Nadia Murad, a human rights activist originally from Iraq, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”. Murad, who is of Yazidi ethnicity, a religious minority in Iraq, was captured by ISIS terrorists along with over 6,000 Yazidi women and girls in 2014, and turned into a sex slave in the Iraqi city of Mosul. She managed to flee her captors eventually and reach the West. Her 2017 book, The Last Girl, gives a harrowing account of her and her fellow Yazidi women’s lives as sex slaves of the ISIS.
History says that sexual violence is used as a weapon of war against women where the perpetrators exploit women’s physical vulnerabilities to terrorise them and their family members and even her community to instil fear, assert power, and destabilize societies. It’s a crime where the victims are dehumanized, and social fabrics are ruptured. According to the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1820, “rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute a war crime, a crime against humanity, or a constitutive act with respect to genocide”.
It is in this context that the enormity of the horror stories that are coming out of Bengal’s Sandeshkhali needs to be understood. It is the same medieval and feudal mindset that is at work here, where a woman can be picked up at the perpetrators’ will, and raped and tortured; where women are kept confined in a political party office for days to pleasure the men there; where husbands are asked to send their wives to “serve” the local party leaders; where party hooligans go house to house, searching for young and beautiful women who they can take to their bosses.
This is a case of systemic sexual violence, which has been going on for years. What is this if not sexual slavery, where the women who are targeted have to experience horrors similar to the women targeted by groups like ISIS? If all this had taken place during the time of war, it would have been called a war crime—a crime against humanity.
It is difficult to believe that something like this can take place in the 21st century, in one of the world’s most thriving and vibrant democracies. Is West Bengal still a part of India? Is it a part of the civilized world? Does the rule of law apply to the state? The villagers say that they have been complaining about such incidents since at least 2021, that such complaints have been sent to even Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s office, but to no avail. They allege that the police is on the payroll of the ruling Trinamool Congress and have been turning a blind eye to the reign of terror unleashed on them by the party’s local muscle man, the infamous Shahjahan Sheikh and his henchmen.
These are the same criminals who had attacked and bloodied the Enforcement Directorate personnel when they had gone to conduct a raid at Shahjahan’s residence recently. The problem with Bengal is that there are these fiefdoms run by these criminals who have a complete sway over their respective territories. Hence, political parties rely on them to deliver the votes, which these criminals do, more often than not by threats and intimidation, and/or voter suppression. Corrupt to the core, they have the local administration following their diktat, while the government in Kolkata turns a blind eye to the criminal enterprises they run because of the electoral dividends involved. This was the case with the previous Left Front government and is the case with the current Trinamool government, the reason why Shahjahan Sheikh, currently absconding, has been patronized by both the Left and the TMC.
But for how long can this situation continue? The state police is saying no complaints of rape have come to them. The state Women’s Commission says that the victims have spoken to them, but they will need to cross-check the allegations and are waiting for a report from the police. A Sandeshkhali woman has been quoted by news agency ANI as saying, “We are being asked to show medical report to prove rape… How can the women of the village come forward and say they have been raped?” Given that these cases have taken place over the last few years, and given that there has not been any mechanism on the ground to register their complaints, how will they provide such reports even if they are willing to go public with their ordeal?
According to Rekha Sharma, chairperson of the National Commission for Women, “police has filed complaints against the relatives of women victims instead of filing their complaints” and that villagers are being terrorised equally “by goons and by the police”. So what happens next? What hopes of justice do these women have if their own state machinery abandons them?
Amid this, mention must be made of Bengal’s civil society—particularly the intellectuals who come out on the streets demonstrating against the slightest of Central government decisions. Not a word of protest is coming from them. Their silence is symptomatic of the loss of Bengal’s moral compass. It’s a sad day for a state that was once hailed as the cultural and intellectual engine of the nation.
Joyeeta Basu