Rage Against the Machinery

The brutal rape-murder of a junior doctor at Kolkata’s R G Kar Medical College and Hospital has an inescapable geography

- Saikat Majumdar

THE brutality of rape and murder elicits a reaction that is not only ethical and political in nature. It also evokes a response that is deeply aesthetic. By aesthetic I mean that visceral reaction to the visual and sensory reality of the crime. The pall of violence across the body, the blood around the eyes, the decimation of limbs. The brutal nakedness of it all, the pair of jeans flung to the side. At the juncture of the aesthetic and the political is the corrosive reality of violation done to a woman, invoking the dark and primitive memory of civilisation, where male power has repeatedly etched itself through scars on the woman's body and soul.

The reality of this violence is so overwhelming that it cannot but take over the narrative around it. Indeed, our very humanity is in doubt if we cannot be stunned, shocked, and inflamed as a nation at this violence done to a woman. But this outrage has also done the job of shifting focus from what goes far beyond this single incendiary incident. It is something with a longer and colder history, and a chilling and inescapable geography.

This is the reality of the corruption of medical education in the state of West Bengal. Perhaps of corruption on the whole in the state, and perhaps of the corruption of medical education nationwide too. But we will never get anywhere if we see the problems as a gigantic, endless black hole. It will swallow us and leave us listless, dead. We need to focus on the very specific web of corruption whose reality was bared by this grotesque crime. And while we explode with rage at the violation and its grotesquerie, it's crucial that we don't lose sight of the great network of crime that has taken hold of the state, made bold by the championship by a government of nightmarish corruption.

Not least because this is exactly what the perpetrators of the crime wanted-to be so shocked by the immediate so as to lose sight of the larger, well-oiled machinery behind it.