BJP’s fake breast-beating over crime against women | Faraz Ahmad

Going through the morning papers this Friday [Sept 27, 2024] a sharp contrast struck me. Actually, it has been bothering me for a while.

The first image was of a full-size centre page photo of the women family members of the police officials of Bharatpur ”model” police station in Odisha’s capital Bhubaneshwar sitting protesting against the suspension of their relatives after the horrific treatment of an Army officer’s fiance, a lawyer herself and the daughter of a retired Army Brigadier on the night of September 24, wherein the poor complainant was brutally beaten and even molested by male police officer in collusion with policewomen on duty. As has become customary of the Police in BJP-ruled states a case was registered against the victim, she was produced in court on the charge of assaulting police personnel on duty and after hospitalisation granted bail.

Forcibly stripping a complainant, male or female even in a gender-neutral surrounding itself is a serious offence under the law and therefore is not just unpardonable but should ordinarily invite legal action. Throwing an Army officer in the lock-up is forbidden under the Army Act and to prevent him from coming to his fiancee’s aid compounds the crime of those police officials, men and women both. In a state upholding the rule of law, the entire batch of officials present in that police station during the commitment of custodial crime ought to have been arrested and sent to jail, not merely suspended. What would have been the BJP and its embedded media reaction were such a crime taken place in West Bengal?

This couple rushed to the police station, as the news story goes and as the concerned woman said in her press conference before the media outside the Bhubaneshwar AIIMS where she was sent to determine her injuries, that she and her Army officer fiancé were chased and manhandled by a group of men, numbering 12 in three cars. It is not clear but it seems since they had gone to a pub after closing her restaurant, the young men must have been upset with a young woman accompanying a young man, about whom these fellows knew and cared to know little, being seen at a bar so late at night. Following the uproar over this, some of the men were caught and almost immediately bailed out. How come? The names of those men are still being kept a secret convincing one that they were no ordinary street-level criminals but some who enjoyed state protection and in this case even judicial indulgence.

It seems from all this that the men who harassed and assaulted the young couple that night must have been from the vigilante brigade and are now a law unto themselves, prowling around at night in a BJP government in the state led by a chief minister whose sole claim to fame is that years ago he sat on a dharna in defence of Dara Singh who burnt alive Graham Staines and his two little children in their station wagon. The reluctance, rather refusal, of the police to lodge a complaint of the harassed woman, and catch the culprits might be because of their knowledge who these men were and what political clout they enjoyed in the first BJP government in Odisha. The blasé act of the family members of offending police officials to sit on a dharna after their grave offence is akin to how women in Manipur egged on men who stripped and publicly molested two Kuki women again in a BJP-ruled state. Bharatpur is touted as a model police station with a fancy building but no CCTV cameras to prevent recording what transpires at this police station. Does it not warrant asking whether the absence of CCTV cameras was a deliberate well thought out act to obliterate any evidence of the crime they commit inside a “model” police station.

Now compare this with a non-BJP state like Bengal. There is no doubt that rape and murder of a young doctor in the dead of night at the R.G. Kar Hospital in Kolkatta on August 9 was a heinous crime and the man who committed it deserves the most severe punishment even perhaps a death sentence for that crime. But the BJP led agitation of junior doctors throughout the country seemed as if this country has not seen a similar crime ever before? Within days the Supreme Court took suo moto cognizance of the offence and set up a high-powered committee to go into the crime.

Rubbishing aside the Bengal police investigations and even the post-mortem report, the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) described once more by a bench of The Supreme Court of India as a caged parrot, got into the act which has failed to show any further progress in the rape and murder case than what the Bengal Police determined and caught the accused within hours. Simultaneously another caged parrot the Enforcement Directorate (ED) investigating not the rape and murder of the doctor but everything else concerning the hospital mainly how the former head of the hospital Sandeep Ghosh ran the administration got into the act probing possible financial irregularities that might have been committed and anything and everything concerning the running of that hospital but the murder of the hapless victim. The Supreme Court committee is overseeing and monitoring all this. No defence of the former head of the hospital but how is this related to the rape and murder of the victim, neither the apex court nor anyone else is asking?

It becomes all the more contentious when we see the off-hand manner in which the crime committed in Odisha is dealt with. Even the Leader of the Opposition in the Odisha assembly made just one cursory statement and was done with it. No agitations, no street demonstrations, nothing. Were this young woman not accompanied by her fiancé a serving Army officer and were she not the daughter of a retired Army brigadier, perhaps even this much notice and action may not have come about.