Tens of Thousands of Women Protest on India’s Independence Day After Murder of Medic

The march began with a call on social media that soon went viral: “For women’s independence on the midnight of Independence,” a Facebook post by 29-year-old student Rimjhim Sinha read. As India celebrated 77 years of independence from British colonial rule on Aug. 15, women around the country took to the streets in anger over a brutal case of alleged rape and murder that occurred in the city of Kolkata last week.

Tens of thousands of women and men marched for a ‘Reclaim the Night’ event at midnight on Thursday in Kolkata and other cities, holding candles, signs, and flaming torches in the rain as they demanded speedy justice for the victim. In interviews and on social media, many women have expressed frustration for having to fear for their safety in public

The victim was a 31-year-old woman training to be a doctor at RG Kar Medical College, a government-run hospital, who fell asleep in a seminar room after a 36-hour shift. The next morning on Aug. 9, colleagues discovered her severely injured body on the podium. Local police arrested a hospital volunteer worker as a key suspect, but not before facing accusations that it had botched the case, which led Kolkata’s High Court to transfer it to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Tuesday. 

Read More: The Rape and Murder of a Medic Leads to Nationwide Physician Strike Across India

In response, thousands of doctors and healthcare providers went on strike to demand better protections for women in the medical workplace this week, with the Reclaim the Night march seen as an additional way to mobilize women across the country to demand that authorities do more to protect them. To many, the timing of the march coinciding 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 killed in her workplace—it could have been any of us,” one marcher wrote in Scroll, an Indian digital news outlet. “The streets, homes, and public spaces were already spaces of brutalization. We did not expect the rot to find us at our offices too.”

The case has brought renewed attention to the country’s longstanding problem with sexual violence. In 2012, a 23-year-old student named Jyoti Singh Pandey was raped and killed on a public bus in a case that received widespread global coverage and became known as “Nirbhaya,” meaning fearless. Since then, India has made headlines for rapes that occurred in Unnao in 2017, Kathua in 2018, and Hathras in 2020. Sexually violent crimes against women in India are now so common that a report by the National Crime Records Bureau revealed that the country recorded 1 rape case every 16 minutes in 2022. 

During Independence Day celebrations at New Delhi’s Red Fort, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told crowds that crimes against women “should be investigated expeditiously” to create better faith in society. “There’s outrage against the atrocities being committed against our mothers, sisters, and daughters,” Modi said in his speech. 

Read More: ‘Nothing Has Changed.’ 7 Years After a Gang Rape That Shocked a Nation, Brutal Attacks Against Women Continue

The Kolkata case has also raised alarms in the medical community. A 2015 survey conducted by the Indian Medical Association found that 75% of doctors had experienced some form of violence while on the job, with women accounting for nearly 30% of India’s doctors and 80% of its nursing staff. The safety concerns for medical workers aren’t new: The BBC notes that one of the most shocking cases involved a nurse in a Mumbai hospital named Aruna Shanbaug, who was raped and strangled by a ward attendant in 1973 which left her in a vegetative state. She died in 2015 from severe damage and paralysis. 

Since the most recent incident, medical associations have called for an overhaul of security measures at hospitals after several female doctors and nurses reported worrying about their safety at work. “When I was in college, we would not go to the restroom alone during night duty… because it was often in an area which was isolated and we were scared.” one doctor based in Bengaluru told local outlet Scroll on Aug. 14.

In an open letter penned on Tuesday, the Indian Medical Association told Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda that doctors “are abused, trolled, sued and even beaten to death” because of “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 the Independence Day gatherings grew in numbers in various locations across Kolkata, and then spilled into neighboring towns like Siliguri in the north and Canning in the south, the marchers chanted about justice, safety, and respect, undeterred by the rain. “From time to time, women's individual anger, fear, and hope coalesce with one another,” says women’s rights lawyer Karuna Nundy. “Reclaiming the night is a reclaiming of freedom and of women as a whole.”