The rape victim at Park Street who had stood bravely against her tormentors to lodge a police complaint ignoring Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s claim that the incident was a “stage managed affair” died on Friday. She was suffering from meningoencephalitis. Joint Commissioner of Police Pallab Kanti Ghosh said, “she was suffering from illness and passed away this morning.”
A resident of Kolkata, she was gang-raped in a running car in which she had taken a lift at the up market Park Street area in February 2012. The news hit the national headlines after the Chief Minister claimed that it was a stage-managed affair drummed up by the Opposition to malign her Government. Her party MP Kakoli Ghoshdastidar even claimed that the whole incident was matter between a “woman and her client.”
Named Susan Jordan, she never hid her identity from the media saying, “it is those who have perpetrated the crime should hide their identities not me.” She took part in all the movements against crime against women since 2013.
The gang-rape produced a chain of political events in Bengal after the IPS officer in charge of the case Damayanti Sen arrested the culprits and claimed “the victim was wronged against.” The officer then the DCP Detective Department was later transferred out of Kolkata for apparently failing to tow the official line of those in power.
Jordan never stepped back from her brave stance and deposed before the police and got her evidence recorded before her death despite repeated threat calls from her tormentors. The prime accused in the case Kader Kan is still at large. The brave woman who died on Friday leaving behind two children worked as a rape consultant after she failed to find jobs in various places.
Giving her reactions to the “sad death of a brave woman” social worker Saswati Ghosh said, “Bengal not only lost a lost a brave woman, but also a face of protest against crime against women.”