RGKMCH: The colossal cover-up

The rape & murder in R G Kar Medical College and Hospital is not just another murderous sex crime of West Bengal, rather a culmination of countless such atrocities upon women of the State. Cruelty of unusual magnitude against the lady doctor reminded Bharat of Nirbhaya 2012 in Delhi & the whole country landed on the streets in protest especially in the urban areas. One important reason of such uproar was that the victim was a doctor. The medical fraternity wielded their association power on streets demanding justice for the victim & their own security on duty.

Though West Bengal is an open showcase of oppression on women & sex crimes, it is not true that the urban populace of Kolkata ever bothered to put their minds into those acts of transgressions & barbarity that took place across various districts of West Bengal. However, when a lady of their own elite society, a doctor, turned a victim, the Kolkata-centric urban populace decided to move. While such public behaviour exposed the self-oriented psyche of Kolkata’s urban populace, it also effectively rattled the State’s ruler. [It was the moral responsibility of a representative of the same urban society of Kolkata to put such harsh words in black and white.

The idiosyncrasy of the R G Kar crime is not only in its unusual cruelty but also in the extraordinary efforts by the complete governmental set up of West Bengal to cover-up the matter, the colossal cover-up.

Half-naked body of the lady doctor was found in the seminar hall of the emergency building & reportedly the seminar hall didn’t have a cc camera. “First we got a call from the hospital that your daughter is sick, then the call was disconnected. After that when I called and asked what happened, they told me to come to the hospital. When we called again, the (caller) identified himself as Assistant Super and said your daughter has committed suicide. She went to duty on Thursday, we got this call on Friday at 10:53 am. When we reached there, we were not allowed to see her, we were allowed to see her at 3 o’clock.” Said the victim’s mother claiming her daughter was murdered. What was the hospital authority doing keeping her parents waiting for 3 hours is a legitimate question.

In RGKMCH, there appeared to exist 2 groups of doctors one of which resisted the police carrying the victim’s corpse for autopsy while the other wanted the autopsy to be done in RGKMCH itself. Member of Resident doctors’ association Arif Ahmed Laskar wanted autopsy in RGKMCH in presence of the judicial magistrate, people of the victim’s family & at least 5 junior doctors, but he did not want to comment on the murderous rape. This PGT of the General Medicine Department frequently talked to the media & insisted that the investigating agencies find out the culprit(s) with evidence. However, neither was the autopsy done in presence of the junior doctors nor a copy of the report was given to them. As a result, the junior doctors continued to protest in RGKMCH. ““Our demands have not been met yet. Our cease-work continues,” said Arif Ahmed Laskar, a postgraduate trainee at RG Kar.” Wrote The Telegraph on August 12. Police Commissioner Vineet Goyal promised to show the autopsy report and the CCTV footage to the junior doctors but said that the copy thereof couldn’t be shared with them.

Once the autopsy report was made public, India Today talked to ex-Chief of IMA Dr. Jayalal to discuss on it. “The autopsy must have been done in a much hurried way & it did not report injuries systematically nor systematically explained them.” Said Dr. Jayalal. He said, “such devastating injuries cannot be from a single person, has to be multiple persons.” He further added, “if it is the true report, then it must have been done by quite an immature forensic medicine expert. It is not a proper forensic report. The words they used are very vague. This is not usually the way a forensic expert would write a forensic report. And such kind of mistakes which we see in the language here, is totally unexpected for a forensic report because each word in a forensic report can change the entire scenario of the report. I very authentically say that because we see hundreds of such reports.” Said Dr. Jayalal. He termed the forensic report “superfluous” & said he “didn’t trust it”. This offers sufficient ground to apprehend that the autopsy report was botched up. Dr. Jayalal confirmed that there was no fracture of the pelvic girdle as per the autopsy report. However, a relative of the victim who accompanied her parents to the hospital on 9th morning stated that two of her legs were found “at right angle” with each other. If two of her legs rested at “right angle” without the pelvic girdle fracture remained a suspicion. More pertinent a question is perhaps why was such a “vague” & “superfluous” report generated by the forensic experts of RGKMCH? Is it so that the report gets rejected in the Court of Law & the case remains unsolved & no one gets punished due to lack of a proper autopsy report? The criminals of Kamduni gang rape case too got acquitted for a similar cause. However, if the forensic experts of RGKMCH deliberately generated a vague report in order to save the criminals, such experts need to come into the grip of law and be brought to justice.

And why did a faction of RGKMCH resident doctors’ association want the autopsy to be done in RGKMCH itself in spite of serious allegations of nepotism, extortion, super-high reach & criminal misuse of power etc. existing against Principal Sandip Ghosh? Why didn’t they anticipate a manipulated report in presence of Sandip Ghosh while the other group of students & doctors legitimately resisted hasty dragging of the victim’s body for autopsy?

As mentioned in Supreme Court by the West Bengal Govt counsel Kapil Sibal, autopsy was done between 6:10-7:00 pm on August 9. However, after the autopsy, the State police was in a hurry to cremate the body too. They didn’t want to hand the corpse over to the victim’s parents for her last rites. BJP leaders Sajal Ghosh, Kaustav Bagchi & Agnimitra Paul were seen engaging in bitter altercations with the police asking them why weren’t they handing the body over to her parents? The police was seen contacting the local councilor for necessary working instructions against which BJP leader Kaustav Bagchi involved in a bitter wrangle with the police. Victim’s mother categorically said to the media that the police & the CP did not co-operate with them at all, rather only tried to hush up the case as soon as possible. “Their attempt was to get the post-mortem done as soon as possible and remove the body.” She added.

Even the Shamshaan authority explained to the media that the police was in extreme hurry to cremate the body. There were 2 other bodies in the Shamshaan before her but the police came & requested the crematorium authority from before so that the victim’s body was cremated first. The other 2 parties didn’t mind to let the victim’s body go first. Police pro-activity for first-priority cremation of the victim’s body quite obviously was yet another act of cover-up. Police made sure to leave no scope of a second autopsy.

West Bengal BJP’s leader of the opposition Suvendu Adhikari posted in his X handle on August 23 that the victim was not only cremated in haste under police monitoring & in presence of Panihati’s TMC MLA Nirmal Ghosh, but also “Strangely even though the crematorium is located under the Barrackpore Police Commissionerate, the hasty cremation was supervised by Abhishek Gupta (IPS) DC, North Division along with two ICs of Kolkata Police. The whole ‘operation’ was being monitored by the DGP. @CBIHeadquarters school explore the involvement of these persons and their motive. It might help in uncovering the reason why the cover up was so necessary and closely monitored by top level Police and Administrative officials.” LoP perhaps indicated hasty cremation was monitored from the topmost administrative level due to instructions from the topmost political level.

On the other hand, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee was heard saying, “hear from me what happened that night. I talked to them but 100 times. Minute to minute, the Police Commissioner talked to me till 2 o’clock at night & I didn’t sleep. The police escorted the dead body till it was cremated. Starting right from checking cc tv footage, calling the judicial magistrate, keeping the videography of the whole process and even DNA test & sample collection the next day, they did everything.” West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, thus, protected her police force declaring they acted upon her instructions. Her assertions came when Police Commissioner Vineet Goyal was being openly implicated by prominent social media handles in evidence-removal & manipulation of the autopsy report.

However, solicitor general Tushar Mehta on behalf of CBI said in the Supreme Court that the victim’s parents wanted videography of the autopsy procedure out of nothing but trust-deficit on the Hospital i.e. Govt authority. Therefore, even if West Bengal CM defended Vineet Goyal, trust-deficit on her administration remained a  reality in front of the top court.

West Bengal Govt’s antecedents of crime cover-up & evidence fabrication had been raised by the solicitor general once more on Day 1 hearing in the Supreme Court mention whereof would be found later in this piece.

On August 10, Kolkata Police arrested a civic volunteer for the crime alleging his earphone was recovered from beside the dead body. The unscrupulous civic volunteer reflects apparent debauchery in his appearance & is of no extraordinary physical built while the unusually vengeful murder of the lady doctor suggested such murder could normally not be the yield of any single person’s efforts. Moreover, had the arrested & accused civic volunteer been a person of extraordinary strength he would perhaps not have continued as a Civic Volunteer in West Bengal Police but have aspired for some better paid job in some other security forces. Kolkata Police itself could have absorbed him in the regular police force in full Government Scale & not kept him as a mere casual civic staff.

So, it seemed even to laymen that Sanjoy Roy was being framed or there were other people too along with him who also engaged in the crime. But Kolkata Police, without the due length of investigation, declared Sanjoy Roy to be the criminal. This too appeared a part of the cover-up. Police tried to add various dimensions to a frail & lecherous look unscrupulous fella like Sanjoy Roy to portray him as ‘influential’. It was later found that he was close to a mere assistant sub-inspector of Police Anup Dutta & Anup Dutta was close to an inconspicuous TMC leader of North Bengal.

Dodgy activities of the West Bengal Government didn’t conclude here. On August 12, RGKMCH authority, by the order of the elusive Sandip Ghosh, then Principal of RGKMCH, broke the wall of a room just adjacent to the seminar hall apparently for the sake of building renovation. Photographs of such dismantling of the existing interior went viral in the social media. Breaking the wall of a room just adjacent to the seminar hall raised eyebrows whether it was done in order for evidence-removal.

Dismantling, however, didn’t stop only at this level. On August 14 evening, when the civil society landed on the streets of Kolkata & suburbs, a group of around 7000 people (as claimed by Kolkata Police) entered RGKMCH & vandalized the emergency building at which existed the seminar hall. This was perhaps the ultimate effort of dismantling the existing set up of the emergency building of RGKMCH. The policemen not only failed to curb the vandals but also ran within the toilets of the Hospital to hide. The nurses became vulnerable & started delivering panic statements to the media about their plight without any protection in front of a rabid mob attacking the hospital premises. As people in the social media created a commotion against such vandalism which plainly appeared to be police-facilitated efforts of evidence-removal using the minority community hooligans of Belgachia (name of the place where RGKMCH is located) bustee, police started issuing notice to whosoever attempted to be critical about the apparent police-criminal nexus in RGKMCH. Even I received a police notice in my X handle following which I deleted my post which was nothing but the screenshot of a Facebook post by a senior Endocrinologist of Kolkata, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Referring to such incident of mob attack upon RGKMCH, solicitor general implicated the West Bengal Police to have helped those who vandalized RG Kar Hospital on August 14 & said, “if we want 500 people to come into an auditorium, we need to make efforts… but here it is 7000 people who entered the facility and damaged.” SG added indicating towards the infamous Bengal Cadre IPS Rajiv Kumar, “West Bengal has an in-charge DIG who is already being considered by your lordships to have allegedly fabricated evidence in the Sarada case. Let it not be done by this person.”

Finally, after CBI takeover of the case on August 13 by the order of the Calcutta High Court, CBI reportedly informed the Supreme Court in their status report on August 22 that evidence of the case was tampered.

On the same August 22, in the Supreme Court, counsel for the Govt of West Bengal Kapil Sibal said to the solicitor general Tushar Mehta, “come on come on.. you are just muddying the water” while the SG said in reply, “we are only removing mud from the water that is all.” That is precisely what the people of West Bengal are expecting from CBI— removal of mud from the water.