New Delhi: Singer and Trinamool Congress MP Kabir Suman may have sparked off fresh controversy within his party with a song he penned in support of IPS officer Damayanti Sen, who was recently demoted after she cracked the high profile Park Street rape case, and a severely critical commentary on party leader Mamata Banerjee on his website.
Suman posted the audio clip of the song 'Damayanti Sen chollen' on his website. Sen is Kolkata's first woman joint commissioner of police (Crime) who enjoyed public sympathy for doggedly chasing the crime.
Interestingly, Suman in a highly critical blog post, said it was a "different" Mamata who took over the charge of West Bengal from the person who would help destitute women before she assumed power.
"There was a time when Mamata, the Great Opposition Leader, always ran to any woman who might have suffered any assault and she always stood by the victim. But now it was a different Mamata. Gone was her past disposition. I, for one, felt pain. And then I heard a member of Mamata’s cabinet go to the extent of saying that the victim was in some escort service, as though that justified the rape. It was anger that I felt. I felt awkward because once I had been with these people in our collective struggle against the CPI(M)-led Left Front government," Suman said.
Sen is now the Deputy Inspector General of Police (Training) at Barrackpore, considered a demotion for an Indian Police Service officer.
Suman, who has recently fallen out with his party, said his reaction stemmed from the fact that Mamata called the Park Street "rape incident a fabricated story which was aimed at tarnishing her government’s image."
"I wish the new government hadn’t gone to this extent. But the fact that it did was a sad commentary on the ethical stance of the "poriborton" (change) government that millions of people had been looking up to following the long misrule of the Left Front government," he said.
On a derisive note, he blamed what he called his “senile degeneration to think that a police officer who has shown such professional excellence and independence of mind, a quality that is becoming progressively rare in our country should have been encouraged to continue in the crime department especially at a time when crime is known to be increasing in our city and in our state in general."
He wrote the song on April 9, 2012, and recorded it on a portable digital recorder using only the little stereo mic that came with the recorder. He said he used his old nylon string guitar.
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