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29-08-2024
Bureau Report + Agencies
NEW DELHI/ KOLKATA: Thousands of protesters blocked train tracks, halted buses and shouted slogans in India’s state of West Bengal on Wednesday in the latest demonstration following the brutal rape and murder of a trainee doctor.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is in opposition in the eastern state, called for a 12-hour state-wide protest strike after police fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse a march on Tuesday.
Most of Wednesday’s protesters were BJP workers, who also forced shops to shut, as authorities braced for more disruptions, with one police official saying 5,000 officers had been deployed to quell any violence.
Thousands of doctors, many of them on strike since the Aug. 9 crime was discovered, marched in the state’s capital of Kolkata, demanding justice for the victim and better workplace safety for doctors.
“If the state government had powers to make laws, I would have made a law in seven days that would mandate capital punishment in incidents of rape,” Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee told a rally.
Banerjee, a staunch political foe of Modi who has promised swift justice, appealed to the striking doctors to return to work, expressing sympathy for victims of sexual violence and their families.
Many university students were among Tuesday’s protesters, who had called for Banerjee’s resignation over her handling of the rape and murder of the 31-year-old doctor in a government-run hospital in Kolkata.
Indian President Droupadi Murmu said she was “dismayed and horrified” by the incident.
“No civilized society can allow daughters and sisters to be subjected to such atrocities,” sources quoted Murmu, a constitutional figurehead, as telling news agency PTI in her first comments on the crime. “Enough is enough.”
The nationwide outrage unleashed by the attack was similar to that which followed the 2012 gang-rape of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in New Delhi, but campaigners said tougher laws had not deterred sexual violence against women.
A police volunteer has been arrested for the crime and federal police have taken over its investigation.
Earlier, on 18th August, some Indian junior doctors remained off the job on Sunday as they demanded swift justice for a colleague who was raped and murdered, despite the end of a strike called by a big doctors’ association, while some other people held street protests.
Doctors across the country have held protests, candlelight marches and refused to see non-emergency patients in the past week after the killing of the 31-year-old postgraduate student of chest medicine in the early hours of Aug. 9 in the eastern city of Kolkata.
In solidarity with the doctors, thousands of people marched in the streets of Kolkata on Sunday evening chanting “we want justice”, as authorities in West Bengal state struggle to contain demonstrations against the horrific crime.
Women activists say the incident at the British colonial-era R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital has highlighted how women in India continue to suffer despite tougher laws following the gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in Delhi in 2012. “My daughter is gone but millions of sons and daughters are now with me,” the father of the victim, who cannot be identified under Indian law, told reporters late on Saturday, referring to the protesting doctors. “This has given me a lot of strength and I feel we will gain something out of it.”
