A Tale of Tragic Love Cracks Calcutta’s Mirror

SOMINI SENGUPTA
NYT, October 28, CALCUTTA

A HINDU-MUSLIM love affair. A rich, well-connected patriarch. A high-handed police inquiry. And finally, a dead man on the railroad tracks.

For over a month, Calcutta has been gripped by the story of Rizwanur Rahman and Priyanka Todi: he a young, striving Muslim, she a fabulously wealthy Hindu, both daring to marry despite her family’s archresistance and, in the end, paying a terrible price. On a Friday in September, barely a month into their marriage, the body of Mr. Rahman, 29, turned up on the railroad tracks, his head mangled almost beyond recognition; whether it was murder or suicide remains in dispute. Ms. Todi, 23, shut herself off from the media glare and has said nothing publicly since.

At the center of their short-lived union stood the city police. Over the course of the eight days they lived together in Mr. Rahman’s family home, police interrogated the couple no fewer than three times, apparently at the request of Ms. Todi’s family. The police chief at the time, Prasun Mukherjee, justified his officers’ intervention by saying, at a news conference, that he found resistance to the marriage by the bride’s family “natural.” The family, he added, according to local press reports, “reacted because Rizwanur’s social and financial status did not match theirs.”

The police swiftly labeled Mr. Rahman’s death a suicide — a verdict his family just as swiftly rejected.

This tale of love, defiance and death has dominated the public imagination of this city, and not only for its rich drama and intrigue. It seems also to have touched a raw nerve, sparking public outrage that the police were making the bedroom their business, and seeming to do so at the behest of the rich and mighty. The case has been particularly jarring to the psyche of a city that has long regarded itself as a place where Hindus and Muslims can live relatively peaceably.

The Telegraph, a Calcutta-based newspaper, concluded in a sardonic editorial that the police, rather than pursue robbers and murderers, had chosen to investigate a legally registered marriage. “They would make very good uncles,” the editorial said, adding, “the police seem to feel avuncular towards a particular economic class only.”

A candlelight vigil sprang up outside the prestigious St. Xavier’s College, the Christian missionary school from which Mr. Rahman graduated with an English honors degree. And for three weeks, students, families and ordinary people of all faiths flocked there every evening, signing giant banners and lighting up a narrow sidewalk with hundreds of small white candles. “Candles of conscience,” read a banner. “Why is Todi so cozy?” asked another, referring to the bride’s father, Ashok Todi, a prominent businessman and a men’s underwear baron.

“Calcutta has always taken pride in being different from other cities in India — we’ve been inclusive, the only metro that hasn’t voted along parochial lines, a bit rebellious and openly pro-underdog,” said Bonani Kakkar, founder of a citizens’ group that calls itself Public, an acronym for People United for Better Living in Calcutta. The group sent out mobile-phone text messages to draw crowds to the candlelight vigil. “Money didn’t make a difference in this city,” she said. “Today it does.”

The case has become potent political poison for the Communist Party politicians who have ruled West Bengal State for 30 years and who have long cast themselves as defenders of Muslim interests. Mr. Rahman was a young, educated Muslim with no known criminal record, and his mysterious death finally forced the party leadership to act. After weeks of public pressure, the police chief, Mr. Mukherjee, was transferred from his post. A court here ordered a fresh inquiry into Mr. Rahman’s death, by a federal agency called the Central Bureau of Investigation.

The saga of Rizwanur Rahman and Priyanka Todi can be read as a fable of modern aspirations encountering feudal traditions.

The couple represented a generation of young Indians eager to find their place in the new economy. Rukbanur Rahman, older brother of the groom, described the younger Mr. Rahman as bookish and strong-willed. He had defied his family early on by studying English literature; his father and older brother pressed him to study science, which is what most Indians still regard as a path to a safe career. His dreams of pursuing a graduate degree in English were cut short by the family’s limited financial means, and the younger Mr. Rahman found a job teaching graphic design at a private academy. Graphic design is a quintessential new economy pursuit that would have been virtually unheard of a generation ago.

At the design school, he met Ms. Todi. She was once a student in his class.

How their romance blossomed, and for how long, is not known. But one day in late August, an unusually nervous Rizwanur Rahman approached his brother and confessed to having secretly married. On Aug. 31, he brought his bride home to the Rahmans’ small, two-room apartment on a narrow alley in a working-class Muslim neighborhood.

His family knew it was a far cry from the upmarket suburban home where she grew up and they took note of how well she seemed to adjust. For a year, she told them, she had been living without air-conditioning in her room at home, as preparation for a new life with the Rahmans.

That new life lasted no more than a week. First, her father came to urge her to leave. Then the police summoned the couple to the headquarters of the “anti-rowdy” division. On one occasion, Rukbanur Rahman recalled, police officers threatened to chain-gang the entire Rahman family to the police station if the couple refused to come with them for questioning. No charges were filed against the couple. The police have declined to comment on the case because it is under investigation.

On Sept. 8, in circumstances that remain murky, the police persuaded Ms. Todi to go home to her parents, Mr. Rahman’s brother said, with a written assurance that she could return to her husband in a week.

She did not, and it left Mr. Rahman distraught. He spent nights at the homes of friends and relatives. He sought out an attorney. When his family suggested that he may have to give up hope of reuniting with Ms. Todi, he became furious. “ ‘She is my life,’ he said,” Rukbanur Rahman recalled. “He was deeply in love.”

Two weeks later, Rizwanur Rahman’s body was found on the railroad tracks in another part of town. Federal investigators are trying to determine whether it was a case of murder or suicide.

BLOOD ON THE TRACKS - A city in need of radical rescue

Ruchir Joshi
The Telegraph, 39 September

This was supposed to be an upbeat column, a sort of positive ‘self-correction’ on the previous Thin Edge where, it was pointed out to me, I had perhaps been over-critical of the state of Calcutta and where I had even displayed my ignorance of initiatives under way that intend to change the city for the better. Two friends who have worked on a plan to rejuvenate an area of the Beliaghata Circular Canal immediately sent me their report, complete with the most beautiful and uplifting drawings of the projected transformation of the bastis adjacent to the water-body. Looking through it, I became for a moment a complete optimism-junkie.

Life, however, has its own plans and agenda of implementation. On Monday evening, I went to a friend’s to watch Team Chak De’s improbable victory in the Twenty20 World Cup. As the skies played Götterdämmerung outside, India squeaked through and we all celebrated. As I began my river-trek home from Ballygunge, I was exhilarated. I hadn’t walked through a flood like this since 1988 and I was filled with the kind of twisted nostalgia that only Calcutta can throw up. It was dangerous, one could have died either through electrocution, open man-hole drowning or just plain old disease, but I did it, I waded through a mile of thigh-deep filth for old times’ sake. On my way, with cars creating surf-waves around me, I savoured the victory, but along with the elation I found I was carrying a cold fury at the captain of Pakistan.

Mukul Kesavan, one of the fastest draws of articulation in the country, had Shoaib Malik toasted, egged and baconed in his blog by breakfast the next day. The offending sentences, spoken within fifteen feet of the celebrating Pathan brothers, and no doubt with Zaheer Khan, Munaf Patel and Wasim Jaffer watching on TV were: “First of all I want to say something over here. I want to thank you back home Pakistan and where the Muslim lives all over the world.” Followed by an apology to all Muslims everywhere for losing the match, and by implication, drowning their collective hopes. As Mukul pointed out, this was no small an insult to all the different players, with their diverse ethnicities and religions who constitute the mix of international cricket.

Within a day, though, it was brought home to all of us that the “Muslim lives” in Calcutta too.

The story, for those just tuning in, goes something like this. A young Muslim man, a graphic designer, and a young Hindu woman, his student, fall in love with each other. The girl comes from a business family, the boy is nowhere near as rich, coming as he does from a family that is at the bottom edge of middle-class. The two (both of them in their twenties) marry against the wishes of the girl’s family and all hell breaks loose: high-level city police officers apparently get involved, all of them allegedly pressurizing the young man to divorce his wife. When she is summoned to the thana, the young woman categorically states that she has married of her own free will, but this cuts no ice with the authorities, who summon her three times without a case. A man who witnessed the marriage allegedly receives threatening phone calls from a top uniform.

Threats of violence and worse explode around the young couple, aimed specifically at the husband. A few days later, the husband is found dead on the tracks of a local train line; the young man has just the day before written up a complaint against the police and his wife’s father; he is on his way, shaved and spruced up to meet someone about the matter; there is a mobile call from him where he tells the person he is meeting that he will be there in fifteen minutes.

There seems to be no plausible reason for suicide, but the city’s chief police officer declares that the young man has obviously killed himself, even before the result of the autopsy is out. The honourable police commissioner also tells the press that he finds it completely understandable that a family that has reared a daughter for 23 years should react badly when the daughter marries someone of a different “social status”. He also defends his officers for playing “marriage counsellors” in trying to dissolve what is a clear-cut legal union between two consenting adults. To counter the uproar (thankfully, there is an uproar) the state government and the police brass run a tight criss-cross of defence, backing each other while proclaiming all the time that a “proper” enquiry will be conducted and the guilty (if there are any guilty to be found, in what is, after all, a “suicide”) will be punished.

While criticizing my last column, one friend here had a jibe: “Don’t compare Calcutta to Ahmedabad and all that nice architecture-sharkitecture! After March ‘02, we know exactly what Narendra Modi’s idea of town-planning is!” Hats off, I now have to say to that friend, congratulations, as small jobs go, Modi and Togadia could hardly have done this one better.

*****

Thinking about it, though, this case throws a direct spotlight on exactly the issues I intended to talk about earlier. There is a nexus between venal businessmen and local authorities that needs to be broken, and broken quickly. There is the marginalization of minorities in this city, where many of the worst basti areas are populated by poor Muslims, in which context the police commissioner’s comment about different “social status” veers very close to a thin euphemism, poor = muslim = poor. There is a general lawlessness that stretches from rampant over-building to lethal traffic and unlicensed auto-rickshaws and buses, in which the death of Rizwanur Rahman is a small, ugly nugget.

Despite all our pretensions and delusions to the contrary, this city is essentially a small-minded place, ‘conservative’ in the expletive sense of the word, where two people from different classes, communities, religions can not have an easy time falling and staying in love. Despite all the new cash streaking around, there is general resistance to mobility, where neither businessman nor policeman can see even an educated, computer-literate guy as a man with a potential for making something of himself. Finally, there is the ongoing haemorrhage of failures on the part of the state government, failures which claim as their victims law, justice, secularism, socialism and the general health of citizens, both mental and physical.

This, at the base line, is what we have to work with. This is where we have to find ways to be positive and optimistic, and try and save our city and the countryside that surrounds it. The question, as always, is where do you start to untangle this clutch of knots which have now formed an Übermass, a mega-knot we like to call Calcutta? If you pull one way something else tightens somewhere else, if you pull the other way, another complication cancers up elsewhere, all of it leading to a constant reproduction of the city’s problems.

On Friday there was a candle light gathering at St Xavier’s College in memory of Rizwanur and as a mark of silent protest at his death. The thousand or so people gathered there came from all sides of the city, many of them young students.

Perhaps another way of remembering Rizwanur might be to put down a set of basic principles for the transformation of this city. Here is one such possible list:

1. Calcutta is a city in need of radical rescue. It needs to be saved from deep pollution (which affects the children of both the rich and the poor), murderously chaotic traffic, the lack of civic amenities, general and widespread lawlessness and anarchically rampant and dangerous over-construction. This situation is at a level of dire emergency. The over-used phrase, “on a war-footing”, is, in this context, neither inappropriate nor over-dramatic, it is merely apt.

2. The only way to proceed is through democratic consultation and consensus, where the people who constitute the city are involved in the decisions that will obviously directly affect them. This consensus then has to lead to a series of probably tough and definitely prompt actions taken by different democratically constituted and empowered bodies whose procedures are transparent and accountable.

3. While radical steps need to be taken with the utmost expediency, each of these should be taken, as far as possible, with the future of the city in mind. There should be a vision of Calcutta in 2012, in 2017, in 2022. The question has to be kept in mind: what kind of a city will Calcutta be in twenty years for a child who is born now?

Without undue sentiment, with the coldest of resolves, it is now time to start creating a city where a couple like Priyanka and Rizwanur can have a life that they want.

Rizwan outrage goes Online

Statesman News Service

KOLKATA, Oct. 8: The tragic tale of Rizwan-ur Rehman and Priyanka Todi has caught the imagination of the Internet community. Blogs, forums and Internet polls flood the webpage when you type in “Rizwan-ur Rehman” in any search engine. Netizens are forming friendships over their common feeling for the Muslim young man who they believe had to pay with his life for his love for a Hindu girl.

Bloggers vent their feelings on Rizwan-ur’s untimely death. On web forums, netizens use strong words to talk about what has happened, such as on Love’s Ragpicker Tales. Some have written poems and uploaded them on online forums. One such poem is Good Night, Sweet Prince: to Rizwanur Rehman”. Another is called Song dedicated to Rizwanur Rehman: Come on to me...” The poet explains the song saying: “Rizwanur is Love’s Ragpicker... Priyanka should be left undisturbed with her legitimate tears, wherever she is now...”

On Live Like a Flame, a netizen urges those who visit the page to join a worldwide protest against those who caused young Rizwan-ur’s untimely death. A petition to the chief minister of the state can be signed by all those who endorse “Justice for Rizwan-ur”. At the time that this story was written, there were 1503 signatures registered on the website called www.petitiononline.com.

On Orkut too, many communities have been created with former students of Rizwan-ur Rehman being their members. Here people have joined in various forum discussions that include asking people to stand up and put up a fight for justice to calling on members to boycott Lux hosiery products. Many polls have been conducted as well and the response is overwhelming.

One such poll done by the ‘Rizwan Sir fans club’ community, which had asked members to vote on whether they believe Rizwan will get justice from law, has witnessed a split result. While 47 per cent had said yes, 52 per cent of the respondents feel otherwise. The same community had done a poll to know whether students of Rizwan-ur were fighting enough for his cause. In this case, 75 per cent of the respondents felt that they were not doing what should have been done. Another poll conducted by the ‘Arena Multimedia Chowringee’ community had asked members whether Rizwan-ur should have given in to the pressure to save his life. This too had yielded split result.

CP blames media

KOLKATA, Oct. 8: Mr Jyoti Basu today reiterated that the CP’s remarks in the Rizwan case at a Press conference two days after the youth’s mysterious death “were unheard of.” The CPI state secretary has written to Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee demanding removal of the CP and two other IPS officers whose names have figured “for the sake of impartial probe.

However, the CP submitted before the human rights commission that his statements were not accurately reported by the media, Mr B Mahapatra, secretary of the commission said. The commission has asked the electronic media houses to submit to it video recordings of the Press conference. The panel will deliberate on the report on 12 October. n SNS

See also Kolkata Plus

Caught in a phalanx

Uday Basu
The Statesman, 9 October

‘Ah, me! It’s a wicked world and when a clever man turns his brains to crime, it is the worst of all.”

Sherlock Holmes conjured up such a dark vision of the world when he was confronted with an inveterate criminal who was planning to snuff out the life of one of his step-daughters after murdering her twin sister in a blood-curdling manner for grabbing money.

But we don’t need a Sherlock Holmes to pinpoint who the “clever man” is and how he turned his brains to crime to make the “wicked” world the “worst of all” for the suave, young Rizwan-ur-Rehman whose only “crime” was to forget his socio-economic standing because he believed love doesn’t admit such artificial barriers.

Since he was a student of English literature, it’s tempting to conjecture whether he had read Browning’s famous lines: “It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

And this brings us to another connoisseur of literature who also happens to be the state’s chief minister who has been crying himself hoarse about the need for the administration he presides to be “sensitive, humane and prompt” in dealing with the people’s problems. His police behaved exactly the way their minister-cum-chief minister had asked them not to in Rizwan’s case, except that they were frightfully prompt. But their swiftness was not to give protection to the hapless youth, but to hound and harry him so that he ended up in a lump of lifeless flesh.

Ironically, it was the same Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who as home minister in the Jyoti Basu Cabinet, took only a few days to show the then Police Commissioner, BK Saha, the door. Saha’s misdemeanour was that a criminal, a terror in the area surrounding the Keorotola crematorium repeatedly called out his name in a drunken state when he wasn’t allowed to be inside the crematorium to be a witness along with the city’s cultural icons the cremation of Satyajit Ray.

This reporter, who was covering the funeral, can distinctly remember the words of the criminal: “How is it that I can’t be let in? The whole day I have worked to ensure all’s well here. Where’s Saha-da (the CP)?”

The then deputy commissioner (headquarters) swung into action trying to push him away, but the drunken man had such strength that he knocked him out of his way. A whole police contingent went to the DC’s rescue as bricks were showered on one side of the crematorium.

When the CP was asked within minutes that the criminal had taken his name, he flatly denied he knew him. Mr Bhattacharjee, who was present at the funeral, requested the media at the crematorium not to go overboard with the ugly incident as international attention had been drawn to Ray’s last journey, but he assured them that he would act appropriately in a few days. He kept his word and Saha was unceremoniously removed from his post.

But much water has flown down the Ganga since then. Mr Bhattacharjee is now the chief minister and the CP of the day, unlike the CP of the other day, is his protege, whom he declared to be his candidate for the election to the CAB president’s post, though he lost.

In a strange twist of coincidence the CAB turns out to be Mr Bhattacharjee’s nemesis. When the chief minister announced that the CP, Mr Prasun Mukherjee, was his candidate for the CAB top post, he was at the apogee of his political success. The CPI-M had been returned to power with a thumping majority, decimating the Opposition and there was a chorus of praise from his shameless sycophants who attributed the electoral victory to Mr Bhattacharjee alone.

And this got into his head so much that he thundered that the defeat of his candidate in the CAB elections meant the “triumph of evil over good” and wanted the democratically elected president to immediately step down.

Such a demand was so patently preposterous that Mr Jyoti Basu wondered “how an elected person can be asked to leave office like that.”

Then followed in a bewildering and breathtaking succession a series of cataclysmic events that made it crystal clear that Mr Bhattacharjee had lost his touch with the common man, the ill-fed, ill-clad, tiller who often cannot live from hand to mouth.

Singur and Nandigram proved beyond doubt that Mr Bhattacharjee’s heart bleeds more for the rich, the scheming, cunning operators than for the naive, innocent men, women and children. Police brutality perpetrated on these villagers is now history or rather part of a new folklore of resistance against Marxist sham.

At this stage, a new plot seems to have been hatched by some of the dramatis personae of the CAB! An assistant secretary, the brother of a high profile cricketer and himself no mean cricketer, “introduces” Mr Ashok Todi to the CP, who doubles as CAB president, to “help” him out in his “personal, family problem” about which he claimed to have no inkling.

Not even a child would accept the CP’s claim that this was how he came to know Mr Todi. That’s indeed bad cricket and worse criminal jurisprudence!

The Marxists have a proven record of interfering with the personal lives of the state’s people, especially in their conjugal life. The CPI-M women’s wing and local committees have all these years played a dubious role in “settling” marital disputes. The party’s might has been in evidence in forcing more often than not young men and their relatives to accept a solution that they hated most fearing reprisals from the cadres.

But when the police replace CPI-M satraps, the result can be infinitely more horrendous because they have the state machinery, the third degree and all other tricks of their trade at their disposal. And when money and political clout join the police, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Rizwan got himself into a phalanx that was in a way similar to the one that the ill-fated Abhimanyu of the Mahabharata confronted. How could he come out of it alive?

(The author is a Special Representative of The Statesman, Kolkata)