A Bengal-Mexico parallel?

The enormous public anger over the recent alleged rape and murder of a young doctor in Kolkata reflects the helplessness and heartbreak that the youth and women of the state – and the country – feel. In these days of post-truth, misinformation, disinformation, and fake news, it is difficult to find answers to the reality of an incident.

For clarity, it is necessary to see all aspects of West Bengal as it is today. The stories – or information – doing the rounds are quite extraordinary.  It is alleged that several dozens, possibly hundreds of Jamaat-e-Islami members from Bangladesh have for several years now been actively sheltered, protected, and perhaps even subsidized inside West Bengal. The Jamaat is a vehemently anti-India outfit and a clear and present danger to the country. What is the logic of sheltering them from the Bangladesh authorities who quite rightly want to arrest and try them?

There is a pattern of abuse of women in Bengal. By most accounts, a senior politician, his henchmen, and goons were allegedly involved in terrorizing and sexually exploiting women in Sandeshkhali, a tiny island in the North 24 Parganas district, for years. And yet, the electorate did not seem to care. The voting patterns reveal a nonchalant indifference and possibly even an acquiescence of intimidation.

From the issue of the alleged rape and murder of the young doctor in Kolkata, a larger story emerges. That many government institutions in West Bengal, including schools, colleges, hospitals, and the police are allegedly under the control of rent-seeking criminals and criminal gangs. Irrespective of the veracity of this information, many believe that these matters are true and in fact, the situation is worse. This somewhat explains the public reaction.

Drugs from Myanmar – now the world’s largest producer of opium1 – use the state and the northeast region, as a pass-through, and often as a distribution centre. This deserves mention and we will come back to this later.

The status and role of the police is even more startling, with thousands of off-books “volunteer” policepersons deployed, with an indeterminate official standing. English reformer Robert Peel consciously moved societies away from vigilante citizen policing to organized police employees. But in today’s West Bengal, such policing is officially back as off-book, low-pay, unverified background-check ‘consultants’ are deployed, sometimes to societal harm, as seen in the D.G. Kar Hospital case.

There is an analogous situation in the contemporary world. People shrug their shoulders as they recount that in Mexico, most institutions are compromised by or directly or indirectly involved in the drug trade, in narco-terrorism, in human trafficking. Crime syndicates control ports and global supply chains, and, says a Council on Foreign Relations report, use their ‘vast profits to pay off judges, officers and politicians.”3 This may be officially untrue. But sufficient people believe it and the belief sticks.

Mexico’s Federal Security Agency has credibly been accused of giving “protection” to drug gangs. If government institutions including schools, colleges, hospitals and the police in West Bengal are infiltrated by criminal gangs, the state’s resemblance to Mexico becomes more obvious.

The parallels are clear, and worrying. The last thing we need is a deadly criminal syndicate (with or without the narco tag) state operating within India’s borders. We need action and we need it urgently. And the action must be to restore public credibility so that the criminal-institution nexus, if any, is firmly squashed.

Jaithirth Rao is the author of The Indian Conservative and Economist Gandhi. He is the former founder and CEO of MphasiS, and former head of Citibank’s Global Technology Division.

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