Outlook English - Print Subscribers Copy Outlook English, 26 February 2018 | Page 36

COVER STORY
HER HAND IN THE
STATE’S GRIP
If the Rizwanur episode revealed the Left regime’s moth-eaten
attitude towards women, Taslima’s banishment confirmed it
by Dola Mitra in Calcutta
I
T was a warm September day in 2007. Newlywed Priya­
nka Todi, 23, the daughter of an influential Calcutta
businessman, found herself being packed off from her
in-laws’ house and sent back to live with her parents.
Neither she nor her husband, Rizwanur Rahman, a
29-year-old graphic designer who came from a humble
background, wanted her to leave. But, in a bizarre turn of
events, allegedly acting on behalf of the girl’s irate father,
the Calcutta Police had forced the move. It had called the
couple to the police headquarters for ‘interrogation’ sev­
eral times and advised them to annul the marriage. When
they refused, the police persuaded Priyanka to return
to her parents’ home for just a week and reassured the
distraught husband that if he was cooperative she would
return to him within a due date. That day came and went.
What followed is well known. Rizwanur was found dead
beside a railway track on September 21, his mangled face and
body barely recognisable. While the initial police claim that it
was suicide backfired with allegations that it had driven him
to kill himself, a subsequent Central Bureau of Investigation
probe also investigated the murder angle. And as public out­
rage poured forth, accompanied by continuous media atten­
tion, the political opposition pounced on it—West Bengal’s
large Muslim voteshare was deemed to be up for grabs. With
its police accused of hounding a poor Muslim youth to his
death in collusion with the girl’s rich business family, the Left
rulers had let down their most loyal support base. Outraged
Muslim mobs rioted in sections of Calcutta on September 22,
viciously targeting the police.
Indeed, the Rizwanur case—which roiled the urban
heartland of Bengal for weeks—indicated, more powerfu­
lly than even Singur and Nandigram, as it demonstrated
the extent to which the state government could interfere
in the private lives of people, that the decline of the Left in
36 OUTLOOK 26 February 2018
West Bengal was inevitable.
But if the Rizwanur Rahman incident shattered two of the
Left’s most ardent claims—that it was a party which stood for
the poor and the minorities—it also busted another myth:
that the CPI(M) was committed to gender equality. The Left
Front government in West Bengal habitually proclaimed that
it was the first among the states to implement 33 per cent
reservation for women in rural governing bodies.
The fact of the matter remains that in a ‘progressive’,
‘liberal’ state like West Bengal, Priyanka, an adult, was
not allowed enough freedom over her own body or mind
to decide on whom to marry, not just by her conservative
family, but also, horrifically, by the state police. A repres­
sive state was more comfortable dishing out gender equal­
ity like a dole, rather than granting a woman the agency to
shape her own future, something that was her birthright.
In other words, women’s emancipation was a good thing
provided the state controlled it.
Priyanka was not
allowed enough
freedom over her
own body and mind
not just by her family,
but also by a
repressive state.