WASHINGTON: Thousands of people were staging protest demonstrations in over 130 cities across 25 countries on Sunday, organizers stated, to demand justice after last month’s rape and murder of a trainee doctor at a hospital in Kolkata, India. The protest demonstrations started in large and small groups across Australia, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan, before spreading to cities in several European nations. Sixty protest demonstrations were planned in the United States.
They added to the current protest demonstrations around India after the Aug. 9 brutal killing of the 31-year-old postgraduate student of medicine. An accused was arrested along with the former principal of R.G. Kar Medical College where the trainee doctor was studying.
Indian Doctor’s Rape-Murder
At one of the protest demonstrations in the Swedish capital Stockholm, scores of mainly black-clad ladies gathered in Sergels Torg square to sing songs in Bengali as well as hold signs, demanding accountability and justice for the crime and safety for women in India.
Dipti Jain, an organiser of the global protests that the news of this heinous crime committed on a trainee doctor while on duty numbed and shocked each of them at the total ruthlessness, cruelty and disregard of human life.
Jain, now a British national and alumni of the Calcutta National Medical College and Hospital, had last month organized a female doctors protest demonstration in the United Kingdom. The protest demonstrations are taking place as India’s Supreme Court has listed the next hearing of the murdered trainee’s case for today.
Although laws were introduced following the 2012 gruesome gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in New Delhi, India but analysts and members of civil society say the Kolkata case shows how women continue to suffer from sexual violence in India.
