Inhuman Cut By Husband, Unkindest By SIR

When I saw the story (Image 01 – below) in The Times of India, Calcutta, it rang a bell. Some stories die hard.

Four years ago, Renu Khatun, then in her early 20s, had her right palm chopped off by her husband and his friends because he did not want her to accept a nursing job she landed at a government hospital a few days earlier.

The story was published by all newspapers and I claim no particular credit other than setting aside the usual pettiness— to which I was also susceptible — that prevents newspapers from playing up a story if a rival paper’s coverage was better. The Times of India carried the first report on the attack on Page 1, while The Telegraph inside because of my poor judgement call. But The Telegraph, which I edited then, was compelled to play the story on Page 1 the next day (Image 02) because of what Khatun attempted.

Khatun stunned everyone by turning the instance of inhuman domestic violence into tenacious and gritty toil to empower herself. Within 48 hours of losing her right palm, she started practising from her hospital bed to write with her left hand, determined to write to chief minister Mamata Banerjee to keep her job offer alive. “My husband cut off my hand to stop me from working, but I will work and prove him wrong,” Khatun said.

The next day, chief minister Mamata Banerjee announced that Khatun would get her job (Image 03). Within a few days, a government official handed over her appointment letter (Image 04). The chief minister met her later.

In April 2023, The Times of India reported (Image 05) that she was fitted with a prosthetic limb. (Screenshots of the reports below.)

Now, Renu Khatun’s name has been deleted from the voter’s list, probably because several names had been mapped to her father’s name in the 2002 list. Khatun has several siblings.

Khatun says she had submitted all the required documents.

If Khatun cannot vote, who can? If If India is not proud to proclaim Khatun as the nation’s daugher even without looking at her documents, who should it be proud of, the minister who purportedly reinvented modern science a few days ago, played super-matchmaker and made sure that the equator “met” the tropic of cancer in Ujjain?

Eerily, I recall that only last night I was telling some friends, quoting Col Slade from Scent of a Woman, how “there is no prosthetic for an amputated spirit”. The context was about a section of renowned journalists selling their souls and joining the bhaktwagon.

I hope the Supreme Court, which is hearing the issue, will take up the deletion of Renu Khatun’s name. Yesterday, the apex court asked the tribunals to look into the deletion of the name of the grandson of Nandalal Bose who illustrated the original manuscript of the Constitution. The Times of India had flagged the issue in its edition on Monday.

Newspapers still matter — if they do their job.