When president must also speak

If the head of state were to condemn alleged improprieties in states ruled by her former party, her recent article decrying Kolkata rape and murder case would not come across as partisan

Few will doubt the genuineness of President Droupadi Murmu’s dismay and horror, expressed in an article she wrote for a news agency, over the rape and murder of a woman doctor in a Kolkata hospital. She said what was most depressing was that the Kolkata incident was “part of a series of crimes against women.” The concluding sentence of her article was: “Let us collectively say enough is enough.”

Since the rape-murder in Kolkata was part of a series and, therefore, not unique, why did Murmu choose to highlight it? It was impolitic of her to do so as the gruesome crime occurred under the watch of the Trinamool Congress government, which has been perennially locked in conflict with the Bharatiya Janata Party ruling at the Centre. It was impolitic because she had been a member of the BJP before she was elected president.

Murmu’s political past makes her vulnerable to the charge of partisanship, more so because of the timing of the article. Early last week, the BJP sponsored a march to the state secretariat in Kolkata, which triggered skirmishes between the police and protesters. The next day, the BJP called for a 12-hour statewide bandh in protest.

The BJP’s attempt to appropriate the movement for justice dismayed the doctors, who are its spearheads. They issued a statement distancing themselves from the march, sparking apprehensions that the movement could weaken because of conflicting strategies over intensifying and enlarging it. Soon thereafter, Murmu published her article. It was as if she was employing the moral authority the president commands to tacitly consolidate as well as give a fillip to the movement, evident from her remark urging people to say “enough is enough.”

The rape-murder in Kolkata is, indeed, a worthy cause to be raised. But it also true that there have been other occasions during Murmu’s tenure when she could have called on people to cry out “enough is enough.” Fifteen days after she was sworn in as the president, the 11 people convicted of gang-raping Bilkis Bano and killing her family members during the 2002 Gujarat riots were released under the State’s remission policy. Murmu did not speak out against it, although it could be said she was too inexperienced then to dare spark a controversy.

Yet, even a year later, the woman in Murmu was not awakened to express horror over the viral video of two Kuki women who had been gang-raped and paraded naked. Was her silence linked to Manipur being a BJP-ruled state, and the Centre rebuffing the demand for removing its chief minister, Biren Singh?

Compare Murmu’s response with Pranab Mukherjee’s to the 2012 rape-murder of the physiotherapist popularly known as Nirbhaya. Then, too, the country was outraged. At the presentation of the Stree Shakti Puraskar for 2012, when the Rani Lakshmi Bai Award was given to the “spirit of Nirbhaya” and her mother received it, President Mukherjee said, “Nirbhaya as she is now known was a brave and courageous girl who fought till the very last minute for her dignity and her life… Her sad demise should not be in vain.”

The bug of sensationalism did not bite Mukherjee. He did not mistake the president’s duty as that of ushering in change, as Murmu seemed to have done with her enough-is-enough remark.

When a massacre took place at Lakshmanpur Bathe village, in Bihar, on December 1, 1997, Manoj Mitta, in his book Caste Pride, quotes then President K R Narayanan describing it as a “national shame.” The scale of the massacre was numbing: 58 Dalits were gunned down in one night. This is in sharp contrast to Murmu mentioning the solitary victim of Kolkata’s rape-murder incident in the opening line of her article reflecting upon the perilous state of women in the country.

Rabri Devi was the chief minister of Bihar in December 1997. Her party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, was a constituent of the United Front government, which had played the lead role in electing Narayanan as president. Yet he commented upon the massacre in Bihar, upholding the principle of non-partisanship.

Narayanan also spoke on the 2002 Gujarat riots, which occurred under the watch of Narendra Modi, who was then the state’s chief minister. Once again, the death toll was extraordinarily high: over 1,000 people died across the state. Two months after the riots broke out, Narayanan issued a press release, which his press secretary S N Sahu dug out for me.

Describing the riots as a “crisis of our State and society,” Narayanan’s press statement expressed his anguish and pain over the killings. His was a plea to the public: “I appeal to all my fellow citizens to restore communal harmony and do everything to end the communal violence that has devastated the State and continues to occur even after two months…”

Indeed, the insecurity in the Manipur of 2023 mirrored that of the Gujarat of 2002. Had Murmu expressed her horror over Manipur, none would have faulted her for breaking away from the tradition of the president making a statement of political import. If Murmu were to speak out against, say, lynchings and the extra-judicial demolition of houses of alleged criminals in BJP-ruled states, she would emerge as a paragon of political neutrality. 

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

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