A day after a Kolkata court sent three people to the gallows in the brutal Kamduni gang rape case, Tumpa Koyal and Mousumi Koyal – the faces of an over two-year-old movement championing the victim’s cause – voiced their willingness to plunge into West Bengal’s political landscape.
The duo, along with members of social activism group Aakranto Amra (We The Victims), are likely to contest in the forthcoming Bengal assembly polls as independents. They may be backed by either the Congress or the CPI(M).
Aakranto Amra, led from the front by Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra, has been organising protests for the last two-and-a-half years to decry atrocities such as the Kamduni rape-murder and election-related violence. Mahapatra began his crusade after he was arrested in April 2012 for circulating a cartoon that allegedly lampooned state chief minister Mamata Banerjee and then party general secretary Mukul Roy.
With barely three months to go for the polls, forum members recently held separate meetings with CPI(M) mandarins as well as Bengal Congress president Adhir Chowdhury to discuss their participation in the electoral process. “We want to free Bengal from the misrule of the Trinamool Congress. Hence, we are willing to field some of our members, including Mousumi and Tumpa, as independent candidates for the assembly elections with support from opposition parties,” Mahapatra, convenor of Aakranto Aamra, told HT.
He said discussions have also been held with Left Front chairperson Biman Bose and CPI(M) state secretary Suryakanta Mishra, and their proposal has been taken under consideration. “We had planned to hold talks with the BJP leadership as well. However, CPI(M) leaders made it clear that they won’t be with us if we seek saffron support,” Mahapatra added.
Another prominent face of the forum is retired Supreme Court justice AK Ganguly, who was part of the bench that delivered a February 2012 verdict quashing 122 2G licences issued by the erstwhile UPA government. However, when he got embroiled in an alleged sexual harassment case as the head of the West Bengal Human Rights Commission a few years later, the Trinamool Congress did everything in its power to make him step down.
Tumpa and Mousumi, both residents of Kamduni, had created a flutter when they confronted Banerjee with tough questions after the brutal gang rape and murder of a 20-year-old student of Derozio College on June 7, 2013. A city court sentenced three of the convicts to death and awarded the life sentence to three others on Saturday.
Aakaranto Amra, with a membership of 130, was formed in July 2014.
