New Delhi — Hundreds of indignant college students and different protesters marched on the streets of jap Indian metropolis of Kolkata within the West Bengal state on Tuesday demanding justice for a physician who was brutally raped and killed earlier this month at a metropolis hospital.
The police used water cannon and tear gasoline to disperse protesters who had been on their method to the state secretariat constructing to demand the resignation of Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of the West Bengal state, whom they accuse of mishandling the case.
Indian TV networks aired movies displaying protesters climbing barricades that had been positioned on the Howrah Bridge, as police used water cannons to cease them.
The brutalized physique of a 31-year-old physician was discovered with a number of accidents in a lecture corridor on the state-run R.G. Kar Medical School and Hospital in Kolkata on Aug. 9. The feminine physician had gone to the lecture corridor to relaxation throughout an evening shift when she was attacked. An post-mortem confirmed sexual assault and a number of accidents sustained earlier than she died, suggesting she resisted and will have been tortured earlier than being murdered.
The Kolkata Police arrested a volunteer member of the pressure on Aug. 10 and have charged him with rape and homicide, however the brutality of the case has drawn nationwide outrage, with medics throughout the nation demanding safer workplaces and residents demanding security for ladies in a rustic with a shameful document of rape.
Docs at public hospitals throughout India refused to work final week, turning away all however emergency sufferers as a part of a nationwide strike over the rape and homicide.
Kolkata police had turned the town right into a digital fortress forward of Tuesday’s deliberate protest, barricading all roads resulting in the state secretariat and deploying 6,000 personnel in full riot gear. The police stated they’d not given permission for the protest march, and the Trinamool Congress occasion, which is in energy in West Bengal state, alleged that it was an try by opposition events to create unrest within the metropolis.
Police clashed with the protesters Tuesday morning as a number of the crowd managed to climb over the barricades, however the demonstrators had been stopped earlier than they might attain the state secretariat.
The Bharatiya Janata Get together (BJP), which is the opposition in West Bengal, claimed a number of college students had been injured Tuesday amid the clashes with the police and known as for a brand new, 12-hour normal strike within the state on Wednesday to protest the response.
India’s federal Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI), which was tasked with investigating the rape-murder in Kolkata, subjected the prime suspect, Sanjay Roy, to a polygraph take a look at final week, the outcomes of which had been but to be launched Tuesday. Many within the nation hope the outcomes will shed new mild on whether or not different individuals may have been concerned within the assault, as has been prompt by the sufferer’s father.
India reported a mean of practically 90 rapes per day in 2022, in response to the newest information accessible from the Nationwide Crime Information Bureau. Specialists consider the true quantity might be a lot greater, as many rapes go unreported as a result of prevailing stigmas round sexual violence and a scarcity of religion in police investigations. Conviction charges stay low, with many circumstances turning into mired for years in India’s overwhelmed prison justice system.