Mind the Gap: Another rape rocks Kolkata. But politicians are busy playing their usual game
Another rape in Kolkata, but the politicians are busy scoring points. Another day another rape and, of course, political points are flying fast and thick.
Another day another rape and, of course, political points are flying fast and thick. Yet again, the BJP says West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee must resign. Yet again, Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) is running its own little side-show for stupidest statement. In the running so far:
- Kalyan Banerjee, member of Parliament: “If a friend rapes another friend, then how will the government authorities provide protection?”
- Madan Mitra, member of the Legislative Assembly: “If that girl had not gone there, this incident wouldn’t have happened.”
- And Manas Bhunia, West Bengal irrigation minister: “The moment there is a small incident in Bengal, they say ‘look the state is gone, such destruction’.”
There are denials and retractions. But there is no boxing back the misogyny.
Kalyan Banerjee is wrong. It is precisely the job of the college to provide a safe space to all students from friends and strangers. It is most certainly the job of the state to ensure women are safe everywhere, in the college where she studies or hospital where she works.
Is Madan Mitra suggesting that women should be locked up at home after hours? Maybe he doesn’t know that one in three women is subject to violence from her own family.
Perhaps Manas Bhunia has normalized rape as a ‘small incident’ in a country where 86 cases are reported every day. These are very much India’s shame; a key reason why the US state department recently issued a warning to single women against travelling to India.
Not one to shy away from battle, Mahua Moitra takes the high moral ground saying misogyny cuts across party lines: “We condemn these disgusting comments no matter who makes them,” she tweets. Moitra has a bit of a history of bad blood with Kalyan Banerjee who then crosses a line by making needless personal comments about her (proving, ironically, her point about misogyny) and an unseemly war of words breaks out.
Rape, horror and impunity
Cutting through the noise, this is what we have.
On June 25, a 24-year-old first-year law student at the South Calcutta law college was gang-raped within the college premises. Her medical report reveals forceful penetration, bite marks and nail scratches. She was beaten with a hockey stick, filmed naked and threatened with the release of the video if she complained.
She filed a police complaint anyway.
There have been four arrests so far: Security guard Pinaki Banerjee and two students, Promit Mukherjee and Zaid Ahmed, as well as the prime accused Monojit Mishra, a lawyer who is an alumnus of the same college and an ad-hoc staff member.
The rape is said to have been planned by Mishra as a ‘lesson’ to the student for rebuffing his advances.
Mishra was admitted to the college in 2012, expelled a year later for criminal activity but somehow made his way back in 2017. In 2021 he was thrown out of the college’s TMC student unit where he was an office bearer. A year later he managed to graduate.
Details of Mishra’s early criminal career include reportedly 11 cases against him, including attempt to murder, sexual assault and extortion as well as at least three prior arrests, the most recent in April or May this year. In 2022, another first-year student filed a police complaint against him for sexual harassment. Nothing happened.
As Joydeep Thakur reports for HT, so powerful was Mishra that administrators at the law college last year issued a notice informing students that he was their points man for atheir queries.
What is the source of Monojit Mishra’s clout? How did a man with his record and reputation manage a job, even an ad-hoc one, in an educational institution? Where did he get the confidence to continue his free run as college goonda and serial sexual assaulter? And if this is not systemic failure, then what is?
In a state where student union elections have been suspended in most colleges across the state for over a decade, “political proxies often fill the vacuum. These unelected groups, backed by ruling-party networks, consolidate informal authority without accountability,” writes political science anthropologist and college lecturer Suman Nath in The Indian Express. “This dynamic is especially dangerous in institutions of higher learning, where dissent, student safety, and democratic governance are critical.”
More chilling is the fact that police have now urged “other women who may have faced similar harassment and molestation to step forward and lodge complaints.”
Political clout and impunity
There’s a chilling but undeniable link between political influence that cuts across party lines and cases of sexual assault.
In West Bengal itself, Sheikh Shahjahan, a strongman from Sandeshkhali used his TMC links to run a reign of terror for years. In early 2024, several women came forward and spoke about how Shahjahan and his henchmen were able to operate with impunity thanks to political patronage and police complicity. Despite the political heat raised by opposition parties in an election year as well as pressure from the Calcutta high court, it still took 55 days to finally arrest Shahjahan on February 29.
A horror story was emerging in Karnataka too where days before the elections, hundreds of pen drives featuring Prajwal Revanna, a sitting member of Parliament and grandson of former prime minister H D Deve Gowda, were circulated. Revanna is alleged to have sexually assaulted and filmed dozens of women. Revanna’s party, the Janata Dal (Secular) is an ally of the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had personally campaigned for him.
Revanna ran off to Germany but was arrested on his eventual return and remains in jail.
The hall of shame includes Kuldeep Singh Senger, BJP legislator from Uttar Pradesh accused in the rape of a minor girl. During trial, key witnesses died in mysterious circumstances—the girl’s father in police custody and aunts when their car collided with a truck. Senger’s conviction and sentencing to life imprisonment is a rare aberration in the quest for justice by rape survivors against the powerful and connected.
In 2021, the court acquitted Chinmayanand, a former BJP union minister, of rape charges brought against him by a law student. The court noted that the victim had turned hostile taking back her previous statements stating that she had made them under pressure.
A rapist knows no geography, religion or caste. But when he comes armed with political clout, he has reason to believe he is above justice and can commit the crime with impunity. And when other politicians base their response and outrage on ideology, they only serve to feed this sense of impunity.
Monojit Mishra presided over a reign of fear and terror. There are news reports of women students choosing to miss classes rather than run into him. The co-opting of a security guard and other students in the rape of a student points clearly to institutional collusion and failure. The question to ask: What gave him the confidence to believe he could get away? If justice is to be served, then that question must be answered.
