Women hold candles as they take part in the Reclaim the Night March on August 15 to condemn the rape and murder of a medical intern at a government-run hospital in Kolkata, West Bengal. Credit – Avijit Ghosh—SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
TThe march began with a call on social media that quickly went viral: “For women’s independence on the midnight of independence,” a Facebook post after by 29-year-old student Rimjhim Sinha. As India celebrated 77 years of independence from British colonial rule on August 15, women across the country took to the streets in anger over a brutal case of alleged rape and murder that took place in the city of Kolkata last week.
Tens of thousands of women and men marched in Kolkata and other cities at midnight on Thursday for a ‘Reclaim the Night’ event, holding candles, placards and flaming torches in the rain as they demanded swift justice for the victim. interviews and further social mediaMany women have expressed their frustration as they fear for their safety in public
The victim, a 31-year-old woman training to be a doctor at the government-run R G Kar Medical College, fell asleep in a seminar room after a 36-hour shift. The next morning, on August 9, colleagues discovered her grievously injured body on the stage. Local police arrested a hospital volunteer as the prime suspect, but not before accusing them of botching the case, leading the Kolkata High Court on Tuesday to transfer the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
Read more: Rape and murder of doctor leads to nationwide strike by doctors across India
In response, thousands of doctors and healthcare workers went on strike this week to demand better protections for women in the medical workplace, with the Reclaim the Night march seen as another way to mobilize women across the country to demand that authorities do more to protect them. For many, the timing of the march, which coincided with India’s Independence Day, was a stark reminder that the country’s women were still fighting for their freedoms and liberation.
“A doctor was raped and murdered in her workplace – it could have been any of us,” said one of the protesters. wrote in Scroll, an Indian digital news outlet. “The streets, homes and public spaces were already spaces of brutalization. We didn’t expect the rot to reach our offices too.”
The case has brought renewed attention to the country’s longstanding problem with sexual violence. In 2012, a 23-year-old college student named Jyoti Singh Pandey was raped and murdered on a public bus in a case that garnered worldwide attention and became known as “Nirbhaya,” meaning “fearless.” Since then, India has been in the news for rapes that occurred in Unnao 2017, Kathua in 2018, and Hathras in 2020. Sexual violence crimes against women in India have become so common that a report by the National Crime Records Bureau revealed that the country recorded one rape case every 16 minutes in 2022.
During the Independence Day celebrations at the Red Fort in New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said: told crowd that crimes against women “must be investigated expeditiously” to build more trust in society. “There is outrage over the atrocities being committed against our mothers, sisters and daughters,” Modi said in his speech.
The Kolkata case has also raised alarm bells in the medical community. A 2015 study conducted by the Indian Medical Association found that 75% of doctors had experienced some form of violence at work, with women bookkeeping for nearly 30% of doctors in India and 80% of nursing staff. Safety concerns for medical staff are not new: the BBC notes that one of the most shocking cases involved a nurse at a Mumbai hospital called Aruna Shanbaugwho was raped and strangled by a doorman in 1973, leaving her in a vegetative state. She died in 2015 from severe injuries and paralysis.
Since the most recent incident, medical associations have called for a review of safety measures in hospitals after several female doctors and nurses expressed concerns about their safety at work. “When I was in college, we wouldn’t go to the toilet alone during the night shift… because it was often in a remote area and we were scared,” a doctor in Bengaluru said. told local outlet Role on August 14th.
In a open letter Written on Tuesday, the Indian Medical Association told Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda that doctors were “being abused, trolled, sued and even beaten to death” because of “the violence unleashed on them” in the medical profession. It warned that the Kolkata case would not be the first or the last if “corrective measures are not taken.”
As Independence Day rallies swelled in various locations across Kolkata, and then spilled over into neighbouring towns like Siliguri in the north and Canning in the south, protesters chanted for justice, safety and respect, undeterred by the rain. “From time to time, the individual anger, fear and hope of women coalesce,” says women’s rights advocate Karuna Nundy. “Reclaiming the night is reclaiming freedom and women as a whole.”
Write to Astha Rajvanshi at astha.rajvanshi@time.com.
