India: rape and murder of young doctor sparks fury

Amidst the pomp and pageantry of Independence Day, a furious protest movement following the rape and murder of a young medic tells the real story of Modi’s India. The Revolutionary Communists of India (RC(I)) demand justice – for the victim of this heinous crime as well as all who suffer under capitalism, which poisons human relations and subjects billions to oppression, violence and misery.

The 31-year-old victim was a postgraduate trainee, studying respiratory medicine at the state-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata, West Bengal. Such postgraduate medics are heavily exploited, forced to undergo 36-hour shifts as part of their studies and training.

Last Friday, following one of these gruelling shifts, the medic in question was sleeping in the hospital’s seminar room (due to a lack of any designated area for students to rest), when she was gang-raped and murdered by unknown assailants. A volunteer police officer, Sanjay Roy, has been arrested in connection with the attack.

Following spontaneous calls on social media, protests led by women started in Kolkata last week under the slogan ‘Reclaim the Night’, and have continued to grow, with rallies spreading to New Delhi, Chandigarh, Uttar Pradesh, Patna, Goa and elsewhere.

Someone influential is clearly trying to protect the culprits. The principal of RG Kar initially informed the victim’s parents that their daughter had committed suicide, until an autopsy revealed the real cause of death.

Meanwhile, the state government has sent goons to attack the demonstrations in Kolkata. Agent provocateurs disguised as protestors also vandalised RG Kar and attacked police, giving cover for dozens of arrests and detentions, including of our comrades.

On Independence Day, hundreds of thousands of women and men from all walks of life were on the streets of Kolkata, with placards and burning torches in hand. One female student, interviewed by BBC World, encapsulated the mood when she furiously asked:

“When do we get our independence? How long do we have to wait to work without fear?”

Violence towards women and medics

In the world’s fifth-largest economy, relations between men and women have been hideously warped by the grinding poverty and enforced backwardness endured by billions of people.

There is an epidemic of rape and violence against women in India / Image: Dr Syed Faizan Ahmad, Twitter

There is an epidemic of rape and violence against women in India, with around 90 reported cases of sexual assault a day, and an untold number going unreported. In much of the country, unaccompanied women cannot walk the streets safely. In the poorest rural communities, girls are killed at or shortly after birth in horrific numbers, while so-called honour killings are widespread and broadly tolerated.

Victims of rape and assault are met with indifference or intimidation by the police, and silenced by the stigma they face from their families and communities.

Sexual violence is also used as a weapon of communalist repression. It is enough to remember the 2002 Gujarat riots, which Modi helped provoke, that saw the rape of hundreds of Muslim women and girls by Hindu nationalist mobs.

In addition to the question of violence against women, medics at India’s often squalid, chronically under-funded state hospitals face a daily gauntlet of exploitation and abuse.

According to the Indian Medical Association, more than 75 percent of Indian doctors have endured some form of violence. In 2019, two junior doctors were assaulted by an angry mob in Kolkata’s Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College and Hospital (NRSMCH) after a 75-year-old patient passed away in the hospital. This provoked protests by doctors across the city, demanding better workplace security.

Tragically, last Friday is far from the first time that violence against women and doctors has overlapped. In 2012, a 22-year-old physiotherapy intern was gang-raped and murdered on a bus in Delhi, which also triggered nationwide protests and superficial changes to the law that have done nothing to protect women or medics since.

Postgraduate doctors are at the forefront of the new protest movement. The Federation of Resident Doctors Association (FORDA) called for a nationwide halting of elective services on Monday. FORDA suspended this action on Tuesday, after Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda promised to expedite the passage of the Central Protection Act (legislation aimed at protecting doctors from violence), which has been languishing in Parliament since 2022.

But the Federation of All India Medical Associations (FAIMA), along with medics at the Delhi-based All-India Institute Of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and Indira Gandhi Hospital have pledged to continue their strike until concrete measures are in place, including a full inquiry, and a Central law that makes violence against doctors a non-bailable offence.

They are also calling for the firing of the principal of RG Kar, who has so far only been transferred to a lucrative new position at a different Kolkata hospital.

Opportunism

After losing West Bengal to the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in the recent general elections, Modi is seeking to opportunistically exploit this situation to regain ground for his BJP party. He has publicly condemned the rape-murder in Kolkata, and called for the dismissal of Mamata Banerjee, leader of the TMC-led government in West Bengal.

Postgraduate doctors are at the forefront of the new protest movement / Image: Arijit Kisku, Wikimedia Commons

The leadership of the TMC itself is split, with some MPs joining the protests, while others condemned them as “a political move to defame West Bengal, backed by the BJP and CPI(M)”. Yesterday, there were competing rallies called by opposition organisations and the BJP, with the latter calling for Banerjee’s resignation.

The BJP has no leg to stand on when it comes to the question of violence towards women. Such crimes have increased year-on-year under Modi’s rule, except 2020, due to the COVID-19 lockdown.

In 2022, 11 rapists, imprisoned after the Gujarat Riots, were released by decree of Modi’s government and met with cheers and flower garlands by the Hindu nationalist thugs who make up the BJP’s base. The perpetrators were eventually returned to prison by a Supreme Court order following massive public outrage.

In other words, Modi is trying to settle political scores over the body of a young doctor, killed in an atmosphere of violence and oppression he helped create.

The grubby political manoeuvring by varying cliques of bourgeois gangsters is sickening to watch. When crimes like this are committed in a state-run hospital and the highest authorities in the hospital cover it up, it’s highly likely that the state government knows about it, if they haven’t also assisted in the cover up directly.

If Banerjee’s administration is brought down, this victory must be claimed by the movement alone, and become the start of a confrontation with Modi’s Central government.

Political answers needed

The organisers have emphasised that politicians were not welcome, and requested that no party flags should be brought to the protest. Understandably, they feel nothing but contempt towards the entire political establishment, which collectively has the blood of countless women and young medics on its hands.

Sexual violence and the decaying Indian health system are political questions / Image: Sumita Roy Dutta, Wikimedia Commons

However, sexual violence and the decaying Indian health system are political questions. The vile capitalist system Modi defends, and the chauvinist Hindutva ideology he cultivates, are the ultimate source of the social sickness in Indian society. These must be fought by political means.

Presenting this movement as bringing together all women is a dead end. The leader of West Bengal state is a woman, which made no difference to the victim of last week’s attack. Indeed, Banerjee’s administration is sending police and thugs to break up demonstrations seeking justice. Meanwhile, Modi is sheltering Sheikh Hasina, the ousted leader of Bangladesh whose regime has killed hundreds of student protestors since July.

Bourgeois politicians, be they women or men, uphold their class interests above all other considerations. The working class, youth and poor peasantry, women and men alike, must fight under the banner of revolutionary communism for an end to the system responsible for all forms of oppression.

End violence towards women: end capitalism!

There is a seething anger in Indian society, expressed in a series of unprecedented struggles in recent years, including some of the largest general strikes in history, and the victorious farmers’ movement against Modi’s hated agricultural bill.

Combustible material, capable of provoking a mass movement like that in Bangladesh, exists in abundance in India. The murder of the young medic at RG Kar could be the spark that lights the powder keg. But one way or another, tensions will eventually erupt and put a decisive showdown between Modi and the masses on the agenda. We must prepare!

The RC(I) offers its full solidarity to the protestors and striking young medics. Violence towards women is a plague that infects the whole of society. The current movement must grow and tap into the mood of anger that exists right across India.

The case has been referred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), but even if the culprits are identified and punished (which is far from given) there can be no illusions that the Indian state will be able to protect women or young medics in the future. We have heard promises of new legal protections in the past, and things are worse than ever.

Nor can there be any illusions in the Congress-led bourgeois opposition, which is trying to co-opt the movement and steer it to safe channels. All Rahul Gandhi and co seek to achieve is putting a more ‘respectable’ face on the same diseased system.

The fact is, sexual violence and femicide are the poisonous fruit of a rotten society. Join the Revolutionary Communists of India and help us to fight for a dignified future, free of these horrors.

We say:

• Build the movement, grow the doctors’ strike: all out until we have justice!

• An injury to one is an injury to all: all working-class, peasant and left organisations must join the fight!

• Banerjee, Modi and the RG Kar administration all have blood on their hands! Bring all the criminals to justice!

• To end violence against women, we must end capitalism!