[But lately Mr. Jha has been feeling hopeful, he said in an
interview, mainly because his daughter’s case is now in the hands of Damayanti
Sen, a police official who propelled the investigation into the high-profile
Park Street rape case of 2012. She also has a reputation for sensitivity, which
is rare among
police officers who handle rape cases.]
By Anuradha Sharma
 |
| Damayanti Sen |
His daughter died of her burns in a Kolkata hospital in
December, and he petitioned the Calcutta High Court to bring in the Central
Bureau of Investigation because he said the local police had refused to help,
instead telling him to go back to Bihar, his home state.
Mr. Jha said the family was forced to flee Madhyamgram after receiving
threats from the rapists, who then tracked them down in the Dumdum area north
of Kolkata and began threatening them again. As word of the rape case spread
through the neighborhood, the Jhas’ new landlady asked them to move out.
Soon afterward, the daughter was set on fire. Early news reports
said she had tried to commit suicide, but the police said the dying girl had
told them that her rapists’ friends were responsible. After she died, the Jha
family moved again.
But lately Mr. Jha has been feeling hopeful, he said in an
interview, mainly because his daughter’s case is now in the hands of Damayanti
Sen, a police official who propelled the investigation into the high-profile
Park Street rape case of 2012. She also has a reputation for sensitivity, which
is rare among
police officers who handle rape cases.
Following Mr. Jha’s petition, the Calcutta High Court on Jan. 20
ordered Ms. Sen, a senior Indian Police Service officer with the West Bengal
Police and deputy inspector general of the state Criminal Investigation
Department, to look into Mr. Jha’s daughter’s case. She submitted her
findings to the court on Monday.
Ms. Sen interviewed the Jhas in early February at the family’s
current accommodation near Nimtala Ghat in north Kolkata.
“She was very warm, gentle and spoke to us reassuringly,” Mr.
Jha told India Ink. “We trust her completely.”
Ms. Sen first made headlines in 2012 when she investigated a
rape case in Kolkata in February that year, which was known in India as the
Park Street case. Suzette Jordan,
then 37, said a man had raped her inside a moving car, aided by his friends,
after she accepted the offer of a ride outside a club on Park Street in
Kolkata. (Indian laws prohibit the identification of rape victims, but Ms.
Jordan has made her identity known to the public.)
At the time, West Bengal’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, had
summarily dismissed the allegation by Ms. Jordan as a “fabricated” story, made
up to make her government look bad.
But after her investigation, Ms. Sen determined that Ms. Jordan
had been indeed been raped on the night of Feb. 5, 2012, and her report led to
the arrest of
three men on charges of gang rape for their roles in abetting the crime,
criminal conspiracy and criminal intimidation. The police have yet to find two
other suspects, including the man accused of raping her.
For Ms. Jordan, Ms. Sen’s treatment of the case was an immense
relief after the indifference she said she encountered from other police
officers.
“When I first went to the police with my complaint, they refused
to listen to me,” said Ms. Jordan. “I was humiliated and reviled. Even the
chief minister, who herself is a symbol of women empowerment, did not believe
me. It was Damayanti Sen who stood by me.”
While Ms. Jordan called Ms. Sen “a tigress” and “a champ,” and
there was widespread praise for her in the news media and on social media,
the state government quickly transferred her from the post of joint
commissioner of police in the crime division in Kolkata to the northern Kolkata
suburb of Barrackpore as a deputy inspector general in charge of training,
considered a lower-profile position in police circles.
But Ms. Sen later went on to become the deputy inspector general
in the mountain range around Darjeeling and is now back in Kolkata with the
Criminal Investigation Department.
Small and soft-spoken, Ms. Sen is one of the dozen or so female
Indian Police Service officers in the state. Reticent with the news media, she
does not give interviews or engage in small talk with crime reporters, never
going beyond her brief in news conferences. She did not answer repeated
requests from India Ink for an interview.
In previous interviews, she has played down the idea that she
broke the glass ceiling at the Kolkata police headquarters. “I don’t think that
women are better or worse off in a job,” she told The
Telegraph in Kolkata. “The only reason people ask a lot of questions related to
my gender is because there are fewer women in my profession now than men. But
as that changes, people will stop being so interested.”
Ms. Sen joined the police force in 1996 soon after completing
her master’s course in economics, receiving high marks as both an undergraduate
and a graduate student. “She was brilliant, hard-working and focused without
being boringly studious,” said Joyashree Roy, her teacher at Jadavpur
University in Kolkata. “She was very clear about her goal to be in the civil
services.”
Mr. Jha’s lawyer, Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, who is also a
former mayor of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, called her “very efficient,
balanced and poised.”
“I’ve seen her handle law and order situations and unruly
demonstrations with perfect ease,” he said.
Very little is known about her personal life, except that she is
married to a teacher, Rajat Shubhro Sen, and has a son of school-going age,
Arjun, according to The Telegraph.
Her colleagues, including Jawed Shamin, the police inspector
general and co-investigator on the Park Street case, declined to speak about
her, citing her aversion to publicity.
Some colleagues, who asked to remain anonymous, described her as
efficient, honest and meticulous. But two of the police officers also added
that Ms. Sen was “nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Like us, she’s doing her job, efficiently,” one said.
But for Ms. Jordan, the fact that Ms. Sen is “doing her job” is
extraordinary, given that the police officers who handled her case before Ms.
Sen had shown no interest in investigating her rape complaint.
“She is among the good cops,” Ms. Jordan said. “If only all the
police officers were like her.”
Anuradha Sharma is a freelance journalist based in Kolkata.
Follow her on Twitter at @NuraSharma.