Bengal: Mamata Banerjee, who wrote the book on protests, faces her biggest test

Kolkata:West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee may have been hoping for a breather after the state assembly unanimously passed the anti-rape ‘Aparajita Bill’ on Tuesday. The Bill was hurriedly cobbled together by the Bengal government amid strident protests in the state over the brutal rape and murder of a junior doctor in Kolkata on 9 August.

Among other things, the legislation seeks the death sentence for persons convicted of rape if their actions result in the victim’s death or leave the victim in a vegetative state. It will have to be signed by the governor and the president to become law.

Banerjee was counting on swift passage of the Bill to take some of the oxygen out of the protests that have roiled the state since the rape-murder at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital. However, the protesters appear to be in no mood to relent. Hours after the Bill’s passage, a 15-km-long human chain across Kolkata’s Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, an important thoroughfare, was alive with song, slogans, and cries for justice. Thousands of people got off work early to join the human chain and lend their voices to the protest.

A day later, junior doctors across the state continued their stir. Their weeks-long strike has crippled health services at state-run medical facilities, which the poor, in particular, depend on.

For Banerjee, who is no stranger to this turf, having led many such protests herself against Bengal’s Left Front government in the years before she became chief minister, this is a moment of reckoning. It is by far the toughest challenge she has faced over a long political career.

At the receiving end

Banerjee has been a politician for over 40 years. As the leader of the opposition for two-thirds of that time, she had faced it all wearing her trademark chappals—police batons, insults, forcible eviction from the state headquarters by the Left regime, attacks by Left front hoodlums, and isolation as the lone representative of her party in parliament.

As chief minister, she has tangled with the union government, central investigative agencies and the governors appointed by the centre on numerous occasions. And she has had ugly faceoffs with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the electoral battlefield.

But those were all battles in the political arena. Never before in her 13-year stint as chief minister has she faced sustained pressure from the public on such a scale. Every other day Kolkata and its hinterlands and even some towns have witnessed marches, processions, and candlelight vigils. Sometimes there are as many as 22-23 protest rallies on a single day in the city. Many of them call for Banerjee’s resignation—she is in charge of both the home and health ministries in the state.

It is all the more galling for the chief minister that all this has come to pass barely three months after the people gave her a thumping victory in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, sending 29 MPs from her Trinamool Congress party to parliament.

Spontaneous combustion

Banerjee, at one point, tried to draw parallels between the protests against her government and those in Bangladesh, which forced that country’s leader, Sheikh Hasina, to flee. “CPI(M) and BJP are indulging in cheap politics. They think they can do a Bangladesh here,” she said at a programme on the eve of Independence Day.

But while political parties may have been trying to reap some gains from the tragedy, the protests have largely been apolitical in nature on the surface. “This is a spontaneous movement. Why do you think people are joining us in hundreds everyday, helping us with food, water bottles and mental strength? It is because they realise no one is safe in this state,” said Dr Subhendu Mallick, a senior resident doctor at R.G. Kar’s state medicine department. “If a junior doctor can get raped at her second home, no girl or woman is safe here. The state cannot duck its responsibility of giving protection.”

Kolkata is no stranger to rallies and processions by the people. In the past, the city had witnessed them when the Left Front government awarded land to the Tata Group in Singur for its Nano car project. Again, in 2007, there were protests after the police firing in Nandigram over land acquisition for a chemical project. The Trinamool Congress was at the forefront of both agitations. When the party toppled the Left and took over the reins of power, it had to face protests over a series of rape cases in 2012, 2013 and 2022.

But political analysts and social scientists see a marked change in the way people have reacted to the latest incident. The unusual thing this time, they say, is that the people have consciously left behind their political preferences and identities. Realizing that politicians would, as usual, divide rather than unite people, they have been firmly kept out.

From the beginning, the junior doctors on strike inside the R.G. Kar compound and throughout the state have consciously barred political banners, festoons or party slogans. The same is true of protests by the public, which has tried to prevent the people’s movement from turning into a political slugfest. A couple of times when political banners popped up in the sea of humanity, they were pulled down.

When the BJP, the principal opposition, sensed a big political opportunity and threw its weight behind a 12-hour bandh called by student group Chhatra Samaj on 28 August, the doctors made it a point to take out separate marches demanding the resignation of police commissioner Vineet Goyal, the principal, and the perpetrators of the crime. The Chhatra Samaj is backed by rightwing outfit Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the BJP’s student wing.

“It was a conscious decision to let the people at large decry the incident and denounce the authorities responsible, rather than politicians doing so,” said Dr Aniket Mahato, a resident doctor. “Bringing in political parties and their different agendas would have been damaging to the single purpose of delivering justice.”

Others believe the anger goes beyond the latest incident. According to Prasanta Ray, social scientist and professor emeritus at Presidency University, “The flareup is the outcome of a deep seated disillusionment and dissatisfaction over many areas of governance.” At least one out of every two people shouting for justice, he believes, has a legitimate reason to do so. “She/he may have lost a school teacher’s job to an ineligible candidate for refusing to bribe the system. Or he could be one of those facing the brunt for being on the wrong side of the party or system. The ground was ready, it just needed a cause,” said Ray. The tragedy in R.G. Kar was the spark that lit the powder keg.

Cracks within

For the first time, the Trinamool Congress, which has remained united in the face of many challenges and overtures, appears to be a divided house. Rajya Sabha member of parliament (MP) Sukhendu Shekhar Ray, who demanded the custodial interrogation of Sandip Ghosh, the principal of the R.G. Kar Medical College, and the police commissioner, got a summons from the Kolkata Police.

Another former MP, Santanu Sen, who tried to flag the irregularities under the patronage of the principal and the north Bengal lobby, was stripped of his role as the party’s spokesperson. Party insiders say serious differences have cropped up between the top bosses—Banerjee and her nephew Abhisek—over the handling of the situation and the attempt to protect those allegedly at fault.

Trinamool MP Jawhar Sircar, too, accepted that the protests were genuine. “There’s an undeniable public outrage against the heinous crime and the initial handling by the college authorities and the police,” he said. “The question now is whether this will lead to lasting solutions, and better systems of accountability or wether it will be hijacked by a political party. After all, the record of unpunished rapes and murders in a state ruled by that party is far worse than Bengal’s record.”

Missteps aplenty

Meanwhile, nearly a month since the junior doctor’s rape and murder at her alma mater, investigators are yet to identify the culprits. Other than arresting a civic volunteer on the basis of CCTV footage, the state and central investigating agencies haven’t made much headway in bringing the culprits to book. In fact, they are yet to ascertain whether it was a case of rape or gang rape. Principal Ghosh, his bodyguard and two vendors have been arrested to face charges of financial irregularities dating back to 2021.

Aside from the law and order aspect, the people, it appears, hold Banerjee squarely responsible for trying to shield those close to her party, especially Ghosh, from the fallout of the incident. According to various medical associations, the former principal wielded a lot of clout through his connections in the top echelons of the Trinamool Congress.

Banerjee’s government appointed Ghosh as the principal of another premier institution a few hours after he verbally expressed his desire to resign from medical service, owning moral responsibility for the incident at R.G. Kar. As news spread that Ghosh would be joining as principal of Calcutta National Medical College, students broke out in revolt. The state government had to beat a retreat when the High Court censured Ghosh and asked him to go on leave. He was arrested by the CBI on 2 September and suspended by the government only thereafter, on 3 September.

Last year, the hospital’s deputy superintendent, Akhtar Ali, had lodged complaints with the vigilance commission, anti-corruption bureau and the health department against Ghosh. He cited the leasing of government assets without necessary approvals, nepotism in selection of vendors (and claiming 20% commission from them), and sale of biomedical waste to two Bangladeshi nationals, among other violations. The whistleblower was transferred the very day he submitted a 1,000-page report as the member of a committee formed to investigate the irregularities.

Though Ghosh was transferred from R.G. Kar twice over his alleged involvement in misappropriation of funds and corruption, he was reappointed quickly. On one occasion, a senior doctor at the hospital told Mint, Ghosh’s bouncers took control of his office room and prevented the newly appointed principal, Manas Banerjee, from occupying it. Banerjee was appointed principal after Ghosh’s exit.

It was not unusual for the principal to strut around with such bouncers and namedrop the chief minister to flaunt his power, say insiders. “It is an open secret. Ask anybody at R.G. Kar, and they’ll tell you how Ghosh threw his weight around by claiming proximity to the chief minister. Students were scared of antagonising him because they felt their career would go for a toss,” said a resident doctor, seeking anonymity.

One of Ghosh’s lawyers Mint spoke to said that the allegations made above were untrue.

Aside from protecting Ghosh, the state government has made other missteps. An order transferring 42 doctors, billed as the biggest reshuffle in the health department, but allegedly to punish voices of dissent, drew the ire of the medical community. The government was forced to backtrack within 24 hours following protests in a few hospitals over the transfers.

Time for introspection

While calls for Banerjee to resign as chief minister have been growing louder by the day, Kingshuk Chatterjee, associate professor of history at Calcutta University, said it is unlikely the government will fall over this issue. “If that happens, it would be a case of one straw breaking the camel’s back,” he said, adding that it would defeat the people’s mandate to an elected government.

“There are instances though, in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, where public outrage has pulled down chief ministers. When the party in power creates a repressive atmosphere by using state machinery, the principal political opponent is likely to gain some ground piggybacking on popular disenchantment,” he added. “The habit of politicizing comes naturally to political parties and people because it yields quick results.”

Being a leader who has risen to power through mass movements against land acquisitions in Singur and Nandigram, as well as political excesses and bloodbaths in Netai and Sainbari, Banerjee has been in the thick of the action in numerous protests. Now, with the chappal on the other foot, she will have to go back to her roots to understand the widespread anger against her administration. Failure to do so will cost her dearly.