Dial 033 For Creepy Crawlers

Shame In Numbers

West Bengal accounts for 12.67 per cent of cases of crimes against women registered across India. In 2012, under Mamata’s watch, the state showed a jump of 1,800 cases over the previous year.

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Causes Behind The Spurt

• Callous comments: Allegations of rape dismissed as a “concocted story”, or a “small incident”, as Mamata Banerjee had done
• Police demoralisation: Punitive action against honest officers, as the transfer of detective department’s Damayanti Sen showed
• Poor facilities: There is a lack of adequate resources in tune with the increase in number of police stations to deal with growing cases

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It’s 9 pm, a typical Calcutta evening. At a street corner in Jodhpur Park, as safe and bhadralok a neighbourhood as you want to get in this city, a group of young males has gathered, age ranging from the late teens to the early 30s. A motorbike is parked along the pavement. Another one, carrying three young men, zooms in, circles around the block, and disappears into the darkness. In the hazy light of the electric streetlamp, one sees the bike slow down as it passes a pedestrian—a woman—halt for a few seconds and speed off when she hastily walks away. Barely a kilometre from the spot, where the bylane meets the main road, a couple of policemen are on vigil. But the bikers are not intercepted.

“We come out at night and take turns riding through the streets,” a youth from the group informs us. He works in a travel agency and speaks fluent English. None of the men, in fact, are unemployed. Nor uneducated. Nor disgruntled. “It’s just our pastime,” he explains. Some men in the group deny that they drink or do “anything wrong”. But others are cockier, more defiant. “Nothing will happen to us,” says one. “So why lie?” He admits that their nocturnal activities include “drinking, watching porn and chasing girls”.

It was in this genteel neighbourhood  that a French woman who was interning with Alliance Francaise and her male colleague were chased through the streets while walking back to her apartment late at night last month. The pursuing bikers threatened her with rape, shouting, “I want to f*** her.” She managed to escape by first hiding in a construction site and then scaling the locked iron gates of a residential compound (where people came to her help) while her friend tried to divert the attackers’ attention by running in a different direction.

The incident, widely reported, shook and swaddled Calcutta in a sense of shame, and not just because it was an attack on a foreigner. Taking place in  what would hitherto have counted as a rather unlikely venue by itself, and also within walking distance of two big police stations, Jadavpur and Lake, the incident reinforced the growing fear among soul-searching Calcuttans that the city, which had always had a positive reputation of being one of India’s few “women-friendly” places, could no longer answer to that epithet.

“I used to walk freely around these lanes late at night and nothing ever happened,” says Joyeeta Ganguly, a 35-year-old journalist who has lived in Jodhpur Park for over two decades. “But lately I’ve been scared to come back home after dark.” Out of ten women Outlook spoke to, only one disagreed that “things are worse”.

“Crimes against women are certainly not new,” the woman who differed said. “Let’s not forget incidents like the police officer who was bludgeoned to death by his own colleagues on New Year’s eve some years ago when he protested their lewd comments about a woman.” But she agreed on the “atmosphere of fear” that has gripped Calcutta. Also a Jodhpur Park resident, she says that while earlier she regularly went out with her women friends to nightclubs, now she makes it a point to return early. The statistics seem to corroborate these women’s fears. In fact, Bengal has topped the list of states with the most number of crimes registered against women (see box).

Mamata arrives in Kamduni. (Photograph by PTI)

The attack on the French nationals also put the spotlight on a new menace: gangs of goons on motorbikes who roam the city’s streets at night, preying on women. Less than two weeks after Jodhpur Park, another woman—a bank manager walking back home at night—was accosted by two bikers in nearby Golf Green.

Explaining this alarming new trend in Calcutta’s crime scene, police off­icers only say that this is symptomatic of a larger lawlessness. Something which West Bengal governor M.K. Narayanan had referred to earlier this year saying that the state was in the grip of a “kind of goondaism”.

“Crime is born and thrives in a lawless society,” former Calcutta commissioner of police Prasun Mukherjee told Outlook. “That is what is happening in Calcutta today. There is a sense in those who commit crimes that no action will be taken against them. So no one is afraid of the police. The police have been rendered toothless right under the noses of criminals.” As an example, Mukherjee points to the ‘transfer’ of then joint commissioner (crime), Damayanti Sen, when she cracked the Park Street rape case. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had earlier dismissed the incident in which a woman was raped in a moving car after coming out of a nightclub as a “concocted story”, even insinuating that the victim was a call-girl. While Sen cracked the case and her findings contradicted the CM’s statement (issued even before the investigation star­ted), many in the opposition alleged some of the accused—including the abs­conding main accu­sed—have Trinamool con­n­ec­tions and that explained Mamata’s stand. In another high-profile ins­­­tance, police commissioner R.K. Pachn­a­nda was replaced after he ini­tiated a probe against Munna, a city TMC leader. He allegedly led the gang one of whose members shot dead sub-inspector Tapas Chow­dhury in broad daylight in Calcutta’s Garden Reach.

“The Calcutta police force is completely demoralised. They would rather not act for fear of repercussions,” Mukherjee says. “Their whole mindset now is ‘Why bother? We may as well just sit idle. That way at least we will continue to get our salaries. It’s better than to stick our necks out.’ So, instead of the criminals, it’s the police who are afraid.” Admitting candidly and a tad bitterly to the open secret that “political interference is a reality that plagues the police”, Mukherjee, who was himself transferred after the Riz­wanur Rehman case during the Left regime, told Outlook: “It existed after the Left regime too. But not on this scale. The direct threat to top police officers for performing their duty and investigating serious crime was unheard of.”

Rinku Das with a photo of her brother Rajib, who died trying to protect her from molesters in 2011 in Barasat. (Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee)

Indeed, the most recent case of political interference—and police demoralisation—to have shocked Calcutta was the incomplete chargesheet the cid submitted in the Barasat court on the Kamduni rape and murder case (see Sisterly Indifference, Outlook, Jul 1). It named only one accused in the gang­rape and murder of a college girl, prompting the incredulous judge to comment that it was almost unbelievably inadequate. While police officers have claimed that lapses in investigation—resulting in faulty chargesheets—occur when there is pressure to deliver on time (Mamata, in her trademark spur-of-the-moment manner, had ann­ounced that justice would be done in less than 15 days and the culprits hanged), the opposition alleged that one of the main accused, whose name did not figure in the original chargesheet, was a local TMC thug.

According to senior police officials, lack of resources is another problem. In the last two years of TMC rule, the number of police stations in Calcutta has shot up from around 40 to 67, but many of these are not equipped with sufficient resources such as personnel, vehicles, and licensed firearms. In fact, according to former commissioner Mukherjee, the increase has actually worked to the detriment of the city’s law and order situation. “Earlier, each police station would be able to deploy a certain number of personnel to patrol sensitive stretches of the city. Now, some stations no longer have so many policemen to deploy.” Pol­ice officers point out further that the sit­uation is worse across the rest of Bengal, where distance bet­w­een police stations is greater.

Of all the reasons attributed to the rise in crimes against women in Calcutta, the argument that callous comments from the state’s rulers lie at the root of the problem appears to be one of the oft-repeated. On behalf of Calcutta’s civil society, poet Sankha Ghosh had issued a statement that strongly criticised the CM’s comments that described the Kamduni gangrape and murder as “a small incident”. As Suzette Jordan, the Park Street rape survivor, who was at the receiving end of cruel official indifference, said, “Making light of serious criminal offences only emboldens others to commit crime.” The sudden and continuing spurt in crimes against women in the city seems to bear out in letter this grave concern.

The attack on the French woman that shocked and shamed Calcutta so also drew attention to the perception of the city in the eyes of foreigners. “In our country, newspapers are full of reports of rapes and molestations taking place in India. So our impression of Indian men is that we are not safe with them,” said 19-year-old Julia Hagele, a tourist from Germany. Julia and her friend Anna Grimminger, also from Germany, have been living in Calcutta for the past one year and had heard from friends that it was “relatively safe”. In Julia’s travels in Delhi, Agra and now Calcutta, she recalls how she has been molested numerous times. “I have been pawed all over and on several occasions I have had to run from men harassing me.”

Anna, who has been working in Calcutta with an NGO that requires her to travel to interior villages across Bengal, has learnt it the hard way. “Six months into my stay in Calcutta I went and bought a pepper spray in case things got really bad,” she said. Stepping out with her friend from their hotel room on Sudder Street, she sticks it into her purse. As a motorbike passes her, she whips it out. “It’s become a reflex now,” she says  apologetically. A reflexive act that reflects Calcutta’s lost reputation.