Everything is broken. We know it, but refuse to see it. Maybe now we will. But the rape and murder of a doctor on duty in a government hospital should not have been the event to open our eyes to this.
The facts are stark. This 31-year-old doctor, on the job for 36 hours, was looking for a place to recoup. She found one at her place of work. A seminar hall. There, she was raped and murdered. At night.
Initially, the authorities, including the hospital, sought to pass it off as suicide. The police — true to character as many in Calcutta would agree — thought it fit to launch a murder investigation only after the parents complained. One person was arrested, but forensic tests on the nature of injuries suffered by the woman indicate more than one person is most likely involved. The police probe made little headway, prompting the Calcutta High Court to order an investigation by a central agency. The CBI is now on the job.
Statements issued by the authorities, namely the chief minister and the police, have been tediously predictive. Mamata Banerjee, who oversees both police (home) and health, may have boldly declared the state would seek "the death penalty" for the accused, but subsequent actions of her administration haven't yet inspired confidence about its sincerity in getting to the truth. The principal of the medical college, under whose watch the horrific crime took place, was re-assigned to another college, not put in the dock or slapped a showcause as one would expect. Had it not been for the high court, he would not have been benched. It has come to light that he's some sort of a favourite, having had two prior transfer orders revoked mysteriously.
The man who has been arrested, via electronic footprints, is said to be a civic volunteer, a member of this over one lakh-strong band of do-gooders being put together since 2013 under the aegis of the state government. Initially, they were deployed as traffic wardens during festivals. Over the years, this army of youngsters has been co-opted by the police who use them liberally, to collect legitimate fines and illegitimate bribes. Today, civic volunteers are a law unto themselves, pitching in with their services for the ruling party wherever required, at times shedding their all-blue uniform to shore up the numbers at Trinamul rallies. More important, this is not the first time one of them has been linked to an unnatural death.
That explains why the arrested volunteer enjoyed unfettered access at RG Kar, his place of work as a custodian of the law, even if inebriated as he was that night.
It is because of such tell-tale circumstances that protesting students and the Opposition have expressed fears of a cover up. A “Reclaim the Night” clarion call voiced by university students, all girls, has drawn unprecedented support from people of the state. Thousands of women and men, young and old, hit the streets peacefully throughout Bengal to usher in Independence Day with the cry: We want justice. The protest venue at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital was vandalised by goons, reinforcing suspicions of insidious attempts at shielding the culprits.
Across the country doctors have spearheaded protests in solidarity to highlight one of their basic demands, ie, the declaration of hospitals as safe zones and the promulgation of a central law to tackle violence against doctors since the existing 25 state laws haven't yielded any convictions in spite of regular violence against medical practitioners.
Doctors and interns serving in state hospitals in Bengal do so in abominable working conditions. It has been like that for ages. Now a murder on campus has renewed the focus on such institutional lacunae. Not just in Bengal though, authorities have displayed a stubborn resistance to learn from the lessons of the past.
In November, 1973, Aruna Shanbaug, a junior nurse at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, was brutally assaulted by a ward boy, leaving her blind, deaf and paralysed. Shanbaug lived on for 42 years on life-support at the hospital, cared for by fellow nurses before she passed away in 2015, her death and debates that ensued thereof spurring an important legislation on euthanasia in the country.
At IIT-Kharagpur, a student’s death in October 2022 was attributed to suicide. His parents moved court. Ultimately, his body was exhumed and another autopsy done to reveal he was murdered. Closer home at Jadavpur University, a fresher was thrown out of the balcony of his hostel and killed exactly a year ago. That terrible fallout of ragging blew the lid off a racket in allotment of hostel rooms. Then too, the authorities in Bengal rattled out pious platitudes about right and wrong, about what was and what would be done to ensure no parent would lose a son to vicious bullying.
Today, rumours are rife on why what happened at RG Kar happened. The "inside stories" are too sordid to repeat. But in the prevailing atmosphere of mistrust, these tend to get amplified. After the monstrosity heaped on the medical practitioner at RG Kar, nothing seems right now. The unfixed have remained unfixed. Consider the list of demands the National Medical Commission (NMC) has issued to all medical colleges. It has asked for a "policy to ensure a safe work environment" within college and hospital campuses, specifying, among a host of requirements, that "corridors and campus (es) should be well-lit in the evening for staff to walk safely from one place to other..."
Hang on, but weren't these supposed to be in place already? Evidently not. The state of West Bengal and those who run it had to be told: if it's a dark corridor, please fix some lights. It needed a postgraduate student to be raped and killed in a state-run hospital for the apex medical college regulator to come out with this mind-numbingly prosaic list of dos and don'ts.
Yesterday will remain a devastating memory, a shameful blot. And tomorrow is usually never what it's supposed to be. But it's up to us to change that. The time for "learning from the lessons of the past" is over. We have had 78 years to do so. It is now time to act. Rebuild, step by step, a broken public health system and with it reclaim a civic space that has been polluted and rendered rotten by a total lack of order in all its spheres, be it as basic as safety in the workplace.