Mamata Banerjee is one of the crudest and vilest politicians Bharat has produced. Her specialty is her utter lack of empathy towards female victims of sexual violence in her state. One would have thought that the ‘sajona ghotana‘ (fabricated incident), ‘choto ghotona’ (petty incident) remarks she made after the Park Street gang-rape would have taught her a lesson in public speaking, but apparently not.

After the ghastly gang-rape and murder of a minor girl aged 14, who was allegedly plied with alcohol before being gang-raped by her adult male friend – the son of a TMC panchayat leader – and his companions in Hanskhali block of Nadia district, the victim’s family was threatened against taking the bleeding girl to hospital for treatment (her father took her to a quack) or lodge a complaint. After the victim died, the family was forced to hurriedly cremate her on the same day. Incidentally, some reports mention the accused’s name as Sohel while others reported it as Brajgopal.

Hopes of justice aren’t high knowing the dismal track record of the WB police and administration, but what Mamata said to trivialize this incident has shaken even hardened political observers.

The WB CM stated that everyone was aware of the girl’s ‘love affair’ and one is left to wonder ‘whether it was an actual rape or pregnancy that went wrong’. Speaking at an inauguration event in Kolkata yesterday, the CM also hinted that the girl may have taken her own life or may have been assaulted by her own family members.

She said in Bengali, “As a layman, I am saying where would someone get the evidence whether she was actually raped or was she pregnant or was there any other reason, like someone beat her up or she died of some illness. There was a love affair for sure, her family knew about it, and their neighbors also knew about it. Now if a girl and a boy love each other, I cannot punish them. This is not Uttar Pradesh that I can do that in the name of Love Jihad,” said the West Bengal CM.

Even if we forget this disgusting victim-blaming and attempted rationalization of rape for a minute, how can such a senior Constitutional authority forget that any sexual act with a minor is statutory rape – consent doesn’t come into the picture at all. But trying to reason and argue with those presenting such vile arguments legitimizes them. If our media, Lutyens’ elite and left-liberal judges had a shred of integrity, they would take Mamata Banerjee to task for this deeply offensive act of whitewashing a brutal crime against a minor. But we know that Mamata’s facade of left-liberal-secular politics will protect her from any meaningful scrutiny.

She went on to lambast the media for ‘politicizing’ the incident to defame the state. It is pertinent to remember that Mamata Banerjee had even smeared the Park Street gangrape Anglo-Indian victim as a prostitute by stating it was a misunderstanding during a deal between a woman and her “client”. So there is no depth to which this lady cannot fall to defend her party and administration. And she gets a free pass from media every single time, with some ‘public intellectuals’ even touting her as a potential PM candidate,

A PIL has also been filed in the Calcutta High Court demanding a CBI probe into the matter. The way things are in West Bengal at the moment, with the WB Police itself accused of assaulting Hindus celebrating Ram Navami instead of protecting them from Islamist attacks, every serious crime investigation deserves to be handed over to CBI.

Indeed, the WB government would have long ago been dismissed and President’s Rule imposed if the situtation had deteriorated to this extent in a BJP-ruled state. But such is the secularism-induced distortion in our hijacked Republic that Mamata Banerjee has a free license to do whatever she wishes, and neither judiciary nor the center are inclined to step in.

And just as this piece was being written, news has come in of yet another horrifying rape from West Bengal – a 40-year-old woman was allegedly gangraped and kerosene poured into her private parts by the perpetrators who tried to burn her alive.