The RG Kar Protest And Its Aftermath In West Bengal

Over the last couple of decades, after horrific cases of sexual assault and murder were prominently reported in the media, Indians have shown a remarkable willingness to come out on to the streets and undertake vocal and deep protests demanding justice for the victims. An aspect of these protests is that such demands are centred on the need for a rapid police investigation and punitive judicial intervention to punish the perpetrator as soon as possible, rather than for systemic reform, both institutional and socio-cultural, to prevent similar incidents in the future. This is unfortunate but understandable given the difficulties in carrying out such deep-seated socio-cultural reform, mainly due to the fact that it will need men to recognise that they are the major part of the problem as the perpetrators, which is practically impossible as it would involve challenging the foundational patriarchal superstructure on which Indian society rests. As an ameliorative measure the political class has implemented limited legal reforms in response to mass protests in order to satisfy civil society demands with some form of “action” promising to restructure the status quo without actually doing so.

The protests that erupted in the aftermath of the horrific incident on August 9 at RG Kar Hospital in West Bengal began with similar demands for justice for the victim, but gradually grew into a mobilisation against both patriarchy and the state’s existing medical system. The unprecedented response by civil society when they gathered en masse under the banner of “reclaiming the night” and organised protests by junior doctors, with the formation of the West Bengal Junior Doctors Front (WBJDF) as their representative body, are examples of protests that goes beyond just police and judicial action over a single case. It opposes both societal patriarchy and the current status of institutional medical setups run by the government.

Some of the key factors that led junior doctors to broaden the scope of their protests were the dire state of hospital buildings, including the hostels; the ever-present threat culture; the informal handling of appointments and referrals; the tight control of politically affiliated student members over the academic space despite their “inadequate academic performance”; the near-nonexistent bodies and panels to deal with reported harassment cases; and the absence of democratically elected student bodies. The demands of the protests therefore, were very specific and addressed all of the aforementioned issues. The doctors were asking for mechanisms to not only function peacefully in a safe environment but also to create a space for dispute resolution and preventative measures against administrative mishandling of cases.

Over time, the methods of dissent also evolved. It began with a non-violent gathering, symbolic demonstrations, and sloganeering, however, the doctors soon understood that the government was either not responding to their demands or was responding insufficiently, thus the stakes needed to be upped. As a result, the hunger strike, and an ultimatum of a statewide complete cessation of medical work emerged as a form of protest. Aside from its deep historical significance in the Indian context, the fast unto death approach has played an important role in the political ascension of the state’s incumbent chief minister and her party. Mamata Banerjee herself had utilised this tactic in the recent past, protesting against Tata Motors during the Singur agitation in a similar fashion for 26 days before her demands were met. As such this approach continues to have great symbolic value in the memory of the people going back of course to the master of such symbolic gestures Mahatma Gandhi who introduced it into his form of non-violent politics, and the doctors’ protest aimed to alter the collective memory of the populace by using the same strategy.

Aside from the top priority of ensuring that the victim receives justice as soon as possible, the doctors have made the following demands in their ten-point demands charter: the digitisation of the medical system, including a central referral system and a bed vacancy monitor; the removal of the principal health secretary; an investigation into allegations of corruption in the medical council and recruitment boards; the election and validation of student councils; the elimination of the threat culture by looking into and punishing “threat syndicates” on college campuses; the inclusion of students, including female students, in panels tasked with updating college security infrastructure; the immediate filling of open positions in hospitals to cope with the workload; and more police presence in the hospitals. These demands are quite specific and thus extremely difficult for the ruling party to avoid, and their reluctance to fulfill them stems from the nature of party politics in the state.

If the state has to comply with these demands, a series of reforms will be required, not just in medical infrastructure, but also in the method by which party activists dominate a designated public space and use it for political expression. Since the ruling party has a history of suppressing student body politics in educational institutions, permitting this to occur will be detrimental to the party’s reputation. Furthermore, student politics will create an “opposing force” against party-affiliated staff within the medical system, which will harm the political space that they have established. Likewise, digitisation of the patient-doctor handling process would lessen the culture of middlemen, which will further affect the political space of party officials within the system. Aside from these, the government will require both money and time to hire medical staff, police personnel, and restructure the referral system, among other things, and, in line with current fiscal constraints, no government likes to be pressured into investing money in public welfare.

Due to the government’s insufficient response to earlier forms of protest, the doctors decided to go on hunger strike to underline the gravity of their demands. Ultimately, the CM met with the doctors’ delegation on October 22 to engage in negotiations. The conference resulted in some of the doctors’ demands being satisfied, while others remain on hold. The doctors terminated their fast, although they stressed that it was not because the government wanted them to, but because civil society and the victim’s parents requested them to do so.

The political ramifications of the protest have been such that in the last three months, the incumbent government’s image has been severely negatively affected, to the degree that the TMC’s core voter base is extremely dissatisfied with the party’s handling of not only the assault case but also the manner in which it has dealt with the protests. The growing anger has created a political vacuum in the state, allowing opposition politics to develop and reclaim the popular imagination. The two main opposition groups in the state are the CPI (M) and the BJP. The long history of CPI (M) rule remains fresh in the people’s minds. The decline of the CPI (M)’s traditionally strong party cadre has created an ideal chance for the BJP to gain an advantage in the state. West Bengal has a history of protracted single-party political regimes, and the TMC is relatively young in that regard. The BJP has expended a huge amount of energy and resources to capture power in the state, with the 2021 Vidhan Sabha election in West Bengal being one of the most expensive on record. It has so far been unsuccessful in using both the immense power at its disposal as well as the ideological juggernaut of Hindu nationalism to displace the TMC from power. The latter has so far been able to successfully capitalise on the personal popularity of its chief minister and appeals to Bengali regional regional nationalism to act as a bulwark against the BJP’s looming electoral machine; however, with this crisis and the ham-fisted response of the TMC state government, the legitimate discontent and rage generated by the RG Kar incident have provided an opening for the BJP to take advantage of.

This elides the much deeper problem of patriarchal attitudes towards sexual assault which have pervaded every level of daily life and penetrated every party regardless of ideology. The instinctive reaction across the board is to: blame the victim, deny it in fact happened, spin a false narrative misrepresenting it as something more innocuous and innocent and lastly to argue that it is an inevitable social fact of life which cannot be eliminated and that by extension people should not get too worked up about it. The BJP is one of the most egregious offenders on this front, as the alarming cases of rape and murder show in Uttar Pradesh such as Hathras, with the victims often being Dalit women to the politicised early release of the convicted rapists and child murderers in the Bilkis Bano case, in violation of all established norms governing the early release of parolees. Most notorious of course were the defence of the accused in the Kathua rape and murder case of a nine-year-old child; the common denominator being that the victims were invariably Muslim, while the perpetrators were Hindu, which in the binary Hindutva politics of the BJP was enough to overlook the heinousness of the sexual crimes against women involved and either support the lenient treatment or defend from prosecution the guilty, simply because they were Hindus. Such responses however are not just confined to the BJP; George Fernandes’s infamous statement in the Lok Sabha during the parliamentary debate that raged on the Godhra pogrom, stating that gang-rapes, mutilation, and brutal killing of women that had happened in that shameful episode, were “nothing new” but had been occurring for the last 54 years. The Samajwadi Party leader in 2014, Mulayam Singh, stated his objection to capital punishment as part of the new anti-rape legislation being enacted in the wake of the Nirbhaya agitation, not out of any principled opposition to the death penalty per se but because “Boys will be boys. They make mistakes.” Commenting that friendships develop between boys and girls and that when “differences occur, girls level charges of rape,” arguing that those who level false allegations should also be punished.

The TMC and Mamata Banerjee herself, have a very poor record on this as well; as a reaction to a gang-rape in 2012, in Kolkata’s Park Street area, where a woman was abducted by five men into a moving car and sexually assaulted, she termed the incident as a “shajano ghatana” (fabricated incident) intended to defame her government. In an eerie echo of Mulayam Singh’s similar statement on inter-gender relations among the youth she further commented “Rape cases are on the rise because boys and girls interact m freely now. Earlier, if men and women held hands, they would be caught and reprimanded by parents, but now everything is so open. It’s like an open market with open options.” When a 14 year-old girl was raped in Nadia, West Bengal; Mamata again sought to downplay and deny that a rape had taken place, saying that “This story they are showing that a minor has died due to rape, will you call it a rape? Was she pregnant or had a love affair? Have they enquired? I have asked the police. They have made arrests. I was told the girl had an affair with the boy.” The accused in this case was the son of a local influential TMC party official, which could partially account for her reluctance to acknowledge the reality of sexual assault. It also raises the larger problem of representation, as it was a woman chief minister making these statements and in a similar manner to her male counterparts, refusing to address incidents of appalling sexual violence against women seriously. The orthodox argument that greater political representation of hitherto marginalised groups such as women or religious and caste minorities in positions of power, will better represent their interests when it comes to these situations here sees it’s limitations, as without a real redistribution of power representation can be a hollow symbol, giving only the veneer of change, without the reality of it.

All political parties whatever their ideological stripe have made such statements in the past in their approaches to heinous incidences of sexual violence. This demonstrates a severe lack of political will to actually tackle patriarchal attitudes and structures entrenched within society that create such a “rape culture” due to the perceived costs of doing as and an unwillingness to expend political capital on it beyond lip-service. When particularly gruesome incidents such as the Nirbhaya gang rape in in New Delhi and the RG Kar incident inflame public opinion, creating intense levels of outrage that spill into street demonstrations which can’t be defused by the usual symbolic platitudes, only then is the political establishment pushed out of its torpor and forced to act. Even here, however, the actions are limited to superficial measures, which while they appear strong on paper, do little to tackle the structural and deeper problem by focusing on aspects like speedy trials and mandatory stiff sentencing which are in reality only patchily and selectively applied. Until there is a serious and concerted effort to alter this approach, little will change and the losers in this will remain the victims of sexual assault, who are primarily women.

Conrad Kunal Barwa is a senior research analyst at a private think-tank, and a senior research associate at the Birmingham Business School. Abhinandan Pandey is a post-graduate researcher in History and is a published Urdu poet