The stakes were always high, no matter the violence: A reflection on the Kolkata rape case

It was around 8 PM when I was walking down the street with my mother and my younger cousin, aged 12. I was a few paces ahead, jumping like a tadpole as I walked along singing a rhythm like teenagers who are still stuck in the childhood of their previous years do, waiting to be told by an elder the bounds of an age they crossed unknowingly. It was right at this moment when a bike went past me at a raging speed, the rider landing a slap on my butt. I thought it was my cousin trying to tease me but as I turned around I saw how ahead I was and it could have in no way been her. My mother came running and scolded me for walking too fast, for not listening to her, and for having let that happen to myself and that was that. I didn’t quite get what happened to me but I knew I was at fault. I think I still had to learn how to regulate my speed even though it had been 11 years since she taught me. Fast forward to five years later when I realized that I was assaulted and blamed in under a minute. Then it took some eight years to finally free myself of that blame. With the country being haunted by another rape scandal and questioning the safety of women on a structural level, I still find it difficult to relate to the movement of epic change that this might bring. In a culture of instant gratification, instant revenge, and instant redemption what actually haunts the victims of rape or sexual assault can be anything but a moment’s worth of hitchhiking.

On 9th August 2024, a resident doctor in Kolkata’s R G Kar hospital was raped and killed. The country’s newspapers and media channels picked it up, a story worth reporting as “Kolkata rape-murder case”, “Kolkata doctor rape case” or “RG Kar doctor rape and murder case”. The news shook the nation and the hospitals all around. On this day, the people of the country mourned an everyday reality – rape and death. It is a ghastly spectre to see the people who are expected to be most okay with something like death screaming in pain, not being able to come to terms with a loss like this.

But the Kolkata rape case became even more important because it did something to the entire healthcare system of the country. It drew attention to the state of doctors and their insecurities about a job that holds the life of the nation, quite literally. The rape case became a vessel for everyone to scream a little of their own pain. The changes that the doctors are demanding are important for not only them but every citizen of the country because if they do not feel safe how can we expect them to heal us?

But what if the report was done like this – ‘A 26-year-old woman raped and burnt in a hospital in Kolkata’ or ‘A woman raped in Kolkata’. The dynamics change a little and not everyone is boiling with horrors, I suppose. It remains the same horrifying, grotesque thing but something that happens every day worldwide, lacking the strength to bring a movement. It becomes a part of the reality we have all accepted to adjust to. Its existence is not threatening to the entire nation, just a few individual women. We have all come to terms with it even before we go into the details.

Incidents like the Nirbhaya, the Hathras, Aruna Shanbaug, and the RG Kar hospital come to the people of India as a shocker, a strong slap on a sunny morning out of nowhere or it seems. As if the whole country decided to wake up one day, wide and alert like in the movie “Ek Din Achanak” (1989). The film follows the aftermath of the day when the patriarch of the family just disappears never to come back. The family is left with a never-ending wait and a reflection on the lost time. Trapped in the confusion to find an answer to why this happened. Their utter disbelief at the events of the day and their inability to find that one anecdote from the past that can explain everything. Maybe we too would benefit from a meditation on how we reached here and all we had to be okay with before something so unforgettable could exist.

The extent of gruesomeness in these cases is inexplainable on so many levels that there is no point in arguing which one was of more importance. But it’s the acceptance that they came out of nowhere and these once-in-a-blue-moon acts of violence are the only ones that should shake a country that makes the whole spectacle ironic. They don’t. The extremists are never built in a day. They are encouraged by our compliance with dangers to a particular level. It’s a coming together of forgotten touches, jokes, and a woman’s sealed lips. The lack of support, incomprehensibility, and the false sense of responsibility for the respectability of the family built in the women of a nation is what results in an act like this. For that one day to come when the entire country can sit and discuss how a 135-year-old hospital failed to protect those who heal us.

We demand a monumental act of law to justify the violence at hand and in turn, protect us all. But it will not be able to unless we start shouting for everything that happens on the streets or the homes or the hospitals or the schools or the colleges or the cars or the clubs or everywhere we might exist. Maybe the newspapers need to dedicate a whole front page to how one evening a teenage girl was assaulted by a biker and her mother was unable to catch him, making sure they know that we are not letting anything pass just like that.