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The brutal rape and murder of a 2nd year PG medical student at RG Kar Medical College, Kolkata on 9 August has sparked nationwide Reclaim the Night protests. After finishing her night shift in the ward, the medico did not have any resting place apart from a Seminar Room in the hospital. This was when she was brutally raped and killed. The college Principal Sandip Ghosh, known to be close to the ruling Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, initially termed the death a ‘suicide’ by a mentally unstable person. After more facts emerged and the medical fraternity raised questions, he started blaming the victim, saying that there is no reason for a woman to be alone in the Seminar Room late at night. Such was the impunity that despite city-wide doctor’ strikes, he was merely transferred to head another medical college. It was medical students who locked out the office and did not let Ghosh take charge which forced him to go on paid leave. It has been street battles fought by doctors and students against Trinamool gunda-ism which won these victories, not any political rhetoric from ruling class parties.
PM Modi spoke about the TMC government’s failure in this Independence Day’s address to the nation. What he missed was that his own government has not just turned a blind eye to crimes against women, with an 18% increase recorded between 2014 to 2022, but also garlanded and protected sexual assaulters. From killing the complainant’s family in Unnao (2017), marching to free the rapists in Kathua (2018), burning the victim’s body in the middle of the night in Hathras (2020), garlanding the released rapists of Bilkis Bano and giving parole to jailed rapist Gurmeet Ram Rahim to campaign for the Haryana elections (2022) or even campaigning for ex-JDS MP Prajwal Revanna (2024), PM Modi stands accused of the same crimes he is accusing WB CM Mamata Bannerjee of. Within days of the RG Kar incident, a 14-year old Dalit girl was raped and stabbed to death in BJP-JDU ruled Bihar.
What has been remarkable about the RG Kar incident has been the vibrant people’s mass struggle for justice. From demanding safety of doctors to better protections for women at the workplace and on campus, Reclaim the Night has breathed fresh air into the Indian women’s movement. 200+ marches were held in towns and districts of West Bengal on the eve of Independence Day which has spread like wildfire across the country. While Congress-ruled Karnataka clamped down on protestors and threatened FIRs on COLLECTIVE activists, Dalit working class women from Mumbai’s Jai Bhim Nagar faced heckling from residents of a private housing complex when they joined the protests. They have asked how women could be safe when the BJP-ruled Maharashtra government was bulldozing their homes on the behest of Hiranandani builders and forcing them on the street. In Delhi, domestic workers joining the night vigils have raised how they have been forced to withdraw complaints by the police while their employer’s threaten to blacklist them from working in housing complexes when they speak of sexual harassment at the workplace. This shows that Manuvadi notions of family honour being linked to women’s bodies have been strengthened further by growing privatization. With the lack of public housing, maternity homes, creches and nurseries, women bear the burden of housework and paid labour. However, growing contractualisation of work has meant that they cannot speak up when facing injustice because of the constant threat of being left unemployed.
It was a powerful women’s movement in the 1970s and 80s which created democratic institutions against workplace sexual harassment. When Mathura, an orphan Adivasi child in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli was raped inside a police station in 1972, even the Supreme Court refused to take action saying that she was ‘habituated to sexual intercourse’. It was a powerdul women’s movement which forced custodial rape to be made a punishable offence and shifted the ‘burden of proof’ from the victim to the accused in legal trials of sexual harassment. In Kilvenmani (Tamil Nadu), Karamchendu (Andhra Pradesh) and Bathani Tola (Bihar), rape was used as a punishment by upper caste landlords against Dalit-Adivasi farm workers demanding fair wages and ownership of land. Even high courts repeatedly gave impunity to upper castes militias saying that they could not have touched so-called ‘untouchable’ Dalit women. Powerful people’s struggles linked the question of land with the struggle for Dalit-Adivasi women’s dignity. From Manipur to Kashmir and Bastar rape has been used to silence dissenting voices. In cases of communal violence ever since Partition, rape is used to assert a community’s dominance over another. In 1992 a government social worker Bhanwari Devi was gangraped in Rajasthan when she tried to stop a child marriage. It was her continuous struggle for justice, supported by broad-based womens’ groups, which led to the creation of the Vishakha guidelines against sexual harassment at the workplace. The Nirbhaya gangrape in Delhi saw wide support from women and students’ groups. It led to the Justice Verma committee’s report calling for police reforms and instituting elected Internal Complaints Committees or GSCASH in every campus and workplace.
In response to the RG Kar Medical College incident, protests sprang up across the country. Masses from all sections of the society took an active part in it. University students, civil society groups, people from the working class rose up in rage and protested against the systemic failure to end sexual violence in the society. Following is a brief reporting of our engagement in those protests and campaigns across Delhi and Mumbai.
Photos from AIIMS Delhi, 14th August 2024. Led by civil society groups, this protest gathering witnessed hundreds of people who came from places across Delhi.
Photos from a protest gathering at Vasant Kunj, New Delhi on 16th August 2024. This was led and organised by working class women from neighbouring bastis and Sangrami-Gharelu Kamgaar Union (SGU).
During the month of August, comrades from COLLECTIVE DU Unit took part in a campaign ‘Hamari Suno, ICC Chuno’ in various colleges and campus areas of DU demanding different infrastructural measures to curb sexual harassment in campus.
Across DU, in different colleges and PG departments, hundreds of students signed COLLECTIVE’s petition to DU admin for conducting regular ICC elections.
On 14th August 2024, comrades from COLLECTIVE Mumbai participated in the Mumbai citizen’s call for violence against women.
In Mumbai, working class women from Jai Bhim Nagar extended their solidarity to women across the country and sang songs of women’s liberation and exposing Builder-Buldozer Raj!
Reclaim the Night is a moment for us to revisit the legacy of this powerful Indian women’s movement. Only by linking the questions of annihilating caste, ending privatization – contractualisation and the struggle for women’s liberation can we achieve an end to sexual harassment at the workplace. Democratic institutions, no matter how brilliant on paper, only work when there is a powerful, broad-based struggling people’s movement to ensure that action is taken. This is a historic moment when we must again assert: ‘No revolution without women’s liberation, no liberation without revolution!’
COLLECTIVE
