Pal is just an addition to the list which Mamata is a part herself. And that defines the weak defense.
Ever since the horrific derogatory speech video of Trinamool Congress MP Tapas Pal surfaced, the party has been trying its best to shield him from the media.
First, party Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien posted a series of tweets regarding the issue condemning but adding that the party did not endorse “what he said weeks ago, being played on TV today”.
The first apology came from the side of Pal’s wife Nandini, and not from the party or Pal himself.
West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee came out to tell the media that Pal’s speech was indeed “a blunder” and that all requisite actions were taken against Pal by the party. But then she wondered: “What do you want? Should I kill him?”
She said that Pal, who was re-elected from the Krishnagar constituency in the recent Lok Sabha poll, had tendered an unconditional apology on her instruction. Pal wrote a letter saying that he had “no excuses to offer” and tendered his apology on the issue. His letter was posted on the TMC website too.
He had earlier tried to pass his “rape” remark as “raid”. Although the elections were long over by June 14, and the video was recorded after that, Pal tried to pass it on as one made during the elections.
The problem is not only Pal, but the whole TMC gang, including Mamata Didi is insensitive to the core about “rape” as a crime.
If one jogs the memory, we have a list of incidences where TMC fails to convince us that it is a party of bhadralok. For instance, the same O’Brien, who had condemned Pal’s speech with “all the authority” at his “command”, had once written on his blog that every rape “is a crime too many” and there should be “no question of which party the rapists may or may not belong to”.
Mamata, who wonders whether she should “kill” Pal and who had rightly excoriated the CPM when Jyoti Basu dismissed a rape case as just as an incident “that happens”, had infamously tried to frame the 2012 Park Street rape case as a “shajano golpo” or concocted story.
Also, when a woman had alleged that a group of robbers gang-raped her on a train in Burdwan, Mamata had said it was “false” because “she happens to be the wife of a CPM supporter”. As a matter of fact, the woman had been widowed 11 years.
After a horrendous gang-rape in Kamdhuni, Mamata had silenced the women there who were anguished over unlit roads and liquor dens. She had thundered at a rally in Minakhan: “Are all women in the state being raped?”
For the same Park Street rape case, TMC MP Kakoli Ghosh Dostidar had said that it “was not a rape at all” but a “misunderstanding” between a “woman and her client”.
For another Tollywood action hero and now MP, Dipak Adhikari or Dev got rape was a “joke”.
During a campaign trail, he had joked to the Bengal tabloid Ebela about the media attention his campaign was getting: “Enjoy…! It’s just like being raped, yaar. You can shout or you can enjoy.”
Pal is just an addition to the list which Mamata is a part herself. And that defines the weak defense.
