ship, he is answerable for the fact that the assault took place at all, especially since doctors have argued that this is not the work of an outsider; but an inside job. An outsider, it has been pointed out by doctors, would not have even known about the whereabouts of the seminar hall, where the victim was resting after a 36-hour shift. Protesting doctors say that the victim’s car was also vandalised on the night she was raped and killed. Was she silenced for knowing something?
Ghosh is answerable for the rape taking place on his watch. But what he does next is astounding. In his initial remarks, he blamed the woman. He faulted her for being in the seminar hall at that time of night, in the worst sort of victim-shaming and victim-blaming.
If that callousness was not enough, officials of the RG Kar Medical College lied to the family and said their daughter had died by suicide. This was outright and unacceptable deceit. First, why was Ghosh not personally communicating with the family? Secondly, he can’t feign ignorance of what the family was told. Family members have now told doctors that they were offered money by the police, for silence.
Shockingly, though he later claimed the young doctor was like his daughter, Ghosh did not even file a complaint. Why were the police not summoned immediately? Why was an FIR not registered for murder and rape that very night? Even the Calcutta high court (HC) has now raised this very question about his behaviour.
These bizarre responses were magnified by suspicions of evidence tampering. A renovation video surfaced showing routine construction and repair work taking place very close to the crime scene. Did Ghosh not think to ringfence the area for forensics? Or was the entire idea for the evidence to be irretrievable?
You would think Ghosh would at the very least be sacked, right? Guess what happens instead. He is transferred as the head of another medical college. Students at this college, Calcutta National Medical College (CNMC), ensured that his office was locked and did not allow him to start his new gig. But why was he given another job within hours of his resignation? Not just that, West Bengal media reported how two Trinamool Congress (TMC) politicians — a legislator and a state minister — arrived at CNMC to talk to students and urge them to call off their protests against Ghosh.
What makes Ghosh so powerful? He has been transferred three times in the past amid controversy but always manages to come right back. Students and doctors speak of him as some sort of local mafioso whom it was impossible to take on. It has finally taken the HC to have him sacked, but not before asking why a government lawyer was sent to defend him.
Other questions are mounting too.
Who sent a mob of thugs to assault protesting doctors at RG Kar Medical College on the eve of Independence Day?
The nursing staff has told us that the mob threatened to rape them in the same way as the victim had been violated. Young female doctors I spoke to said the police fled, leaving them to fend for themselves. They saw mobsters breaking everything in sight, including destroying the emergency room. They saw an overturned ambulance. They saw men clambering up pipes and walls to try and enter hostels.
The police failure is evident, irrespective of who these mobsters are revealed to be. Women have to battle a thousand demons to pursue professional dreams. If their place of work is also unsafe, fewer women will be incentivised to join the workforce.
In the Kolkata rape, and its attempted cover-up, every Indian woman sees a shade of her own reflection, either from an experience already lived, or the dread of one just around the corner.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author. The views expressed are personal
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