On a cloudy gloomy Friday morning of June 27, Kolkata woke up to the horror of another rape and the arrest of three youths for their involvement in the crime. As the monsoon clouds cleared by the afternoon, more details of the crime emerged. What shook the residents of the metropolis was that the assault was carried out within the protected walls of the West Bengal government-run South Calcutta Law College.
For the city still coming to terms with the rape and murder of a postgraduate trainee doctor inside the State-run R.G. Kar Hospital and Medical College on August 9, 2024, another Friday, the allegations of gang rape inside an educational institution only 11 km south of the medical college, in an upscale south Kolkata neighbourhood, came as nothing short of a nightmare.
Over the past 10 months, the city and its people have spent many sleepless nights converging on the streets and raising their voices demanding the safety of women in public places.
Unlike the large campus of R.G. Kar MCH, which attracts thousands of patients and hundreds of doctors every day, the ‘new campus’ of the South Calcutta Law College stands eight storeys tall in Kasba on Rashbehari Avenue, an arterial east-west connector of the city.
Not far from the college, which was closed after the sexual assault, a crowd of thousands of regular people, unaffiliated with any political party, gathered on July 29, a Sunday evening. They converged near the Rashbehari crossing and started to march in protest of the city increasingly turning unsafe for women. Among the crowd were supporters of Abhaya Mancha and Reclaim the Night, groups that came together after the R.G. Kar rape and murder. Many still remember the rape of a woman in a moving car at Park Street in 2012.
A nurse who uses public transport says, “There are no street lights in many pockets of the city. The metro train services stop after 10.30 p.m. There is close to no public transport at night. If I must go out at night, I must have a lot of money and privileges just to feel safe. As a single woman travelling at night in the city, I have never felt safe.”
In 2023, the annual publication of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) for 2022 showed that the number of crimes against women in Kolkata was the lowest in India. Now, women are speaking up about Kolkata’s infrastructure and other safety issues, including the dominance of politically-affilliated ‘dadas’.
The writing on the wall
A few hours into the afternoon of June 27, students associated with the Left parties stormed the gates of the law college and tore posters of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her nephew Abhishek Banerjee hanging in front of the building. However, they could not wipe away the wall graffiti inside the college on the blue boundary wall: ‘Monojit Dada is in our hearts’ signed off by ‘Team MM’ with a heart sign. This is a reference to Monojit Mishra, a 31- year-old former student of the college and the prime accused in the gang rape of the student.
A wall at the south kolkata law college heartfelt mural in a quiet alley pays tribute to “Monojit Dada,” with a message from Team MM: “Monojit Dada is in our hearts.”
| Photo Credit:
Debasish Bhaduri
In the four-page complaint filed at Kasba police station a day after the rape, the survivor refers to Mishra as ‘J’. The complaint stated that she had come to campus around noon on June 25 and was about to leave at around 6.10 p.m. “…but ‘J’ stopped me and told ‘P’ and ‘M’ (two other accused) by eye contact to go outside and locked the door from outside.”
At one point, she alleged, she had a panic attack, after which the accused arranged for an inhaler, but when she tried to escape, she found that they had locked the main gate. The security guard did not help. She describes the violence against her, also saying that ‘J’ was the head of the Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad (TMCP), the student wing of the Trinamool Congress (TMC), West Bengal’s ruling party. “Everyone listens to him. He was giving everyone a post for TMCP. I was also given a post for the girls’ secretary,” the complaint said. The rape allegedly took place in the students’ union room.
Based on the complaint of the survivor, the Kolkata Police has charged Monojit Mishra and two others, 19-year-old Zaib Ahmed and 20-year-old Pramit Mukhopadhyay, with gang rape and wrongful detention among other charges. The security guard of the college was also arrested.
Power sans elections
A week after his arrest, it has come to light that there are at least 11 cases against Mishra. Photographs of him with several TMC leaders surfaced, but MPs and MLAs of the party were quick to dissociate themselves from him, saying there was no unit of the party’s students’ union at the college after 2022. Student union elections are pending in colleges and universities in West Bengal for the past 5-10 years.
A Division Bench of the Calcutta High Court, while hearing a public interest litigation after the sexual assault, directed that union rooms — in colleges and universities where there is no recognised student body or where no election had taken place in the recent past — be put under lock and key.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) State Secretary Mohammed Salim says that by not allowing the union elections to take place, the TMC runs a ‘nexus’ of criminal elements inside college campuses. “This rape and the previous rape and murder of the female doctor is a sad commentary on the condition of our State under Mamata Banerjee. Here, if you work with TMC, you can get away with anything,” Salim says.
Politics and processions
The parents of the doctor from R.G. Kar MCH have lost faith in the investigation process. The woman’s father says in despair that nothing has changed in the past one year. “After what happened to my daughter, so many people came out onto the streets to protest. But even now, similar gruesome crimes are happening inside educational institutions. When will this end,” he asks.
At the July 29 protest, the police stopped the crowd from marching. An artist took to his paints and brush, and with the streets as canvas, painted an image of a woman with the slogan Ar koto? (How many more?). During R.G. Kar protests, a song by Arjit Singh Ar Kobe (When will it stop?) had rallied thousands of protesters on the streets of Kolkata.
The supporters of Reclaim the Night were assaulted outside the South Calcutta Law College, when a team of Bharatiya Janata Party members, including MPs and former Union Ministers visited the college on a fact-finding mission.
BJP protestors clash with police at the Gariahath crossing while protesting against the rape of a law student inside the South Calcutta Law College premises.
| Photo Credit:
Debasish Bhaduri
With less than a year left for Assembly polls in the State, the Opposition parties, particularly the BJP, have hit the streets on mission mode with its supporters bringing out rallies in large numbers. Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has called for Kanya Suraksha Yatras (Women Protection Rallies), urging the parents of the R.G. Kar doctor to join a march to the State Secretariat, Nabanna, against the government on August 9, 2025, a year since the incident.
After facing severe criticism for the manner in which they had handled the R.G. Kar case, the Kolkata Police set up a 9-member Special Investigative Team to probe the law college rape. They transferred the case to the Detective Department. “Since the case is very sensitive, we do not want to share details. However, the FIR was prompt. The three accused were arrested within 12 hours and one more person was arrested soon after. We have collected a lot of evidence, which is being analysed,” Kolkata Police Commissioner Manoj Kumar Verma says.
Trinamool speak
Trinankur Bhattacharya, president of the TMCP says they are not denying their past association with the accused, but that does not define the party. The TMCP leader says that Mishra was at the “lowermost” post of “one of many organising secretaries” in its South Kolkata unit and the party has had no association with him since 2022.
Within days of the sexual assault at least three male senior TMC leaders made comments that embarrassed the party.
“If a friend rapes another friend, then how will the government authorities provide protection in such cases?” MP Kalyan Banerjee said on June 27. Two days later on June 29, MLA Madan Mitra said, “If that girl had not gone there, this incident wouldn’t have happened.” West Bengal’s Irrigation Minister Manas Bhuiyan sparked outrage when he said that every “small incident” raises hue and cry in the State.
The TMC backed Bhuiyan, issued a show cause to Mitra, and remained silent on Banerjee. However, the party’s MP Mahua Moitra took a dig at her colleagues and wrote on social media, “Misogyny in India cuts across party lines.” This triggered a strong response from Banerjee, who launched an attack on the Krishnanagar MP.
About a year ago, when the NCRB data came out, the West Bengal government was lauded for keeping the city safe. In December 2023, Moitra wrote on her social media handle X, “Kolkata safest city with least crime rates for 3rd consecutive year… Thank you Mamata Banerjee for keeping us safe.” The crime rate against women in Kolkata was at 27.1 per 1 lakh population and the city had recorded 11 rapes in 2022.
However, after the June rape, the TMC drew attention to other States’s failures in preventing crime against women: the killing of a woman in a hospital in Madhya Pradesh and the rape of a tourist on one of Odisha’s most populat beaches.
Unsafe spaces and ‘dada’ culture
Paromita Chakraborty, former head of Women Studies Department at Jadavpur University, says, “There are no properly functioning internal systems in institutes. That is why a ‘Dada’ (big brother) character can take charge and run the place. Internal Complaints Committees most days are themselves fighting against the institute; the ICC is not being backed by the institute. Then how will we function and bring change?” Chakraborty says. The men of influence generally have political affiliations.
Debatri Mukherjee, a second-year student at the South Calcutta Law College says she was not surprised that Mishra, known informally as Mango, has been accused of rape. “Mango Da was close to the vice-principal. There was an understanding that he must be revered, that he cannot be disobeyed, and his sway on everything that happened in college was undeniable,” she says
The law college under tight security after the incident.
| Photo Credit:
Debasish Bhaduri
Vaagmita Trivedi, another second-year student at the law college says Mishra would keep asking women students to sit beside him and touched them inappropriately. For Debatri and Vaagmita the closed walls of the college offer no sense of security and safety in a city that claimed to be safest in the country.
“Previously, my mother used to feel anxious when I was on the road and was coming to college. Now, she says she will be more anxious when I am inside college,” a third-year student at the college says, as she stands in protest, demanding justice for her friend.
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