Politics makes strange bedfellows‘ is an old chestnut. But when politics is driven not by any principles but by self-interest and electoral math, even stranger things happen. The cease-work by junior doctors in West Bengal to demand justice for their 31-year-old colleague, raped and murdered while on duty on 9 August at the RG Kar Hospital, is proof.
In West Bengal, the opposition Congress, the Left, and the BJP are going hammer and tongs against the Trinamool Congress government on the issue. But in New Delhi, the near-silence at their respective party headquarters is deafening.
Barring cursory tweets soon after the incident happened, siblings Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra have said nothing about the shocker from Kolkata. Other partners in the INDIA alliance, too, have been circumspect. Ditto, the BJP central leadership. Prime Minister Narendra Modi did, in his Independence Day address, speak about how cases of crime against women should be investigated and those responsible should be punished without delay. But no reference to the RG Kar incident.
Why this silence?
The answer lies possibly in the two-digit number: 29. No political party wants to risk upsetting that applecart of 29 MPs that Trinamool Congress has in the Lok Sabha. Certainly not the Congress and the INDIA bloc for whom 29 could turn into a matter of political life and death in the next election or even before.
Nor the BJP, on the off chance that it desperately needs numbers and, overtly or otherwise, Mamata Banerjee may just oblige.
The BJP also suffers from the additional handicap of horrific incidents of rape, murder and lynching happening with alarming regularity in states it rules on its own or with allies – sexual assault and rape cases in Badlapur, Ujjain, and Uttarakhand, and cow vigilantes shooting dead a Haryana school boy.
On the ground in West Bengal, some grassroots Congress workers lamented to me, on condition of anonymity, that Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra should have come and met the bereaved parents of the RG Kar doctor. That would change the Congress’ fortunes in the state. The workers are still smarting from the fact that the siblings did not come to West Bengal during the Lok Sabha elections.
Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the Congress’ West Bengal president, is putting up a stiff upper lip. “This is a state specific matter, we at the state level know where the shoe is pinching and our leadership has not told us not to protest against the RG Kar incident,” he told me. “We are on the streets”.
Also read: What would you do in Mamata’s place? Not what she did at RG Kar, say Bengal’s people
Disillusionment
BJP grassroots workers are in denial too, pointing out that Union minister Giriraj Singh called Mamata Banerjee “the most dangerous politician” recently and state leaders Suvendu Adhikari, Sukanta Majumdar, and Dilip Ghosh have demanded the CM’s resignation. Privately, though, some BJP leaders admit that the RG Kar incident is a lost opportunity to seriously dent Mamata Banerjee’s stranglehold on Bengal.
Mamata Banerjee, meanwhile, has been picking and choosing her political foes on the RG Kar issue with care. When vandals ransacked the hospital and attacked doctors sitting on dharna, she blamed the BJP and the Left for leading the assault, but not the Congress. Ditto, earlier this week. On the issue of doctors’ cease-work, she accused the BJP and the Left of backing it, but not the Congress.
On Wednesday, when the junior doctors did not attend the meeting for a dialogue called by the state government, her right-hand woman Chandrima Bhattacharya, the junior minister of health, accused them of playing a deep political game.
“Is it normal to mail the Chief Minister’s Office at 3:45 am?” she asked in a shocked tone as if not an email but a team of doctors had arrived in person at Mamata Banerjee’s office. “Certainly not,” she went on, rhetorically. “Then, is there some politics hidden behind it? There must be some politics….”
“…That the girl gets justice, the wronged girl who died – that’s not the point,” she added. “There is some political game behind it, that’s why it is all taking so much time to respond.”
The junior doctors’ comeback was pointed. “Those who are seeing politics in our protests are the ones doing politics,” they said. “We don’t have any political colour; we have kept all politicians away.”
The fact is, not a single political flag has been seen at the protests by junior doctors or at the protests by residents of Kolkata and other parts of the state. When BJP MP and retired justice Abhijit Ganguly went to the dharna site at RG Kar Hospital, he was booed away. Similarly, a BJP MLA, a woman, trying to reach the party office near the current dharna site outside Swasthya Bhavan, the state’s health department headquarters, was heckled and sent away.
There have been a couple of deviations in the past few days. TMC spokesperson Kunal Ghosh on Wednesday posted a video of a young woman shouting slogans at the doctors’ dharna and claimed she was a BJP member, arrested a couple of years ago for allegedly peddling narcotics. The woman posted some documents on social media that she claimed showed the courts had exonerated her.
On Thursday, former Naxal leader Ashim Chatterjee showed up at the dharna site and spoke briefly, telling the doctors their cause was just. It is likely some ultra-Left groups have lent the junior doctors’ agitation their support, uninvited.
But none of the major political players have been allowed a toehold in the most powerful agitation West Bengal has seen in decades.
It is a stand that has earned junior doctors the admiration of the aam janata, who continue to support them in droves even more than a month after their agitation began against the rape and murder of the trainee doctor. What this demonstrates is a total disillusionment among the ordinary people with political parties and politicians in general. When politics is unprincipled, with political convenience being the only moral compass, that disillusionment is complete.
Monideepa Banerjie is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. She tweets @Monideepa62. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)