By Richa Rai / Kolkata
Today is Jamai-shoshti or son-in-law day in Bengal. That means ads for lip-smacking spreads in Bengali restaurants and articles about the price of hilsa fish – something tracked with greater anxiety in Kolkata than how the rupee is doing against the dollar. INN tells us that 500 hundred quintals of Bengal silver aka the hilsa have entered the city’s markets in the last three days. So jamais will have it good this jamai-shoshti.
Their wives, sisters and daughters — not so much. The last couple of weeks have brought the news of more horrific rapes from around the state. A 20-year-old college student in Barasat. A nine-year old in a mango orchard in Malda. A 14-year-old in Nadia while returning from school in the rain. A 24-year-old at her home in New Town.
Meanwhile a group of women protesting the rise in crimes against women outside Mamata Banerjee’s home found themselves in police lockup. “I had no idea that participating in a peaceful rally, where the only thing people is sing protest songs, could land me in a police lock-up,” said Sarmistha Dutta Gupta, one of the women in the group. The city police commissioner, Surajit Kar Purkayastha, defended the cops saying that when the police refused to allow the women to meet the chief minister, “the activists suddenly pulled out placards and posters and started demonstrating… We had no option but to arrest 13 women activists under 154 CrPC.”
Isn’t that what activists are supposed to do? Pull out placards and posters? The chief minister might have Z-plus security. There might be threats to her life. That does not mean the people have no right to demand an audience with her. Or protest outside her house. Even the President of the United States gets heckled. It’s not like the women were trying to storm the gates. Just because arrests have been made quickly in the Barasat case does not mean there is no problem in the state.
As Mallika Dutt, founder and president of the human rights group Breakthrough tweeted:
#whatmakesmemad is when govts arrest peaceful protestors instead of rapists, exploiters, murderers – you get my drift.
The government is on the backfoot these days because the state is getting a bad rap on women’s safety. And now there are actual numbers to prove it. The NCRB figures has Bengal topping the list in crimes against women. The NCRB reported 30,942 crimes against women in 2012 as against 29,133 the year before.
The government’s response has been to parse the numbers. The Director General of Police complained at a press conference that the NCRB refused to publish a disclaimer that “heinous crimes” were down. He said it was domestic abuse cases that were skewing the numbers and giving the state a black eye.
First of all, an increase in domestic abuse is hardly something to brag about in a press conference. Even worse, the chairperson of the state’s Women Commission, Sunanda Mukherjee tried to make some lemonade out of these lemons. She said the statistics reflected a positive side because the uptick show “women are coming out in greater numbers to register complaints of atrocities committed against them.” Apparently Mamata Banerjee’s dismissal of rape cases as conspiracies to defame her or bringing up the politicial affiliations of a rape victim’s long-dead husband are imbuing droves of women with the confidence to speak up.
Mamata’s instinctive reaction to stories like these is to play Lady Bountiful and offer compensation and jobs. In the latest Barasat case, the family has angrily spurned the offers asking for justice not jobs. “We don’t want any job or compensation from the state . We will be happy if all the accused are sentenced to death,” the young woman’s mother told the media. But even a fast-track court and justice doesn’t let the government off the hook. In 2011, a young man died in Barasat while trying to protect his sister from drunk hooligans trying to molest her. Since then there have been at least 45 cases of crimes against women a lawyer told INN.
Two years later the police are still talking about plans to set up a police station in the area. The hooch dens are still there. Police patrols on bicycles are not. Badal Ghosh, a villager in the area, said even when culprits are booked they quickly get bail.”You may call us cowards but who will dare fight this organized gang that enjoys the blessings of politicians and, as the result , the police ?” he told the media.
It is unfair to pin the blame for crimes against women on Mamata Banerjee. She cannot prevent a nine-year-old from being raped in a mango orchard while her parents are working. But her dogged defiance and selective silence is leading to the impression that the “zero tolerance” her party secretary Mukul Roy keeps talking about extends more to the women protesting in front of her house than to the men actually committing the crimes against women.
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