On the auspicious eve of Yogini Ekadashi, the nation was in for a shock, punctuated with horror, by the ghastly news coming in from the small town of Chopra in Uttar Dinajpur district of West Bengal. Tajmul Haque, alias JCB, a local criminal associated with the ruling Trinamool Congress, publicly flogged a couple for an alleged extramarital affair. The local kangaroo court or Salishi Sabha was presided over by Tajmul, who had ostensibly thought of himself as both Kazi and Ameer in his worldview coloured by his interpretation of the Sharia. To dispense medieval style Sharia inspired justice was his unqualified right given by none less than local Trinamool MLA Hamidul Rahman, who later said perhaps his man went a little far after all for the likes of Rahman and Haque Bharat still being Dar Ul Harb is perhaps not yet ready for Sharia.
Atrocities on Women
Demographic changes underway in West Bengal by those in power are fast pushing us towards Dar Ul Islam where Haque, Rahman and their likes would have a free run to usher in ISIS-inspired Sharia law. The Taliban and their now defeated cousins in medieval barbarism, the ISIS, would have been proud to see their ideology having stuck deep roots in Bengal, the land which was the harbinger of reform and rejuvenation of Bharat. The land of the holy triumvirate of Durga, Kali and Jagatddhatri has witnessed unspeakable atrocities on women in especially the last 13 years when a woman has been the sitting Chief Minister of West Bengal. This writer in these very pages had compared Trinamool rule in his home State of West Bengal to the ISIS after the Sandeshkhali shocker came to light. The expected silences from secular quarters notwithstanding; the people of West Bengal are rightly raising their voice.
Changing Demographics
The park street rape case shook the city not just because the perpetrators managed to flee but wherein the motives of the gang rape victim rather than the perpetrators were questioned by the Chief Minister in full media glare instead of expressing solidarity and promising justice. The victim, now deceased, was subject to intense scrutiny and media trial due to the insensitive statements from the Trinamool top brass including MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, who alleged it was a deal between the victim and her customer. The state of women was no better during the period of Communist rule but since 2011 the situation has ony gone from bad to worse. Former Chief Minister Jyoti Basu had once in his typical nonchalant style said such things keep happening when he was asked about the infamous Bantala rape case, where a health officer was gang raped and killed by criminals associated with the Communist party in the southern fringes of Kolkata. Cut to the present, West Bengal is fast becoming a State that is unsafe for women of all ages from children to senior citizens. Administrative apathy, incompetence of the criminal justice system, politicisation of rape and above all fast changing demographics have together contributed to an alarming state of affairs. In 2015, an elderly nun was gang raped in Ranaghat, Nadia by six Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrators, who had crossed the porous border into India due to connivance of the local administration and had subsequently forced their way into the church where the nun lived. The State CID proved its sheer incompetence by managing to get a conviction for just one of the accused, Nazrul Islam at the trial court. Mob lynching can never be advocated in this day and age but less than a decade ago matters had come to such a pass that in Dimapur, a Bangladeshi infiltrator, Syed Farid Khan, who was in jail on charges of raping a Naga woman, was dragged out by a mob, publicly lynched and then subsequently hanged from the town’s clock tower. Self-styled human rights groups and an assortment of Lutyens-based NGOs were predictably silent since the mob did not belong to the majority community. Sheer lack of competence of the State police and public prosecutors, appointed by the State Government, were on display recently when the Calcutta High Court acquitted Amin Ali and commuted the death sentence of Saiful Ali and Ansar Ali to imprisonment till the end of their natural life after the trial court had awarded them capital punishment for gang rape and murder in Kamduni in the year 2013.
As the recent incident of mob lynching surfaced, where a woman was beaten up by a man in full public view, it has come to the fore that 12 such incidents took place in West Bengal in a span of just a week
Nonchalant Attitude Towards Rapes
Rape in West Bengal is not just a social evil but has often been used as a political tool. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has turned a blind eye to this menace of silencing dissenters with rape pioneered in the best traditions of Communist rule. In the post poll violence, unleashed across the State in 2021; 56 activists of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were murdered, crores worth of property was vandalised and hundreds of women were raped including in the infamous rape cases of Khejuri, where a 60-year-old woman associated with the BJP was raped in front of her six-year-old grandson by criminals of the Trinamool Congress. In Hanskhali, Nadia, a 14-year-old minor, was raped by the son of a Trinamool Panchayat Pradhan and subsequently set on fire and killed in 2022. The police did not even hand over the body to the families for conducting the last rites. In Sandeshkhali, the local party boss Sheikh Shah Jahan allowed his associates to mass rape Dalit and tribal women without the police even battling an eyelid. Land grabbing, infilration and election rigging were their ultimate motives, mass rape was just a tool to better help achieve their end goal.
Women Sold into Prostitution
West Bengal almost tops the list of missing women as per the data by the National Crime Records Bureau with 24,937, 28,133 ad 31,299 being the figures for the year 2017, ‘18 and ’19 respectively. The missing women are often trafficked to the Gulf countries and sold into the flesh trade for pitiable sums of money. Despite massive under registration of FIRs, West Bengal is fourth on the list of crimes against women. Cruelty against women in the form of dowry harassment and wife beating was the highest in the country for the year 2021. NCRB data is one of the few rankings where West Bengal tops the chart with industry having left the State, agriculture having become unproductive and the youth migrating off to greener pastures. What then is the way forward for West Bengal in terms of safety and dignity of women let alone empowerment? Quite frankly; none at the moment. The State is staring at a bottomless abyss of rape, assault, trafficking and the denial of it all. Nero slept while Rome burnt, the Chief Minister though is awake but in perpetual denial mode. As Virginia Woolf once said, “Denial is a mechanism of survival”. To survive at the political sweepstakes is Banerjee’s sole competence; victims be damned.
