A terrible crime has taken place, and the nation’s conscience has been justifiably shaken. A 31-year-old doctor, known by many as a cheery and smiling presence, was assaulted and killed, shockingly in a place of healing—a hospital, the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata. The accused Sanjoy Roy, a civic police volunteer at the same hospital, allegedly crept up on her at night when she was snatching a few hours of sleep in the hospital’s seminar room. On the morning of 9 August, she lay dead, the victim of a savage attack by a vicious, cold-blooded “sexual pervert.”
Waves of protest erupted. Anguished citizens poured into the streets. The Bengal opposition levelled charges. Yet urgent questions still remain unanswered: what is happening to our society? Why is it that in 21st century India, professional women are still in such grave danger?
Kolkata Police and the RG Kar case
The trainee doctor in the RG Kar Hospital rape and murder, along with her family, deserves justice above all. The accused must be brought to trial swiftly and given exemplary punishment. What they certainly do not deserve is bruising, cruel politics and shrill media and social media campaigns that only seek to muddy the waters and obfuscate the truth. The fact is, within 24 hours, the investigation was completed, the prime accused was caught, his involvement established through evidence and DNA matching, and he was jailed. CBI sources have corroborated that Sanjoy Roy is the sole accused in the case.
The young doctor fell prey to a barbaric crime, and her life was tragically lost. But the long arm of the law reached out and the culprit was seized. The much-maligned Kolkata Police, in fact, cracked the case.
Accusations have been flung at the West Bengal government. The record must be set straight.
In the Supreme Court hearing on 22 August, the Kolkata Police submitted a detailed minute-by-minute report on the events of 9 August when the trainee doctor’s dead body was discovered. Every action of the police was videographed and those videos were submitted to the court. The Apex court asked some tough questions during the hearing but in the end, it appeared satisfied with the Kolkata Police’s detailed submissions. The fact that the Kolkata Police was confident enough to make a minute-by-minute submission shows that their investigators had little to hide.
The Kolkata Police showed that on 9 August, after the body was discovered in the hospital’s seminar hall, and police arrived on the scene, they first registered a General Diary Entry at 10:10 am. After initial formalities in a “highly surcharged atmosphere,” the police registered an Unnatural Death (UD) case, No. 861 of 2024 at 1:45 pm. Thereafter an inquest was carried out, then a post-mortem by an autopsy surgeon in the presence of the deceased doctor’s mother and five other women doctors. All these processes were videographed. That night, the body of the doctor was handed over to her parents. Later that night, the police official returned to the station and registered the FIR at 11:45 pm.
When the court asked about the delay in filing the FIR, the police explained that they followed the process laid down by a Gazette Notification of 2018. According to this process, when a dead body is involved, an Unnatural Death (UD) case is first recorded, and an FIR is only registered after the autopsy and post-mortem report confirm the cause of death. The registration of an unnatural death is treated exactly the same as an FIR and does not hinder the investigation in any way.
The court accepted this explanation and also acknowledged that the crime scene (the seminar hall) had not been tampered with. When senior advocate Kapil Sibal appearing for the Bengal government argued that since the scene at the hospital seminar hall had been scrupulously videographed by the Kolkata Police and videos had been submitted to the court showing the crime scene had not been altered, the court did not question this.
That the crime scene was somehow altered was widely misreported in the media. This is plain wrong. By all accounts, including CBI sources, the Kolkata Police arrested the right individual.
The police also clarified earlier that, contrary to rumours, they did not inform the parents that the death was a suicide, nor did they arrange the cremation. These theories were spun by wild, uncontrolled social media speculation. The cremation was undertaken by the doctor’s family.
Also read: When ‘good men’ are silent on rape, every Indian woman suffers. So we say ‘yes all men’
BJP peddling misinformation
The manner in which media and social media gave space to all kinds of crazy speculation, was terribly disturbing and damaging. It was as if an entire state was being humiliated and painted in lurid, sleazy colours, as if Bengal is a place of grimy conspiracies and murky ominous goings on.
Misinformation was peddled as scoops, bizarre speculation was passed off as fact. An angry CJI reprimanded the Centre for using social media arguments based on the claim that 150 gm of semen were found on the body—when, in fact, the post mortem report clearly states that 150 gm is the weight of the deceased’s uterus. To claim there was 150 gm of semen (which is measured in milliliters and not grams) would mean she was assaulted by 100 individuals—a fantastical hallucination dreamed up by professional outrage-seekers.
CBI sources have now confirmed the Kolkata Police’s view that there is no evidence of any other attacker other than the accused.
This absurdity about semen quantity became the basis for social media hype about a grisly gangrape.
There were assertions of a smashed pelvic girdle and legs wrenched apart, when in fact no bones were broken in the doctor’s body. Theories swirled about the involvement of a TMC MLA Soumen Mahapatra, when in reality, an RG Kar Medical College intern named Subhadip Singh Mahapatra is in no way related to the MLA. Rumours even claimed that the seminar hall where the body was discovered was demolished and renovated, when in fact, the renovation work was being carried out in a women’s toilet some distance away. Some of these assertions were made by individuals interviewed by journalists, while others were purveyed by the notorious BJP IT Cell, which stepped into the story all guns blazing, spewing lies and half-truths on an industrial scale from its hundreds of social media handles.
Falsehoods were peddled about the West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee being disconnected from the grieving family. But Banerjee had actually been involved from the start. She visited the family, remained in constant touch with the parents through the night of 9 August and was the first to call for the CBI to investigate the crime. The transfer of the RG Kar principal Dr Sandip Ghosh has become the subject of controversy. But his transfer has been revoked, and the CBI has now taken over the investigation into alleged financial irregularities at the hospital. The phone call to the parents, informing them it was a death by ‘suicide,’ allegedly came from the hospital, and this will need to be probed to establish accountability.
Gaps in accountability cannot be fixed in a cacophonous atmosphere with social media functioning as a firehose of fake news, politicians seeking to settle scores, and vested interests trying to hijack the agenda. Sensation-seeking media cannot set the timeline or agenda in a criminal investigation. Such sensationalism only brings more trauma to the doctor’s family.
Also read: We were groped by patients, had no toilets—don’t wait for rape to care for women doctors
Politics over a grisly crime
The BJP and its allies need to look inward. In two decades, the BJP has not bothered to inquire about the welfare of Bilkis Bano, who was gangraped by 11 persons while heavily pregnant in 2002 during the Gujarat riots. Numerous members of Bilkis’s family were massacred including her own newborn baby. Bilkis only survived because she fell unconscious and her attackers presumed she was dead.
In 2022, Bilkis Bano’s attackers were garlanded by the Sangh Parivar affiliate, the VHP, in BJP-ruled Gujarat. The BJP had to be literally goaded to take action against its Unnao MLA, Kuldip Singh Sengar, who was convicted (yes, convicted) of rape in 2019. The BJP has also not acted against its UP strongman, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, despite allegations of sexual assault by women wrestlers. BJP activists were accused of supporting those who were accused of the gangrape and murder in Kathua, J&K. Instead of fake outrage in Bengal, the BJP should introspect on how many women suffered at its hands.
From Day 1 of the RG Kar tragedy, BJP cadres online and on the streets were hellbent on seeking the dismissal of the West Bengal Chief Minister. Their campaign was openly supported by the CPIM in the “Ram-Baam” Opposition combination of West Bengal. The single point agenda was to put the Chief Minister in the dock, dismiss the state government, and create a storm of anarchy in which even the governor became a willing accomplice. A hyper partisan mainstream media propagated only one side of the story. Even the Supreme Court proceedings of Thursday 22 August were reported in a questionable manner by mainstream newspapers.
Systematic efforts were made to provoke the Kolkata Police. During the “Reclaim the Night” march on the intervening night of 14-15 August, motivated mobsters entered the protest and vandalised the RG Kar Hospital. The aim was to force a police action that would bring on President’s Rule. The miscreants smashed vital medical supplies, and broke up precious equipment that took years to stock, revealing the toxic politics afoot. The BJP and its cohorts couldn’t care less for loss of life. They only want to use the doctor’s murder for their power-lust.
Amid all this poison and lies, the real issue of mounting brutalities against women is being lost. The massive asymmetry of power between a woman in a rural community and a police thana means that she often does not have the agency to even register a rape complaint.
In UP’s Ambedkar Nagar, a woman recently hanged herself after the police refused to register her gangrape case. The statistics are harrowing: in 2022 alone, NCRB data revealed that as many as 90 rapes occurred per day in India in 2021, and 2022, a rape took place every 16 minutes.
Public anger is justified. But we have to look for solutions.
Also read: I am a woman doctor and I was taught to keep quiet. Kolkata rape shattered my bubble
Time for introspection
Media images of a domineering patriarchy are deeply concerning. Prime Minister Narendra Modi projects an archaic out-of-touch “dabang” persona bellowing about his own “56 inch chest” in a comical caricature of paternalistic swagger. Too many role models of “bahubalis” and “super heroes” are creating a noxious and violent male dominance in our society through cinema and media. While the rest of the world is moving toward deep introspection on birth-based gender identities, mainstream cinema in India still propagates an archaic hero cult and old style patriarchal values.
An ersatz traditionalism has taken hold, where visible, individualistic women are seen as enemies of the status quo. Lethally violent language is directed at women online, only a few degrees removed from violent actions against them offline. Women are being trapped in the “devi- dayan” (goddess-witch) binary: “virtuous” women are increasingly cossetted at home, while “bold” women are often harassed when they step out. Perhaps that is why even educated women are increasingly dropping out of India’s workforce.
A backward-looking, regressive BJP is presiding over a society where modern women are being dreadfully stereotyped and their freedoms are plummeting. We are pedalling backwards into a mythical, so-called “sanskritic” era, where no one is speaking for modern, forward-looking global values.
Families, educational institutions, media, and courts need to embark on introspection. They need to start awareness drives among people on gender equality. Social conditioning that privileges men needs to be challenged. The demonisation of visible women, as in the case of Vinesh Phogat, must end. Traditionalists preaching a return to some imagined Vedic Age need to be reassured on the merits of modernity and the need for equitable gender relationships. Politicians need to wake up. An Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) report has shown that 151 MPs and MLAs are facing cases of sexual violence, with the BJP topping the list.
If leaders don’t show the way, if a Prime Minister can taunt a woman chief minister with misogynist remarks like “Didi oh didi”, then what example is being set for the public?
Why did a civic police volunteer in a hospital attack a woman doctor with so much ferocious evil intent, a doctor who he perhaps saw every day in his workspace? The reason lies in the inescapable fact that our society is generating criminal psychopaths waiting to prey on women they both despise and hanker for. There is a darkness growing within and all of us need to scrutinise our own relationships. Do we deal with each other on the basis of respect, dignity and equality? The cause of gender justice should not remain trapped in cynical politics. If, after every terrible crime, we only focus on divisive politics, then we will never find a solution to India’s brutal war on women.
The writer is a Rajya Sabha MP, All India Trinamool Congress. She tweets @sagarikaghose. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
Really? It is your report which is full of misinformation. There are other Print media which are carrying accurate information about this case – will read those, thank you. For your information, CBI has not confirmed any such thing. Choti chata bondho korun.
It’s shameful that The Print allows dubious journalists like Ms. Sagarika Ghose to spew lies on it’s platform. By doing so, it becomes complicit in the misinformation campaign orchestrated by the TMC.
Journalists like Ms. Sagarika Ghose are the reason why journalism has lost it’s prestige as a profession.
I was reading the post and was like who in the right mind wrote it and I saw the publication name ofc.l, it the extreme left publications The print
Sagarika Ghose finally breaks her silence.
Enabler of TMC thuggery, defending it big time.
Please. Your party goons have ensured that the evidence stays corrupted because they destroyed the crime scene. I hope you sleep well, ma’am. After all, you are doing extremely good work by shielding a party that routinely uses rape as a political party. The fact that you or your pathetic political colleagues cant look beyond the bjp and feel bad for the poor girl and her family shows having women in politics adds nothing if they are just as patriarchal.