A woman holds a candle during a vigil in Mumbai, India, at a rally condemning the rape and murder of a trainee medic at a government-run hospital in Kolkata. [Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters]Published On 15 Aug 202415 Aug 2024
Thousands of women and men marched across several Indian cities as protests against the rape and murder of a doctor escalated.
Holding candles and posters that read “reclaim the night”, they held rallies in several cities, including Kolkata in eastern India, where the body of the trainee doctor was found last week, also triggering protests by fellow medics demanding better and safer working conditions.
Many government hospitals in cities across India suspended all services except emergency departments earlier this week, as junior doctors sat outside in protest, demanding justice for the victim.
The 31-year-old doctor was found dead on Friday. Police said she had been raped and murdered and one person was subsequently arrested in connection with the crime.
“As a society, we have to think about the atrocities being committed against our mothers, daughters and sisters. There is outrage against this in the country. I can feel this outrage,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Thursday in an address to the nation on Independence Day but did not specifically refer to the Kolkata case.
Crimes against women in India rose 4 percent in 2022 from the previous year, data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), released late last year, showed.
The protesters in Kolkata, who marched under the slogan “reclaim the night”, called for the tackling of violence against women and held up handwritten signs demanding action. [Sahiba Chawdhary/Reuters]Activists from rights groups and students shouted slogans as they participated in the rally demanding punishment for those involved in the crime, in Kolkata. [Bikas Das/AP Photo]Services in some medical centres were halted indefinitely, and marches and vigils shed light on sexual violence as well as doctors’ safety. [Sahiba Chawdhary/Reuters]A 31-year-old trainee doctor’s body, bearing multiple injuries, was found on August 9 in a government teaching hospital in Kolkata. [Sahiba Chawdhary/Reuters]The parents of the victim were initially told “by hospital authorities that their daughter had committed suicide”, lawyer and women’s rights activist Vrinda Grover told Al Jazeera. But an autopsy confirmed she was raped and killed. [Bikas Das/AP Photo]Laws against sexual violence were made stricter following a rape case in 2012, when a 22-year-old physiotherapy intern was gang-raped and murdered on a bus. [Sahiba Chawdhary/Reuters]Sexual violence is rampant in India, where 90 rapes were reported on average every day in 2022. [Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters]People participate in a candlelight vigil held outside Jadavpur University in Kolkata. [Sahiba Chawdhary/Reuters]Doctors held protests across the country, from New Delhi, Chandigarh, and Lucknow in the north to Goa in the south. [Sahiba Chawdhary/Reuters]
