Anti-Rape Bill Is Mamata’s Bid To Pull Wool Over People’s Eyes

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee enacted a farce on Tuesday, and made others join her. The Opposition per force had to go along. The passage of the Aparajita Woman and Child (West Bengal Laws and Amendment) Bill, 2004, in the Assembly seeks to punish those convicted of rape and gang-rape with death penalty in case of the death of the victim or in case of her being incapacitated. This was clearly a brazen attempt to counter widespread criticism of the State Government for its gross mishandling of the case of rape and murder of a young doctor in Kolkata’s premier hospital earlier last month. After the authorities had initially called the death a suicide, after they had transferred the principal of the hospital concerned to a better post, after a mob of 7,000-odd ruling party thugs had torn down the pandal where the junior doctors were holding a protest and ransacked the hospital premises, her death-to-rapists slogan sounds hollow. Nobody is fooled by this bravado. Given that the fate of the Bill is predictable, and she knows it as well as anyone else, her protestations of giving death to rapists will fail to convince anyone. It is a sham, a make-believe bid to pull wool over the peoples’ eyes. As it is well known, the Governor cannot, will not, give assent to the hypocritical Bill. He will dutifully send it to the President. And there it will stay. And where probably Mamata wanted it to stay, smugly believing that she had done her bit to defend the honour of women in her state.

As was revealed in the run-up to the Assembly elections, women in West Bengal, especially in rural areas, feel far from safe. In the Sandeshkhali case, the main suspect who allegedly exploited women’s dignity at will was none other than a key functionary of the Trianmool Congress. After much public hue and cry, the police were obliged to take him into custody. Nothing would have come out of the case had the judiciary not intervened and directed the CBI to investigate. Likewise, the initial reaction of the hospital to the gruesome rape and murder of the 31-year-old junior doctor was to dub it as a case of suicide; it was not to proceed against the principal-in-charge, to allow the main accused, a civic volunteer at that, to happily reside in the police barracks for long hours after the horrific crime. Why, days after the case was entrusted to the CBI, the premier investigating agency was led to complain to the Supreme Court. The agency said the state government was not cooperating, denying the minimum facilities required for the central paramilitary forces entrusted to secure against further acts of crime and lawlessness at the hospital.

The point to consider is that it is happening in a state which is led by a woman. Not only is she called a Didi, Mamata has gone out of her way to send a record number of women to Parliament. In the Lok Sabha alone Trincamool Congress boasts of a record 11 women members. The party has a woman member in the Rajya Sabha too. Led by Mamata herself, the vocal cohort of women TMC MPs is usually quick to tear into the BJP governments at the mention of lawlessness and safety of women in those states. Yet, all of them seem to have lost their voice in the rape and murder of the Kolkata doctor. This too revealed how sham is the concern for justice for the perpetrators of crimes against women.

Meanwhile, the so-called death-for-rapists Bill passed in the West Bengal Assembly is most likely set to meet the fate of such-like previously passed Bills in at least two other states. These too have not yet met the approval of the President. For, the enhancement of punishment, or, for that matter, its reduction, for any crime, and not just rape, should not depend on the political compulsions of the parties in power. Careful research into the crime patterns and investigations into those heinous acts, and the end effect of convictions, whether these had a deterrent effect or not, ought to inform the quantum of punishment to be prescribed even in the most barbaric crimes. In the heat of the moment when a government is under public pressure to shake off the charge of its complicity in misdirecting the investigation into the gruesome rape and murder of the young Kolkata hospital intern, the Bill so passed will naturally lack comprehensive inputs which should be available before enactment of such laws. If the real objective of the Mamata Banerjee government in passing the above law was to detract from its own ham-handedness in the way it handled the investigations, the passage of the Bill would fail miserably. People are not fools. Come to think of it, the CBI has now unearthed the involvement of the said principal in a well-run corruption racket. The Bill cannot hide the incompetence and corruption of the state government.