Tell Mamata that Men don’t Own the Night

It began with a scandal that should have shamed the state, not its women.

- Ravi Shankar

First a girl brutally gang raped in a Kolkata hospital by a politically connected thug. More recently another medical student, this time from Odisha, raped in Durgapur. The response of power is “women shouldn’t go out at night.” This was spoken not by some patriarch from the past, but by Mamata Banerjee, the modern Durga of Bengal politics as if the chief minister has become her own moral policeman. Echoing the vibe was her minister, again a woman. So history circles back: Sita sent to the forest, Ahalya turned to stone, Draupadi stripped in the court; and now, in 2ist-century Kolkata, women told to stay home “for their own safety.” The script is ancient; only the speaker has changed. Pause. Rewind. Did the only woman chief minister in India just blame women for walking in the dark? Yes. Yes, she did. What makes her remark chilling is not merely its content but its context. It came under her watch; a state governed by a woman who rose from the pavements of protest to the pinnacle of power, who defied police batons, political mafias, and masculine derision. For decades, Mamata embodied defiance. She was the woman who would not be told to sit down. Yet power, it seems, has its own grammar and in that grammar, women too can become enforcers of the very silence they once broke. The truth is simple: the state had failed to protect women, and its lea