RG Kar rape-murder: President Murmu gives her first reaction; says ‘enough is enough’, calls for self-introspection

President Murmu reacts to Kolkata doctor rape-murder case at RG Kar

In her first reaction to the gruesome rape and murder of a trainee doctor at the state-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata, President Droupadi Murmu on Wednesday said that she was “dismayed and horrified” over the incident and asked the country to wake up to the “perversion” of crimes against women.

In a powerful article titled “Women’s Safety: Enough is Enough“, President Droupadi Murmu expressed her profound outrage over the recent increase in crimes against women, underscoring the urgent need for self-introspection to address the root causes of this disturbing trend. The article, which features the subheading “The recent spate of crimes against women should force honest self-introspection to uncover the roots of the malaise”, highlights the impact these incidents have on the nation’s esteemed record of women’s empowerment.

The President added that no civilized society can allow daughters and sisters to be subjected to such atrocities. “The nation is bound to be outraged, and so am I,” she wrote.

In her article, President Murmu, who views herself as a representative of this empowerment, emphasized that while training in self-defense and martial arts is crucial—particularly for girls—it alone cannot ensure safety. She pointed out that women’s vulnerability is shaped by a complex array of factors beyond mere physical preparedness.

The President’s remarks reflect a broader call for comprehensive measures to address and mitigate the challenges women face, emphasizing that true empowerment goes beyond individual skills to encompass societal and systemic change.

President Murmu said that she was in a predicament over her reply when some schoolchildren who had come to the Rashtrapati Bhavan on the occasion of Raksha Bandhan “asked me innocently if they could be assured that there would be no recurrence of the Nirbhaya-type incident in future”.

“Obviously, the full answer to that question can come only from our society. For that to happen, what is needed first of all is honest, unbiased self-introspection. The time has come when we as a society need to ask ourselves some difficult questions. Where have we erred? And what can we do to remove the errors? Without finding out the answer to that question, the half of our population cannot live as freely as the other half,” she maintained.

The President particularly called out the mindset that objectifies women but noted that it was not limited to India only. She also highlighted the collective amnesia that grips society once the initial shock of a heinous crime loses its impact.

She said, “I am of the firm belief that we should not let amnesia prevail over the memory of such criminality. Let us deal with this perversion in a comprehensive manner so as to curb it right at the beginning. We can do this only if we honour the memory of the victims by cultivating a social culture of remembering them to remind us of our failures in the past and prepare us to be more vigilant in the future.

We owe it to our daughters to remove the hurdles from their path of winning freedom from fear. Then we can collectively give a firm answer to the innocent query of those children in the next Raksha Bandhan. Let us collectively say enough is enough.”

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