Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)

The horrific rape and murder of a second year postgrad trainee doctor on August 9, inside the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, Kolkata (estb.1886), which ironically hosted India’s first practicing woman medical practitioner (Kadambini Bose Ganguly), has rocked Kolkata and the medical practitioners’ profession countrywide.

The 31-year-old woman doctor was resting in the seminar hall of the medical college-cum-hospital after a 36-hour shift on that fateful night when she was sexually assaulted and murdered reportedly by several individuals. Kolkata Police’s Special Investigation Team (SIT) has taken ‘a police civic volunteer’ into custody as the prime suspect, and under pressure, has transferred the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on August 13. Meanwhile the Supreme Court in Delhi has also taken suo motu cognizance of the case.

The brutal murder, which according to India’s top court has “shocked the conscience of the nation”, has sparked a series of protest marches, with large crowds including practising medical practitioners taking to the streets to protest deteriorating law and order in the state, and especially the safety of working women. All medical graduates are obliged to serve as trainee or junior doctors in residence for three years before they are permitted to practice medicine.

Now there is unprecedented apprehension that women will think twice about entering the healers’ profession in West Bengal where the law and order and justice systems are crumbling and crimes against women doctors and paramedics are multiplying. According to junior doctors, most of the five women’s hostels on the campus of RG Kar Medical College are deserted. Of the full strength of 700 resident junior doctors, only 30-40 women and 60-70 men doctors are currently resident on campus.

There’s a general consensus within the state’s establishment this atrocity will be a huge setback for West Bengal which has an ancient and widely admired tradition of women’s emancipation and enrolment in higher education institutions. The state has a rich legacy of excellence in competitive exams, with around 150,000-200,000 school-leavers from Bengal writing national competitive exams such as IIT-JEE and NEET every year. In 2024, 102,557 students from Bengal wrote the centralised NEET-UG exam which determines admission into medical colleges countrywide. Of this number 59,053 (more than 50 percent women) have qualified and will soon commence to study medicine in the state’s 34 medical colleges including the Central government-run AIIMS Kalyani, 24 state government medical colleges (six of which were started by Banerjee in 2019), one state government aided and eight private medical colleges.

For women medical students, the gruesome RG Kar rape-murder incident has come as a great shock confirming lack of safety and security on college campuses. A state government August 17 directive to hospitals to avoid night shifts for women doctors is being interpreted as interference with their fundamental right to practice a vocation or profession without hindrance.

Moreover, this horrific incident and the state government’s casual and inept response to it — the rape-murder was initially described as a suicide, the crime scene was permitted to be vandalised, and the director of RG Kar Hospital was protected — has also raised fears about West Bengal’s image as an education hub.

In 2024, Kolkata’s colleges received 87,010 admission applications from school-leavers in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Assam, Bihar, and Maharashtra for pursuing undergrad courses. The high-ranked Jadavpur University has 112 foreign students from 18 countries and Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata has 92 from Bangladesh and Nepal. Academics in Kolkata say this inflow could dry up. Moreover, the state’s worsening law and order may well spur an increase in the number of students leaving to study in other states or abroad. According to official sources (Union ministry of external affairs), more than 60,000 students from Kolkata have ventured to study abroad since 2016.

With chief minister Mamata Banerjee concurrently in charge of the home ministry which supervises law and order, and health and family welfare portfolios (supervising hospitals), the ruling TMC government has suffered severe damage as also Banerjee’s relationship with civil society organisations, women’s rights groups, and the bhadralok (refined middle class) who constitute her support base.

Indeed Banerjee, now serving her third term as chief minister, has never faced such intense public outrage and anger. Political pundits in Kolkata believe that the rape-murder of the young doctor has catalysed pent-up public anger against the state’s steady descent into rampant corruption, nepotism, and lawlessness since Banerjee led TMC to a landslide electoral victory in the legislative assembly election of 2011 following 34 years of uninterrupted rule of the CPM (Communist Party-Marxist)-led Left Front government which precipitated massive capital flight and de-industrialised West Bengal. With the state’s next legislative assembly election due in 2026, the RG Kar Hospital rape-murder of the woman doctor working over-time in the public interest and the TMC government’s incompetent response to it may mark the beginning of the end of TMC’s disappointing 13-year rule over West Bengal.