Editorial: No country for women

NEW DELHI: The rape and murder of a junior doctor in a government hospital in Kolkata last week has triggered nationwide revulsion. Her colleagues in Bengal and fellow doctors nationwide are up in arms over the poor security at hospitals. Indeed, the incident raises wider questions about safety measures for women performing night duties in any sector. The doctor was on 36-hour night duty at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata and went to the seminar hall to rest at about 11 pm. Her body bearing multiple signs of trauma was found by her colleagues early next morning. Forensic evidence suggested she was sexually assaulted in the pre-dawn hours.

In the face of a huge public outcry, the Kolkata police have arrested a suspect, a civic volunteer with the local police who was seen leaving the premises sometime after the crime. Although investigation is still in process, the public hysteria has put the police under pressure to produce a culprit post haste. The issue has become political football, with BJP leaders using it as an opportunity to show the Mamata Banerjee government in a bad light. Demands for summary death to the suspect have been aired by all and sundry, vitiating the possibility of due process and only facilitating the police in performing extra-judicial jiggery-pokery to tamp down the public anger.

The junior doctors’ ire has forced the government to oust the principal of the college. The man has quit remonstrating plaintively that the victim ‘is like my daughter’, the typical patriarchal response every daughter finds creepy. Despite 12 years of sensitisation since the Nirbhaya rape, establishment figures hold fast to the belief that feeling fatherly is sufficient, just and convincing. The Kolkata incident is yet more proof that little has changed in the reality of rape in India since the Nirbhaya horror in 2012. Incidents of rape have only increased from 24,900 in 2012 to 31,516 in 2022, an increase of over 25 per cent.

Police records show that 86 rapes occur in India every day but the country by and large sleeps untroubled by the odium of being ‘the rape capital of the world’, a statistically inaccurate but sentimentally apt description. Added to that we now have the phenomenon of rape followed by murder, as has happened in the Kolkata case. Since the National Crime Records Bureau started maintaining data on this new metric in 2017, there have been more than 220 rape-murders of women each year.

Nothing the authorities have done in the Kolkata case is convincing to women that there is sincere change in India. The outrage only provides cover to each arm of the establishment to turn the narrative to their convenience. The police feign stress under the weight of public opinion, but the cry of ‘hang ‘em!’ is music to their ears, a licence to perform summary justice upon future suspects. The lawyers’ refusal to represent the suspect in court is purportedly a bow to the popular mood but a dereliction of duty.

To women at large, the plight of the Kolkata rape victim will only bring home the truth of an adage made famous by Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” It’s a paraphrasing of what the feminist icon wrote, but quite true to her meaning, and spot on as a commentary on the gender equation in India.