Women protest for rape victim on India’s Independence Day

TThe march began with a social media call that quickly went viral: “For women’s independence at midnight on Independence Day,” read a Facebook post by Rimjhim Sinha, a 29-year-old student. 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 in the city of Kolkata last week.

Tens of thousands of women and men demonstrated at midnight in Kolkata and other cities on Thursday to demand swift justice for the victim, carrying candles, placards and flaming torches. In interviews and on social media, many women expressed frustration at having to fear for their safety in public.

The victim was a 31-year-old woman who was training to be a doctor at RG Kar Medical College, a government hospital, and who fell asleep in a seminar room after a 36-hour shift. The next morning, on August 9, her colleagues discovered her badly injured body on the podium. Local police arrested a volunteer hospital employee as the prime suspect, but not before she was accused of botching the investigation, leading the Calcutta High Court to transfer her to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Tuesday.

Learn more: Rape and murder of doctor sparks nationwide doctors’ strike in India

In response, thousands of doctors and health care providers went on strike this week to demand better protection for women in the medical profession. The Reclaim the Night march was seen as another way to mobilize women across the country to demand that authorities do more to protect them. For many, the fact that the march fell on India’s Independence Day was a stark reminder that women in the country were still fighting for their freedom and liberation.

“A doctor was raped and killed at her workplace. It could have been any one of us,” wrote one protester in Scroll, an Indian digital media outlet. “The streets, homes and public spaces were already places of brutality. We didn’t expect corruption to catch up with us in our offices as well.”

The case has brought the country’s longstanding problem of sexual violence back into the spotlight. In 2012, a 23-year-old student, Jyoti Singh Pandey, was raped and killed on a public bus, a case that received widespread global media coverage and became known as “Nirbhaya,” meaning fearless. Since then, India has been in the headlines for rapes in Unnao in 2017, Kathua in 2018, and Hathras in 2020. Violent sexual crimes against women in India are now so common that a report by the National Crime Records Bureau found that the country recorded a case of rape every 16 minutes in 2022.

At Independence Day celebrations at the Red Fort in New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the crowd that crimes against women “should be investigated promptly” to create better trust in society. “There is outrage against the atrocities committed against our mothers, sisters and daughters,” Modi said in his speech.

Learn more: ‘Nothing has changed.’ Seven years after a gang rape that shocked an entire nation, brutal attacks on women continue

The Calcutta case has also raised concerns in the medical community. A 2015 survey by the Indian Medical Association found that 75% of doctors had experienced some form of violence in the line of duty, with women making up nearly 30% of doctors and 80% of nurses in India. Concerns about the safety of medical staff are not new: the BBC notes that one of the most shocking cases involved a nurse at a Mumbai hospital, Aruna Shanbaug, who was raped and strangled by a nurse in 1973, leaving her in a vegetative state. She died in 2015 from severe injuries and paralysis.

Since the latest incident, medical associations have called for an overhaul of safety measures at hospitals after several female doctors and nurses expressed concern about their safety at work. “When I was in college, we didn’t go to the toilet alone at night… because it was often in an isolated area and we were scared,” a Bengaluru-based doctor told a local media outlet. Roll August 14th.

In a open letter In a statement released Tuesday, the Indian Medical Association told Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda that doctors “are being abused, trolled, prosecuted and even beaten to death” because of “the violence they face” within 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 spread across cities in Kolkata and then to neighbouring towns like Siliguri in the north and Canning in the south, protesters chanted slogans for justice, safety and respect, undeterred by the rain. “Every now and then, women’s anger, fear and hope mix,” says Karuna Nundy, a women’s rights lawyer. “Reclaiming the night is about reclaiming freedom and women as a whole.”