When Monica Joseph, the Vatican’s Superior General and global head of the Congregation of the Religious of Jesus and Mary, called up Mamata Banerjee from Rome on Wednesday night to convey her compliments on the urgency with which conviction has been effected in the nun rape case at Ranaghat (March 2015), her words of praise were implicitly addressed to the Nadia district administration, the magistracy, and the West Bengal government in the larger perspective.
Crucially, the case was transferred from the district court to the City Sessions Court at the behest of Calcutta High Court ~ a commentary on the potentially sinister intent of the underworld in Ranaghat. Of critical moment is the fact that the case was shifted after a petition was filed by the nun herself. In retrospect and contextualised with the Park Street gangrape (February 2012), one must give it to the state’s home department that its response this time around was remarkably earnest… in sharp contrast to the attempt ~ at the highest level, one must interject ~ to keep the scandal under the hat.
Of course a doughty IPS officer had managed to track down the culprits, but the person was “rewarded” with an abrupt transfer to the sidelines in Barrackpore. Indeed, two senior officers at Lalbazar had been summoned to Writers’ Buildings for a verbal demarche… for having discharged their duty! A far greater degree of professionalism and seriousness of purpose was manifest in the handling of the horrendous rape (of a 75-year-old nun) and robbery at a convent.
Sister Joseph has thus welcomed the court’s verdict and expressed her satisfaction over the way in which the matter was dealt with by the state. That a Bangladeshi national has been sentenced to “imprisonment till death” and that four of the six convicts are from across the border reaffirms the unchecked influx of criminals to the peripheral districts.
The Park Street victim is no more; the nun has left Bengal. Both had countenaced the deepest tragedies of their lives with fortitude. And the enormity of the tragedy must have provoked the Additional Sessions Judge, Kumkum Singha, to quote from Oscar Wilde’s short story, Selfish Giant ~ “Perhaps even Jesus will not forgive him as he (the rapist) had hurt not only the body of a nun, but also her soul”. Police logistics in a border district betray the soul of irresponsibility.
The general refrain in Nadia two years ago was that the police station ~ nearest to the convent ~ is many miles away. Small wonder that the killers and dacoits could have a free run of the place, not to forget the easy process of ingress and egress from Bangladesh.
Ergo, a stringent check on border crime is no less imperative than curbs on an equally relentless influx. Neither Park Street nor Ranaghat are in the category of choto ghatana.