Paris to Kolkata, Phogat to doctor: What Mamata and all other politicians don’t get

It was her determination to bounce back as a winner, after going down last year following a gruelling campaign against the then chief of the Wrestling Federation of India, the powerful ex-BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, for alleged sexual assault on women wrestlers. It was a traumatic battle – the country saw the images of Vinesh and other wrestlers being dragged by police from the pavements of their protest venue at Jantar Mantar. And it remembers the poignant moment when the wrestlers virtually immersed their medals in the Ganga at Haridwar.

But today, there are thousands of young women in Haryana, and beyond, who tell themselves, “I too can scale those heights”.

Vinesh represents an aspirational revolution that is taking place among the women of India, particularly among the younger women — and the attitudinal change that is coming in traditional families, with fathers and mothers encouraging their daughters to dream and achieve big.

“Our girl, pure gold,” are also words that could describe the 31-year-old doctor of Kolkata, who India mourns today. The only daughter of parents who scraped and saved to educate her to become a post-graduate doctor who, as per her colleagues, was a fine and dedicated doctor. She too aspired to be a gold medalist. But her life was cut short by the rape and murder at R G Kar Medical College and Hospital, in a seminar hall next to the Emergency, where she had been on duty.

It has brought angry young medics on the streets, particularly women, not just in Kolkata or West Bengal but all over India, and they have been backed by the IMA, leading to an all India strike.

They are fighting for safe spaces for doctors, for a law to ensure they are not attacked, for places where they can rest — and of course harshest punishment for those responsible for their Kolkata colleague’s rape-murder. For the first time in the history of India, there are more women doing MBBS today, and in a few years time, most doctors in the country may well be women.

There was a time not so long ago when it was easier to brush a rape case under the carpet. For it would stigmatise the woman victim, and bring dishonour to her family (the chastity of a woman’s body traditionally seen as being synonymous with the family honour.) Today, the family of the victim is leading the crusade for justice for her. Her parents have told the CBI, which is now investigating the crime, that they suspect it was a gangrape and that a bigger plot may be behind their daughter’s gruesome death —and the story is still unfolding.

The anguished, spontaneous and widespread response to the doctor’s rape-murder — and before her to Nirbhaya’s death who was gangraped in a moving Delhi bus in 2012 and then thrown off it — shows that India is moving on, with many more women today unwilling to take things lying down.

The Nirbhaya protests helped change the country’s political trajectory even though it was a leaderless movement. It led to the constitution of the J S Verma Committee which led to changes in the rape laws. The water hose pipes that the police had then used at Vijay Chowk in Delhi to prevent the protesters marching up Raisina Hill, made every family with daughters feel vulnerable that day. Coming as it did in the wake of scams during UPA government 2.0, and the Anna Hazare movement against corruption in high places, the Nirbhaya protests contributed to the change of guard that finally occurred in 2014.

Women are emerging as a political constituency that parties can ill afford to ignore. Going by the response she is getting, Vinesh Phogat may became a factor in the forthcoming elections in Haryana — and knowing it, the parties are trying to bask in her glory and use it to their advantage. Congress MP Deepender Hooda was at the airport to receive her , so was BJP member and former boxer Vijender Singh.

The Kolkata rape will have its own political fallout — the parties are already into the act. At one level, Vinesh or the Kolkata and Delhi protests would not have got the kind of traction they did but for competitive politics that is at play.

The BJP blames Mamata Banerjee for the culture of violence that prevails in her state, which has allowed such a horrific incident to take place — and for the shocking vandalism that took place in that very hospital just a few days later, with the state police unable to stop it or looking the other way. Without opening fire, there are dozens of ways available to the police to stop rioters.

The Opposition believes that the vandalism at the hospital was meant to scare off the protesters there as it was becoming an embarrassment for the Mamata-led Trinamool Congress government. Mamata has blamed “Ram and Bam” (BJP and Left) for what happened that night, allegedly designed to malign her government.

A safe workplace for women in India of 2024 is surely the least that any government should ensure, whether it is helmed by a man or a woman. Many around the country expect tough leaders like Mamata Banerjee to pull out all stops to ensure justice for the doctor, no matter what it takes. For Mamata understands what it takes to be a woman, having come up the hard way herself to get to the pinnacle of power, without a mentor or a political family to help her. This may well be her moment she could seize.

Even as they try and attract women votes, political parties have essentially viewed women as “labharthis”, who must be given free bus tickets, or gas cylinders in place of smoky chulhas, or be part of the Self Help Groups to earn and be hailed as “lakhpati didis”— or as recipients of the Ladli Behna Yojana which brought the BJP back to power in Madhya Pradesh, and is being operationalised in Maharashtra ahead of the polls.

Such measures are important—and women welcome them. They take them a step closer to economic independence.

But women now want to be not just beneficiaries of schemes or sops doled out to them. They want their due place under the sun – as citizens, as equals. And this is something political parties will have to factor in the policies they frame.

(Neerja Chowdhury, Contributing Editor, The Indian Express, has covered the last 11 Lok Sabha elections. She is the author of ‘How Prime Ministers Decide’)