Opinion In West Bengal, how crime is hijacked by partisan politics

A college, like a hospital, is meant to be a refuge and a place of equality. For a 24-year-old law student at Kolkata’s South Calcutta Law College, however, the campus became the space for brutal violation. Her alleged rape on June 25 — less than a year after the rape and murder of a trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College — is an indictment of a state and society that pledges safety to its women only to betray these promises time and again. It is also a story of an abdication that has become a recurring feature in West Bengal — crimes against women are hijacked by a raucous and partisan politics in a state that professes to put women at the centre.

All four accused have been arrested and a Special Investigation Team constituted. But the outrage has been co-opted by political agendas. Opposition parties have spotlighted the Trinamool Chhatra Parishad (TMC student wing) affiliation of three of the four accused —a former student and contractual employee, and two current students; the BJP has formed a “fact-finding” committee to probe institutional lapses. The TMC government has promised “exemplary punishment”, but not before tone-deaf, misogynistic remarks have been made by its own functionaries. The predictable aftermath of the crime sidesteps the foundational failures that enable such horrors. Gender-based violence in India is not an aberration, it is structural. Institutional safeguards are often more performative than functional, political expediency frequently trumps moral clarity. This is particularly acute in Bengal, where law and order is enmeshed in a shadow network of political influence and patronage.

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The horrific December 2012 Delhi gang rape had spurred a long-overdue reckoning with misogyny. That reckoning must not be allowed to fade into complacency. Banerjee’s government must reframe its commitment to gender equity in unequivocal terms. It must confront the culture of impunity head-on — rebuild institutional guardrails that have been systematically eroded, and hold both perpetrators and enablers to account, irrespective of political affiliation. When a woman cannot walk into a college or hospital without fear of violence, it is not just a failure of governance, it is a collapse of the very idea of a civilised society.