“My name is Suzette Jordan and I don’t want to be known any longer as the victim of Calcutta’s Park Street rape,” Jordan said in an interview to the BBC in 2013.  She made that powerful statement 16 months after she was raped by a group of five men in the heart of Kolkata. The image of Suzette, her face unmasked, marching in step with activists to protest the spate of rapes in Bengal, will remain in the collective memory of the people of Kolkata and the rest of the country.

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Suzette died in a hospital in Kolkata yesterday. She was suffering from meningoencephalitis. Despite the hard battles that she fought to live a life of dignity, Suzette did not finally get to see justice done to her. More than two years later, her rapists are still to be convicted and sentenced.

On the one hand, the agencies entrusted with the responsibility to deliver justice feel no urgency to bring relief to victims. On the other hand, the victims are made to suffer social stigmatization and ostracisation.  One can only despair and rage at the perverse reality that stares us in the face.

Let’s rewind to that evening in 2012. Suzette went out with her friends to have a few drinks at a nightclub on Park Street, famous for showcasing Kolkata’s nightlife. On her way back home, the 37-year-old single mother of two daughters was brutally gang-raped and thrown off a car onto the street.

“Over the next fifteen months, Suzette Jordan became a blurred image on our television screens, a silhouette, a disembodied voice with an identifying label: the Park Street rape victim,” Sandip Roy wrote in an article in Firstpost. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, Suzette is one of the 68 “anonymous” women who reported having been raped in Calcutta in 2012. Like every other rape survivor, Suzette too was thrown into a ruthlessly misogynist world where people judged her for having gone out for a drink; judged her for being a single mother; judged her for having taken a lift. In other words, like in the documentary India’s Daughter (whose telecast is now banned in India,) the rape survivor was put in the dock for the violent sexual crime that was committed against her. It may be pertinent to recall here the words of Mukesh, one of the rapists of Jyoti Singh in India’s Daughter: “A girl is far more responsible for her rape than a boy.”

That perverse sentiment was expressed over and over in Suzette’s case as well. Bengal’s political establishment, presided over by a woman chief minister, the neighbours and self-styled guardians of morality, pointed fingers at the victim. Blithely shrugging off the rape, Mamata Banerjee described the incident as a sajano ghatana (manufactured incident). Meanwhile, her cabinet colleague — men and women — questioned Suzette’s character. Why should a mother of two be at a discotheque late at night?  Trinamool MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar even suggested the rape was the result of a “dispute between a client and the girl.”

In her 2013 BBC interview Suzette said, “After the incident, I had to move out from my residence and move elsewhere in the city. Neighbours made it difficult for me to live in that area.” Despite help from women activists, Suzette could not get a job to support herself and her family. Sadly enough, the incident once again busted the myths that have been constructed around Bengal as a progressive, women-friendly state. Pushed to the wall, Suzette said that had it not been for her daughter she would have found it difficult to get on with her life.

Yet in the end, if Suzette’s narrative was one of sorrow and frustration, it was equally one of inspiration in courage.  In her 2013 BBC interview, Suzette said: “Don’t distort my voice, don’t blur my picture.” 

The author is Editor dna of thought