When president must also speak

Few will doubt the genuineness of President Droupadi Murmursquos dismay and horror expressed in an article she wrote for a news agency over the rape and murder of a woman doctor in a Kolkata hospital She said what was most depressing was that the Kolkata incident was ldquopart of a series of crimes against womenrdquo The concluding sentence of her article was ldquoLet us collectively say enough is enoughrdquoSince the rapemurder in Kolkata was part of a series and therefore not unique why did Murmu choose to highlight it It was impolitic of her to do so as the gruesome crime occurred under the watch of the Trinamool Congress government which has been perennially locked in conflict with the Bharatiya Janata Party ruling at the Centre It was impolitic because she had been a member of the BJP before she was elected presidentMurmursquos political past makes her vulnerable to the charge of partisanship more so because of the timing of the article Early last week the BJP sponsored a march to the state secretariat in Kolkata which triggered skirmishes between the police and protesters The next day the BJP called for a 12hour statewide bandh in protestThe BJPrsquos attempt to appropriate the movement for justice dismayed the doctors who are its spearheads They issued a statement distancing themselves from the march sparking apprehensions that the movement could weaken because of conflicting strategies over intensifying and enlarging it Soon thereafter Murmu published her article It was as if she was employing the moral authority the president commands to tacitly consolidate as well as give a fillip to the movement evident from her remark urging people to say ldquoenough is enoughrdquoThe rapemurder in Kolkata is indeed a worthy cause to be raised But it also true that there have been other occasions during Murmursquos tenure when she could have called on people to cry out ldquoenough is enoughrdquo Fifteen days after she was sworn in as the president the 11 people convicted of gangraping Bilkis Bano and killing her family members during the 2002 Gujarat riots were released under the Statersquos remission policy Murmu did not speak out against it although it could be said she was too inexperienced then to dare spark a controversyYet even a year later the woman in Murmu was not awakened to express horror over the viral video of two Kuki women who had been gangraped and paraded naked Was her silence linked to Manipur being a BJPruled state and the Centre rebuffing the demand for removing its chief minister Biren SinghCompare Murmursquos response with Pranab Mukherjeersquos to the 2012 rapemurder of the physiotherapist popularly known as Nirbhaya Then too the country was outraged At the presentation of the Stree Shakti Puraskar for 2012 when the Rani Lakshmi Bai Award was given to the ldquospirit of Nirbhayardquo and her mother received it President Mukherjee said ldquoNirbhaya as she is now known was a brave and courageous girl who fought till the very last minute for her dignity and her lifehellip Her sad demise should not be in vainrdquoThe bug of sensationalism did not bite Mukherjee He did not mistake the presidentrsquos duty as that of ushering in change as Murmu seemed to have done with her enoughisenough remarkWhen a massacre took place at Lakshmanpur Bathe village in Bihar on December 1 1997 Manoj Mitta in his book Caste Pride quotes then President K R Narayanan describing it as a ldquonational shamerdquo The scale of the massacre was numbing 58 Dalits were gunned down in one night This is in sharp contrast to Murmu mentioning the solitary victim of Kolkatarsquos rapemurder incident in the opening line of her article reflecting upon the perilous state of women in the countryRabri Devi was the chief minister of Bihar in December 1997 Her party the Rashtriya Janata Dal was a constituent of the United Front government which had played the lead role in electing Narayanan as president Yet he commented upon the massacre in Bihar upholding the principle of nonpartisanshipNarayanan also spoke on the 2002 Gujarat riots which occurred under the watch of Narendra Modi who was then the statersquos chief minister Once again the death toll was extraordinarily high over 1000 people died across the state Two months after the riots broke out Narayanan issued a press release which his press secretary S N Sahu dug out for meDescribing the riots as a ldquocrisis of our State and societyrdquo Narayananrsquos press statement expressed his anguish and pain over the killings His was a plea to the public ldquoI appeal to all my fellow citizens to restore communal harmony and do everything to end the communal violence that has devastated the State and continues to occur even after two monthshelliprdquoIndeed the insecurity in the Manipur of 2023 mirrored that of the Gujarat of 2002 Had Murmu expressed her horror over Manipur none would have faulted her for breaking away from the tradition of the president making a statement of political import If Murmu were to speak out against say lynchings and the extrajudicial demolition of houses of alleged criminals in BJPruled states she would emerge as a paragon of political neutralityThe writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon Challenging CasteSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper