Protesting junior doctors in West Bengal defied a Supreme Court order, asking them to resume work by 5 pm on Tuesday. They would continue with their protest till their demands are met and the rape and murder victim of the RG Kar Hospital gets justice. They also refused to meet state Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.<\/p>\n
Flashback to 7 January, 1993. Banerjee, then 38, was a junior minister of sports and youth affairs in P.V. Narasimha Rao<\/a>\u2019s Congress government in the Centre, besides being a Youth Congress leader.<\/p>\n Jyoti Basu reigned as Chief Minister of the Marxist bastion from Writers\u2019 Buildings, the colonial-era red brick building that housed the state secretariat. (Banerjee shifted the secretariat to a building in Howrah across the river after coming to power).<\/p>\n It was a cold and windy day. The city was calm after the communal riots that followed the 6 December 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The press enclosure was on the first floor and strategically located opposite the rooms of the Chief Minister and senior colleagues. Through its glass walls, reporters could see the comings and goings of the ministers and their visitors.<\/p>\n Banerjee had parked herself on a sit-in dharna outside Chief Minister\u00a0Basu\u2019s room, with Dipali Basak<\/a>, a deaf-mute girl from Phulia in Nadia district, who had allegedly been raped by a local Communist Party of India-Marxist hoodlum. The police had refused to register a criminal case. Banerjee wanted the hoodlum arrested.<\/p>\n There was no way the state government would give in to Banerjee\u2019s demand that one such hoodlum be booked. \u00a0Banerjee had turned up at the Chief Minister\u2019s office in her trademark white cotton saree and hawai chappals with the girl.<\/p>\n The administration claimed Banerjee did not have an appointment. Basu wasn\u2019t in his office. Joykrishna Ghosh, Basu\u2019s all-powerful executive assistant, asked Banerjee several times to leave. Manish Gupta<\/a>, then the home secretary, could be seen entering and leaving Chief Secretary N. Krishnamurthy<\/a>\u2019s room quite a few times.<\/p>\n Basu\u2019s room had two doors. Banerjee had blocked the front. Basu could have entered through the other door, but he wasn\u2019t really the kind of man who would do that. By 4 pm, a posse of women police had trooped in and encircled Banerjee and Basak. She was told she would have to leave as the Chief Minister had no time to see her.<\/p>\n Banerjee refused. Entered Gautam Mohan Chakrabarti, the deputy commissioner who headed the detective department, in the scene.<\/p>\n At 4.30 pm, the tense stand-off erupted in a brief burst of violence. Banerjee had to be removed as Basu was about to arrive. As she wasn\u2019t going voluntarily, she would have to be removed with force.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t a pretty sight. The policewomen yanked at Banerjee\u2019s hair and rained blows on the junior minister and the rape victim with her. Then they hauled a screaming and struggling Banerjee and the girl and carried them to the ground floor, pushed them into a police van and took them to the Lalbazar headquarters of the Kolkata Police down the road.<\/p>\n All through, Banerjee kept screaming, in pain, and demanding justice for the girl, at the top of her voice, and hurling abuse at the Left Front government for refusing to arrest the rapist.<\/p>\n The police stopped reporters from following her down the stairs. There was a lathi charge and quite a few cameras were smashed. We watched from the balcony as the van carrying her sped away.<\/p>\n Basu then was also in charge of the home ministry, while Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee<\/a>, who later became Chief Minister, was in charge of information and cultural affairs. Tushar Talukdar<\/a> was Calcutta\u2019s police chief and Abani Mohan Joardar<\/a> his deputy commissioner.<\/p>\n In September 1993, a local paper reported that Basak, the rape victim, had given birth to a girl at an ashram near Dhapa, off Kolkata\u2019s Eastern Metropolitan Bypass. Banerjee wasn\u2019t mentioned in the report.<\/p>\n