Rebel Trinamool Congress MP Kabir Suman has composed a song scathingly critical of the treatment meted out to Asian Games gold medallist Pinki Pramanik by police and other authorities in West Bengal after the athlete was accused of being a male and arrested for rape.
Pramanik is now under judicial custody and undergoing gender determination tests – which have seen her being taken from a private nursing home, to a district hospital and now to the state-run premier SSKM hospital.
“Desher janya rupor padak, desher janya sona/Relay race e tumi deshergorbo seta mone rakhbo na /Tomar linga jaachai porbo video te dhora aache/Mobile e tola sei chobi aaj internet e nache (You have won gold and silver for the country/ You did the country proud, winning medals in relay races, but we don’t want to remember that/ Your gender test has been videographed/ It’s doing a jig on internet),” said the bitterly sarcastic song.
Suman, a Trinamool Congress MP from Jadavpur Lok Sabha constituency, had earlier penned several songs and blogs criticising various steps of the Mamata Banerjee government. His songs had protested against the killing of Maoist leader Kishenji, suicide of peasants and the arrest of a professor for circulating cartoons of Banerjee and other Trinamoolleaders.
He has also penned songs criticising the police action against slum-dwellers of Nonadanga in east Kolkata and transfer of police officer Damayanti Sen, who played a big role in solving the rape of an Anglo-Indian woman in fashionable Park Street despite the chief minister calling the allegation cooked-up.
Suman has had a strained relationship with the Trinamool leadership after he raised his voice against alleged corruption among a section of party leaders and openly condemned the joint forces operation in the Maoist-affected districts of the state.
He is credited with having changed the face of modern Bengali music in the 1990s with the “jeebonmukhi” genre, writing and singing about people and their lives.