Lib-Left dilemma over Mamata

Law students at a protest march against the sexual assault and murder of a trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, in Kolkata, on August 24. Pic/PTI

A unique aspect of the growing disquiet against Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is Liberal-Left Kolkatans joining the movement for justice for the young medical doctor brutally raped and killed on the premises of RG Kar Medical College and Hospital. Some of them, in conversations with me, said they have done so even though acutely aware that the movement could debilitate the Trinamool Congress, and prove advantageous for the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Their conduct is unusual for Liberal-Left Indians, who subordinate their political worries to their fear of the BJP acquiring power. They perceive the BJP as divisive and inimical to harmonious social relations. It for this reason Liberal-Left Kolkatans have desisted from opposing Banerjee in a sustained way, and although not enamoured of her politics, bank upon her to keep the BJP out of power, even voting for her at times.

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They don't like her. They know they can't do without her.

Liberal-Left Kolkatans joining the movement for justice is redolent of the choice their Bangladeshi counterparts made, overcoming their apprehension of empowering the right-wing Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Islamists to join the protest against Sheikh Hasina. The primary concern in Bangladesh was Hasina's turn to despotism. For Kolkatans, the principal worry is their loss of faith in the State because of its abject partisanship.

This aspect of the State was known to Liberal-Left Kolkatans, but its grim consequences have been brought into sharp relief because of the poignant and frightening images the rape-murder of the doctor have evoked.

She was the only child of parents engaged in the business of tailoring and selling school uniforms. They struggled for some years before their enterprise became financially viable. She built upon it to become a doctor.

Her surname suggests she was unlikely an upper caste. For Liberal-Left Kolkatans, she symbolised the possibility of achieving socio-economic mobility that was cruelly aborted overnight.

There is also the factor of location: the gruesome incident occurred at a hospital. It is the workplace of doctors, largely drawn from the middle class. Liberal-Left Kolkatans are haunted by the thought that it could well have been their daughters instead of the woman who was raped and killed. Such thoughts generate feelings of vulnerability transcending the ideological divide, shattering the confidence of the middle class that their privileges can protect them even in a milieu the State can't make safe.

It is true middle-class Kolkatans, including those Liberal-Left, have seldom expressed outrage over stories of rape-murder in rural Bengal. But the brutalisation of the doctor in the Capital also became the moment for them to imagine that the perilous life in the badlands outside Kolkata could be creeping upon them in the metropolis. Liberal-Left Kolkatans have joined the protest movement because it has forged a solidarity of citizens that is cathartic in collective moments of shock, fear and despair - and heals the hurt collective conscience.

The protest demands justice for the woman doctor, but it is also fundamentally against Banerjee blurring the divide between the party and the State. This has spawned a political culture in which local Trinamool leaders have become the principal arbitrator of social relations, determine the distribution of State largesse, and engage in violence to perpetuate their domination. The party-State cannot be neutral. This phenomenon is not unique to the Trinamool, but it has certainly elevated the model to an unconscionable level.

Indeed, the rape-murder at RG Kar Hospital bears the marks of the party-State. Take Sanjay Roy, the civic police volunteer who is the sole accused in the case. Civic volunteers are appointed through a process designed to favour party activists and sympathisers. The Calcutta High Court, in March 2017, questioned the criteria the government employed for appointing 1.30 lakh such volunteers, and expressed astonishment that one panel interviewed as many 1,351 of them in just one day. Roy, as we now know, has a violent past. People such as him will invariably slip through a nepotistic system.

Or take Sandip Ghosh, the principal of RG Kar College, who resigned in the wake of the furore over the rape-murder. Yet, within hours, he was posted to another institution as its head. After the Calcutta High Court sent Ghosh on compulsory leave, he was appointed as an officer on special duty in the health ministry headquarters. The state government has appointed a Special Investigation Team to probe allegations of corruption against him.

But this belated measure cannot diminish the suspicion that Ghosh thrived because of being integral to the party-State system. And then, there is the question: did the mob ransack RG Kar College because they believed they would be protected under the party-State system?

The movement for justice, spearheaded by civil society groups, has now acquired autonomy and a spatial spread not conceived earlier. School alumni groups as well as working-class neighbourhoods are organising their own ‘little' protests. Political parties are now part of it. Once the BJP, as the lead Opposition party, seeks to appropriate the movement, the dilemma of Liberal-Left Kolkatans over opposing Banerjee will return to gnaw them. They would rather have her make a credible gesture that restores the people's faith in the State.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.
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