It was 1973. Aruna Shanbaug was just 25. A typical Konkani, she loved fish. She liked to dress up a bit on weekends. She had recently watched Bobby and loved it, perhaps because she was in love too. A nurse at Mumbai's premier King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital, Aruna was engaged to a young neurosurgeon doing his MD at KEM. They hoped to run a clinic together some day.
Her brothers were unhappy as she was marrying outside her community, but they knew that Aruna's mind could not be changed. From a coastal Karnataka town just south of Goa, Aruna had upped and headed to Mumbai to study nursing when she was just 17. By 1973, she had worked at KEM for a few years and was known to be a ‘no-nonsense' professional. She had reported a wardboy and sweeper, Sohanlal Valmiki, for stealing and not working properly.
Aruna Shanbaug, Nurse, Mumbai
On November 27, while Aruna was on night duty, Valmiki sought his revenge. Choking her with a dog chain, he sexually assaulted her. So vicious was the attack that the chain cut the oxygen supply to Aruna's brain. By the time she was found the next morning, the damage was irreversible. Practically blind and barely able to utter a few incoherent words, Aruna's body and brain were reduced to a ‘vegetative state' overnight.
And that's how she remained for the next 42 years, cared for by successive generations of nurses at KEM Hospital. Valmiki was released from prison in 1980. But Aruna remained a prisoner of his act of violence right up to her death in 2015. Her life, as she had imagined it, had been snatched away by a man who didn't think twice before brutalising a woman so heinously.
Fast forward 51 years. To Kolkata. Only to discover that nothing has changed.
Junior Doctor, Kolkata
On August 9, 2024, the body of a young trainee doctor was found in the seminar hall of Kolkata's RG Kar Medical College and Hospital. Studying chest medicine, she was sexually assaulted and then strangled and smothered to death while she was on duty. She had injuries all over her body – mouth, eyes, hands, fingers, stomach, and leg. She was bleeding from her genitals. Her neck was broken. The crime could not have been more violent.
As we write, there are massive protests erupting across several cities, with people taking to the streets. Junior doctors at \hospitals are striking and demanding swift justice for the young doctor.
The police have arrested a 33-year-old civic volunteer, who works at the hospital's police post. Due to his police ‘connections', it's being claimed that he had unfettered access to all parts of the hospital. It is also being reported that the nature of the injuries and the high amount of fluid recovered in the vaginal swab as per the post-mortem report suggest the trainee doctor may have been assaulted and killed by more than one person.
When ‘Guardians' Try To ‘Cover Up'
Shockingly, it also appears that the hospital initially tried to pass off the gruesome crime as suicide. The doctor's family claims the Assistant Superintendent of the Chest Medicine department called her family and said, “Your daughter died by suicide”. The family says they were also made to wait three hours at the hospital before being allowed to see their daughter's body.
Responding to the family's petition for a court-monitored probe, the Calcutta High Court not only transferred the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), but it also described the hospital's initial response as a “cover-up”. The court said the Principal, Sandip Ghosh, had shown “no empathy” despite being the “guardian of all the doctors there”. It also pulled up the West Bengal government, saying, “Why do you protect him? Let him tell the truth... something is missing here”. The court said Ghosh “should not be working anywhere”, and sent him on long leave.
Five decades apart, and yet the stories of Aruna Shanbaug and Kolkata's trainee doctor throw up so many similar questions...
- Why have we repeatedly failed to ensure that women have a safe environment at work, be it day or night?
- Why are we still a society that allows men to think of women as ‘fair game'? Why are men still allowed that sense of power and entitlement to abuse and violate women in our society?
- Why haven't we learnt that normalising everyday misogyny and patriarchy - at home, at school, at college, at work, in public spaces – are at the root of violent gender crimes? Why do we allow it?
- Why do we still bring up our children in a way that normalises gender insensitivity?
- Why are we so poor at policing crimes against women? Why do male predators have no fear of the law?
- Why do those ‘empowered' to protect society, work with a bias towards crimes against women? Why are they repeatedly negligent in response to crimes against women?
Fifty-one years later, we still hear the same shabby defences after every violent sexual assault against a woman at her place of work - “Why must women work at night?”, “Why do women put themselves at risk, working in unsafe places, at unsafe times?”, “Men will be men”, “She probably asked for it”. Really?
Safety at Work – Fundamental Right for Working Women
Even before Aruna Shanbaug stepped into KEM hospital, millions of women had worked night shifts in hospitals across India. Millions of women have served in defence and police forces, they have worked at railway stations, airports, hotels and restaurants. Millions of working women have worked late evening shifts in all kinds of jobs, as senior managers and factory workers. Millions travel back home late at night or in the early mornings. Millions of our poorest women in rural India step out of their homes before sunrise to defecate. Millions of young girls and women attend evening schools and colleges and coaching classes. The list goes on.
We are obligated as a civil society to guarantee the safety of all of them. But decades go by, and we fail them, again and again.
Just in case you thought things ever got better in the intervening years, let's travel back 21 years to New Delhi.
A Nurse In Delhi
On the night of September 6, 2003, at the capital's Shanti Mukund Hospital, a nurse taking care of a patient in a coma was raped by a ward boy named Bhura. As she fought back, he gouged out her right eye. After raping her, he dragged her into a bathroom, where she lay unconscious and bleeding through the night.
Her employers at Shanti Mukund Hospital did not treat her. They referred her to Guru Tegh Bahadur (GTB) Hospital, a massive well-equipped government hospital, where again she received no treatment for three days. They acted only when the woman's story hit the media.
The delayed treatment caused the victim to lose sight in the right eye. She took months to heal. Action came much later, after a documentary filmmaker petitioned the court. A couple of doctors were arrested but soon released on bail.
In April 2005, Bhura was sentenced to life imprisonment. In November 2006, the courts ordered Shanti Mukund Hospital to pay the victim Rs 5.5 lakh, and the GTB Hospital and the Delhi government to pay her Rs 2 lakh each as compensation.
It is not clear when, and if, the woman received her compensation. But it certainly was years after she had been raped and let down by those who were duty-bound to respond the instant she had been violated. Her partial blindness also made her less employable.
Against that, one wonders what maths the court used while awarding the compensation. Surely, survivors of medical negligence, especially those who have also survived the trauma of a brutal rape, deserve a lot more - much more.
Aruna Shanbaug, a nurse at KEM Hospital, Mumbai. The nurse at Shanti Mukund Hospital, Delhi. A Junior Doctor from RG Kar Hospital, Kolkata. Their stories span 51 years, playing out in three of India's biggest, bustling cities, which are home to lakhs and lakhs of working women. The circumstances of the terrible ordeal that each endured are so painfully similar that it makes one ask, when would India's women have been abused and violated enough for us to act and do something substantial about it?
(Rohit Khanna is a journalist, commentator and video storyteller. He has been Managing Editor at The Quint, Executive Producer of Investigations & Special Projects at CNN-IBN, and is a 2-time Ramnath Goenka award winner.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author