History repeating in West Bengal after 17 years

Not very long ago on a scorching mid-October afternoon in 2007 the city was witness to a massive protest rally which had thrown normalcy out of gear. People sweated it out for hours in their vehicles at the seven-point crossing of an important thoroufare without any grudge. Some even got down to join the protestors and lend their voices to the slogan demanding justice for a bright young man, Rizwanur Rahaman, who was found dead on railway tracks under mysterious circumstances. His fault: aspiring to love and marry an industrialist’s daughter.

Rahaman, a computer graphic designer, had sensed what his interfaith and interclass marriage would bring. He sought police help after registering their marriage under Special Marriage Act. But instead of assistance what he got was threats to come out of this marriage and forget the love of his life. The then Police Commissioner of Kolkata, Prasun Mukherjee, known to be close to the industrialist, took matters into hand. Rahaman was under tremendous torment. And what followed was suicide. Mukherjee not only derided Rahaman’s audacity to marry a rich man’s daughter, he justified the industrialist father-in-law’s opposition as natural because of the huge gap between the financial and social status of the two families. Besides, he let his subordinate officers, a trio, to drive the young techie to a breaking point. And all this happened in the Buddhadev Bhattacharjee regime, with the chief minister choosing to lower the blinds.

One sees reflection of the then Police Commissioner Mukherjee in the way the current Police Commissioner Vineet Goyal and the way he handled the case of rape and murder of the junior doctor from the word go.

The victim was discovered raped and murdered at one corner of the seminar room. Not only did the hospital authorities try to pass it off as suicide, the police allowed a lot of discrepancies like registering a case of unnatural death and then lodging an FIR 15 hours after the body was discovered, allowing the scene of crime to be compromised and evidences being tampered. Many of these had come under severe indictment of the Supreme Court. So with time, the cry for justice for the victim also became a cry for removal of the Police Commissioner, who allegedly botched up the case and possibility of a proper investigation to nail down the culprits.

Echoes of similar demand were also heard 17 years ago against the Police Commissioner in the Rizwanur Rahaman case. But realizing public pressure building up against the government and Mamata as the Opposition leader likely to extract political mileage, the CPIM patriarch Jyoti Basu intervened and within a fortnight Bhattacharjee removed the top cop and four other IPS officers. The tension calmed down but by then the invincible Left got a taste of public outrage.

The arrogance that one saw in Buddhadev Bhattacharjee in trying to shield his Commissioner initially has returned amplified manifold. Bhattacharjee was ultimately accountable to his party. All said and done at the end of the day it was the party and its ideology that pulled the strings and not individual leaders, no matter how powerful they were. In the Trinamool Congress regime, Mamata being the be all and end all of her party and government has no one to show her the light. Rather she prefers being her own light. And therein lies the problem.

There’s no one to oversee or overwrite her decisions either in the party or at the bureaucratic level. In fact no one dares to question her judgment.

If she feels in this festive season with Bengalis biggest festival, Durga puja, just a month away, police commissioner Vineet Goyal cannot be relieved from his duties, so be it. If she feels there’s no one to replace Goyal and his intelligence and understanding of law and order, so be it. Rather she thinks Goyal with his vast experience of tackling law and order during festivals is the need of the time. To the growing public demand of the police commissioner’s ouster, she has asked people to be patient.

But patience is running out as more and more skeletons are tumbling out of the cupboard. Every day more and more state Medical Colleges and Hospitals are throwing up horrifying tales of high-handedness and excesses being exercised by a section of medical fraternity, owing to their proximity to the ruling party. Besides, allegations of examination paper leaks, mass cheating, passing exam by bribing appropriate authorities and sexual offences are coming to the fore. More and more women are gathering courage to speak up how pursuing a career in medical science in Bengal is becoming traumatic and in some ways gender offensive.

Even as chief minister prefers patience, the Indian Medical Association and National Medical Council are watching and taking prompt action against doctors involved in corrupt practices, rackets and threat tactics. Sometimes it’s wise to act on time.

Interestingly, justice can take its own sweet time to act but providential justice or poetic justice is sure to strike. And what can validate this better than the way Left’s youth icon Meenakshi Mukherjee lunged forward to stop the hearse of the rape and murder victim being rushed out of R G Kar for a quick and quiet burial of the case. Had not Meenakshi and her comrades created the ruckus and raised questions over a secretive post mortem and a hush-hush cremation, delivering justice would have been impossible. Many are seeing a reflection of the young, fearless gutsy Mamata Banerjee of the yore in Meenakshi. Many are seeing future hope and deliverance.

History is repeating itself. The writing on the wall is all too clear but, as Nemesis would have it, the vision of the power that be is getting blurred, the brain fogged.

(The writer is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. Views personal.)