KOLKATA: Police in India on Tuesday fired tear gas and water cannon on thousands of protesters who were seeking justice for a doctor who was raped and murdered in Kolkata this month.
The discovery of the 31-year-old doctor’s bloodied body at a government hospital in Kolkata triggered countrywide anger at the chronic issue of violence against women.
Thousands of demonstrators on Tuesday marched to a government building in Kolkata to demand the resignation of Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal.
They shouted slogans and clashed with police, who charged the crowd with batons in an attempt to disperse it.
Namita Ghosh, a college student who attended the protest, told the media that the crowd was protesting peacefully when the baton charge started.
According to a senior police official, at least 100 protesters have been arrested on the charge of creating violence.
Numerous protests in Kolkata sparked by the crime have transformed into political rallies, with police clashing with demonstrators from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) angry at the state government.
The Hindu-nationalist BJP is the ruling party of India, but it is an opposition party in West Bengal. The party has accused Banerjee’s government of creating an unsafe environment for women.
Doctors’ associations in many cities of India have launched strikes over the murder that cut off non-essential services, though medical professionals have since returned to work.
The gruesome attack has invoked comparisons with the horrific 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman on a Delhi bus. That incident caused widespread outrage in a country where sexual violence against women is common, with an average of nearly 90 rapes a day were reported in 2022 in the country of 1.4 billion people.
