A rigged, scientific rape

I was recently re-reading Edward Behr’s hilarious 1969 book on journalism, Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? It was once billed as the funniest book ever written on the profession since Evelyn Waugh’s 1930s classic, Scoop. The reason I mention this is that one rape — or the politics of it — has recently been in the news in Calcutta.

When Bengal’s very own Mamata Banerjee stole the headlines with the story of a rape the woman was a candidate of her Trinamool Congress party for the panchayat elections the Marxists cried foul, complaining it was all made up to boost her electoral chances. Among the people who did not believe the story of Champala Sardar, the alleged rape victim, was her aunt who fought and won the polls against her. The last straw came in the form of the final report of the Central Forensic Laboratory, which seemed to have nailed Mamata’s lie. And now we have the Left politicians jumping at the lie. Six Left women leaders including MP Gita Mukherjee went on adeputation to West Bengal Governor A.R. Kidwai, demanding action against Mamata for cooking up the rape story. While the politicians play their games, the hapless woman has gone into hiding. When she was admitted to a nursing home in Calcutta, it was her husband who "disappeared", apparently to escape the Marxists’ "wrath". Now, Champala has done the vanishing trick. The Left women leaders told the governor that they feared that she might have been killed to prevent her from spilling the beans. Her husband, who now lives in a neighbour’s house in their village, maintains that she has moved to an undisclosed place to "save herself from the CPI(M)". The story is getting curiouser and curiouser, but Mamata always made it look curious enough. When she was first asked for concrete evidence of the rape she quipped, rather cynically, "It’s scientific rape, like the CPI(M)’s scientific rigging. It’s difficult to prove."

But the Marxists can hardly claim a cleaner conscience than Mamata’s . As a cub reporter in1977, I had seen them trying to make political capital from a rape story. In the Assembly elections that year, CPI(M) meetings would often put on show a woman called Ashima Poddar, who was actually brutalised in police custody. It was a real story, but the point is that the Marxists showed no compunction in exploiting it for political advantage. Those elections brought the Left Front to power for the first time and they reign at Writers’ Buildings till date. How little has changed in rape news and the politics of rape since Behr’s time!

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The biscuit crumbles: Another woman has made news of a different kind of late. Dolly Basu, wife of Chief Minister Jyoti Basu’s son Chandan, is known to be a nice lady who has many friends and admirers outside the political circle. Local residents of south Calcutta’s Triangular Park area have appreciated her simple, unaffected manners ever since she opened a boutique there about seven years ago. But Dolly is fallen on hard times. She and Chandan have filed a divorce suit,apparently by mutual consent. And Jyoti Basu obviously is an unhappy man. He has told his party that he wants to call it a day because of his failing health. The divorce suit makes it a sad autumn for the patriarch.

Bengali hooligans: Calcutta can teach a thing or two to the goons who daily make World Cup soccer more than a ball game. Recently, Amal Datta, the 67-year-old coach of the city’s soccer giant, Mohun Bagan Club, had a taste of soccer violence outside the Salt Lake Stadium. The club fans literally gave him a bloody nose. Datta is now in France, watching the matches from the quarter-final stage. He may have a chance to compare Calcutta soccer’s goon-dom with that on French shores.