The harm three monkeys can do

You can’t act to stop a genocide because you can’t use the word ‘genocide’ until the entire community has been wiped out

Certain words are best left unsaid. Certain events are best left unnamed. Certain actions are best not acknowledged. Gandhi’s three monkeys, with eyes, ears, mouth covered, teach us this. Routinely, men and women in powerful positions teach us this.

We learnt it in Rwanda in 1994. The unspeakable word was genocide. 

We learnt it during the pandemic, when certain words were deliberately dis-missed from public view. The price of that is only becoming clearer now.
We learnt it in Kolkata on August 9. There was one word no one wanted to say until there was no choice but to say it. It was rape.

Giving something a name has consequences, not always benign. That was a common predicament during the pandemic. They said the virus spread through fomites rather than aerosols (wrong!). For a year, people cleaned surfaces rather than wear masks and practice social distancing. How many died because they were given the wrong precautions?

It happened again when Moderna announced its innovative new vaccine against COVID-19, using mRNA. Unlike traditional vaccines, which in-clude a protein from the virus’s surface, mRNA carries genetic material called RNA with instructions to help a human cell manufacture that protein.

There was a small hitch. mRNA’s composition and mode of action qualify it as a gene therapy product (GTP). Even Moderna knew that. However, the US Federal Drug Administration and the European Medicine Agency decided to go with vaccine, without offering technical or ethical reasons. Was it because the clinical tests for vaccine approval take only weeks and only require proof that it eliminates a disease’s symptoms? A GTP, on the other hand, requires years of testing for long-term safety and side effects.

We’re living with the aftermath. COVID is behind us, but the world is haunted by anti-vaccine sentiment and the fear of pernicious and unknown effects from the vaccine, such as myocarditis, thrombocytopenia, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, myelitis and others. 

Little information is available; no one looked for it in the first place.

In Rwanda, in 1994, information was not the issue. Everyone could see exactly what was going on and there was a word for it. Genocide. But the USA was not interested in stopping it.

Bill Clinton understood the three monkeys perfectly. In 1994, when Rwanda was drowning in rivers of the blood of Tutsis massacred by Hutus, the USA, like the shady Dr. Sandip Ghosh in Kolkata, knew that the word genocide must never be uttered, or else the US would be bound to get involved and prevent it, according to the Geneva Convention agreement it had signed on to. 

The American desire, according to a politician there, was for “zero degree of involvement, and zero degree of risk, and zero degree of pain and confusion”.

While Tutsi bodies hacked to pieces piled up outside churches and schools, the US government played with words. A government spokeswoman equivocated gingerly, saying that “the types of actions” and the “kind of brutality” under way needed to be examined “extremely carefully”, and whether the perpetrators were trying to eliminate a group in whole or in part. 

The conclusion was Orwellian and inevitable. It could not be called a genocide until the entire community had been wiped out. Therefore, the USA could only get involved in preventing genocide once all the Tutsis had been killed, and it could properly be called genocide.

In Kolkata, only one person had been killed. The word that could not be uttered there was rape.

The previous night, August 8, a 31-year-old doctor, only daughter of her parents, had been brutally raped, savaged and murdered in the seminar room of RG Kar Medical College. Her body was found the next morning around 9. The autopsy noted that she had been raped and sexually assaulted before being strangled to death.

Dr Sandip Ghosh, the hospital’s principal at that time, now comfortable in jail, understood that this was a three-monkey moment. The First Information Report is the first step in any case. You cannot start an investigation 
until there is an FIR.

An FIR tells the investigators what to investigate. If there is anything that is best left alone, not filing an FIR is the perfect way to do it.

The Supreme Court noted that in this case, the first step took almost 14 hours.

Sandip Ghosh called the chief cop at the police station, Abhijit Mondol to discuss how best to prevent the incident from turning into a police case. They hatched a plan.

Rushing to the scene, Mondol quickly registered a case of “death by unnatural causes”. Don’t say rape.

The parents were first told that their daughter was unwell and later that she had committed suicide. Don’t say rape.

Mondol bulldozed the stricken couple through the cremation of their daughter although they had been asking for a second autopsy. 

It was 6 pm by the time they registered a complaint. But Mondol delayed filing the FIR till almost midnight. 

It did not mention the word rape.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at [email protected]
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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