Lib-Left dilemma over Mamata

A unique aspect of the growing disquiet against Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is LiberalLeft 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 PartyTheir conduct is unusual for LiberalLeft 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 LiberalLeft 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 timesThey donrsquot like her They know they canrsquot do without herLiberalLeft Kolkatans joining the movement for justice is redolent of the choice their Bangladeshi counterparts made overcoming their apprehension of empowering the rightwing Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Islamists to join the protest against Sheikh Hasina The primary concern in Bangladesh was Hasinarsquos turn to despotism For Kolkatans the principal worry is their loss of faith in the State because of its abject partisanshipThis aspect of the State was known to LiberalLeft Kolkatans but its grim consequences have been brought into sharp relief because of the poignant and frightening images the rapemurder of the doctor have evokedShe 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 doctorHer surname suggests she was unlikely an upper caste For LiberalLeft Kolkatans she symbolised the possibility of achieving socioeconomic mobility that was cruelly aborted overnightThere 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 LiberalLeft 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 canrsquot make safeIt is true middleclass Kolkatans including those LiberalLeft have seldom expressed outrage over stories of rapemurder 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 LiberalLeft Kolkatans have joined the protest movement because it has forged a solidarity of citizens that is cathartic in collective moments of shock fear and despairmdashand heals the hurt collective conscienceThe 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 partyState cannot be neutral This phenomenon is not unique to the Trinamool but it has certainly elevated the model to an unconscionable levelIndeed the rapemurder at RG Kar Hospital bears the marks of the partyState 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 130 lakh such volunteers and expressed astonishment that one panel interviewed as many 1351 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 systemOr take Sandip Ghosh the principal of RG Kar College who resigned in the wake of the furore over the rapemurder 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 himBut this belated measure cannot diminish the suspicion that Ghosh thrived because of being integral to the partyState system And then there is the question did the mob ransack RG Kar College because they believed they would be protected under the partyState systemThe 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 workingclass neighbourhoods are organising their own lsquolittlersquo protests Political parties are now part of it Once the BJP as the lead Opposition party seeks to appropriate the movement the dilemma of LiberalLeft Kolkatans over opposing Banerjee will return to gnaw them They would rather have her make a credible gesture that restores the peoplersquos faith in the StateThe writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon Challenging CasteSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper