Death of a dream

Past few days have witnessed a string of shocking stories of abuse and death, young college and schoolgoing girls at the heart of each. It began on June 25 with the news of the gang rape of a first-year South Calcutta Law College student in Kolkata’s Kasba. She was assaulted by an alumnus and two seniors, all known to her.

Then came the July 13 recovery of Delhi University student Sneha Debanath’s body from the Yamuna. The BA (Mathematics) student had gone missing from Signature Bridge in the Capital before turning up dead by a river. The shock had barely settled when an Odisha college girl, who self-immolated after months of sexual harassment by a professor in a Balasore college, died of 95 per cent burns at AIIMS- Bhubaneswar. This happened on July 15.

On July 19 streamed two more shockers. A 21-year-old Bachelor of Dental Surgery student at a Greater Noida University hanged herself over mental harassment by two teachers she named in a suicide note. They wouldn’t sign her practical sheet and she feared she’d be barred from writing the exams.

The same day in Odisha’s Puri, a minor girl visiting a friend was abducted and set ablaze by three unidentified men. She was airlifted to the AIIMS-New Delhi on Sunday, but has near zero hope for survival.

Unravelling in different parts of the country, these tales of trauma and abuse are strung together by common threads – the death of the dream of great education and even better life, the invisibility of pain and the failure of everything we define as the system.

Sneha Debanath may have been alive had the Delhi Police deployed everything at its disposal to find her. And no, she was not depressed. Her college principal says she had taken all the exams just a month ago. Her family says she had been creating “once in a lifetime stickers” and caring for strays when she went missing one fine morning.

The dental surgery student at Greater Noida and the BEd student at a Balasore college had both raised multiple cries for help. These were disbelieved and silenced. Seventy-one out of 100 classmates of the Balasore student judged her and wrote to the college management in defence of the professor she was accusing.

In Kolkata’s Kasba, the law aspirant knocked at several doors before college seniors brutalised her.

So there was no dearth of efforts on the part of the victims. It was the system that failed.

As tragedies unfold, dreams shatter and homes break, one thing is clear – except for the laws around women’s safety, nothing else has changed.

Criminal law amendments after the horrific December 2012 gangrape in Delhi expanded the scope of sexual assault to include demands for sexual favours. But this law could not save the girl in Odisha. The Prevention of Sexual Harassment at Workplace Act-2013 mandates speedy justice by a free and fair internal complaints committee of the organisation. But this legislation failed the victim in Greater Noida.

Also, while new tragedies pile up, old ones still linger in the shadows. As recently as July 7, the parents of Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College rape and murder victim were doing the rounds of courts with a prayer to revisit the crime scene. Ideally, the August 2024 case that shook the national conscience and triggered a full-scale political war between the BJP and Bengal’s ruling TMC should have been solved by now. But no. The victim’s parents are even today asking why the Bengal Police and the CBI (which took over the case later) didn’t probe four college students last seen with their daughter.

Across these many stories of pain and anguish – RG Kar and Kasba to Balasore – the only constant is elusive justice. And this won’t change till society changes, till appeals for justice are seen for what they are: desperate cries for help, till we learn not just to hear but also heed, not just to heed but also act.

Delhi