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.
This story is from the September 1, 2024 edition of Outlook.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the September 1, 2024 edition of Outlook.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Criminal Amnesia
The focus may have now shifted to the Kolkata gang rape case, but questions about the sexual violence in Manipur since May 2023 remain unanswered
To Rape A Wife
Survivors of marital rape face twin hurdles: a lack of legal framework to deal with these cases and the social stigma that comes with reporting them
A City Violated
Public outburst of anger over the rape and murder of a junior doctor in Kolkata has left the Mamata Banerjee government puzzled, worried
The Forest of Loss
From a legal perspective, justice appears to have been served in the 2017 Gudiya rape and murder case at Kotkhai, Himachal Pradesh. But several questions persist
Here, Nobody Speaks of the Wounds
Muhammad Iqbal Shah's 14-year-old cousin was gang-raped and murdered at Handwara town, Kupwara, in 2007. The family is still trudging along the long road to justice
She Must Have Been Afraid
The 2012 Delhi gang rape is reflective of a systematic failure to cleanse the societal malaise
The Burning Woman
UP has the highest rate of crimes against women, and the district of Unnao has seen some of the State's most gruesome cases
Naked (vs.) Justice
On March 14, 2006, Latabai and her son, six, were paraded naked in a village in Solapur. Less than six months later, four members of a Dalit family were paraded naked; mother & daughter were allegedly gang-raped
Songlines of Chambal
How do the residents of Sheikhpur Gudha, Phoolan Devi's village in Uttar Pradesh, remember her: as a survivor, a rebel, a leader?
Don't You Remember My Story?
A child gang rape survivor's 12-year long ordeal in Sikar, Rajasthan shows how calls for punishment of perpetrators don't always mean empathy for the victim