Doctors throughout India launched a strike on Monday after a student doctor in Kolkata was found dead at the government-run hospital, apparently raped and murdered at her workplace.
The victim has been identified as a 31-year-old trainee doctor or post-graduate medical student in the chest medicine department who was reportedly on duty at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital on Friday when she disappeared. Police ultimately found her body in a seminar hall at the hospital and found evidence that she had been raped before her killing. New Delhi Television (NDTV) reported that her body showed signs of a harrowing assault, including being found in a semi-nude state, suffering “eye injuries” and a broken neck. The hospital was fully functioning and crowded at the time of her disappearance, meaning no other staffers, security officials, patients, or anyone else noticed something amiss or, if they did, did not intervene.
Violence against doctors is rampant in India, often manifesting in the loved ones of a dying patient beating and threatening the lives of medical staff. Rape is also a pervasive problem, though often considered a separate problem to violence against doctors. The United States has issued travel warnings to Americans in the past over rape being widespread and common in India, including brutal gang-rapes and other atrocities, and the Indian government doing little to crack down on the scourge.
Indian police arrested a man identified as Sanjoy Roy this weekend after they identified him wandering the hospital on security cameras. Roy reportedly confessed to the crime, telling police, “hang me if you want.” Sources familiar with the hospital have told Indian outlets that Roy was often inappropriate to employees there and did not work there or have any legitimate reason to be at the facility, but was “frequently seen in buildings on the campus” anyway.
NDTV reported on Monday that Roy was a “civic volunteer with Kolkata Police” and often used that to impersonate a legitimate police officer, wearing clothing with police insignia and leveraging his false authority to extort the families of patients to ensure them a hospital bed. Government-run hospitals in India are often dramatically overcrowded as they have a policy of not turning away patients, resulting in long wait times.
The Emirati newspaper the National reported on Monday that doctors at multiple government-run hospitals announced a strike for elective services in solidarity with their slain colleague, demanding the government of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi take their safety seriously.
“As a mark of our solidarity with the colleagues of RG Kar, we announce a nationwide halt of elective services in hospitals starting Monday,” the Federation of Resident Doctors’ Associations announced. “This decision is not made lightly, but it is necessary to ensure that our voices are heard and that the demands for justice and safety are met without further delay.”
The Karnataka State Chapter of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) also issued a statement on Monday asking the government for a thorough criminal investigation and adequate action to ensure such violence does not happen again.
“We demand that the authorities act with precision and in time of 48 hours, failing which IMA will be constrained to initiate nationwide action,” IMA state president Prof. Dr. S. Srinivas said, according to the Indian newspaper the Hindu. “A fair, transparent and time-sensitive criminal investigation is in order. An ultimatum of two days is given to arrest culprits, otherwise IMA will take [out] nationwide protests.”
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Speaking to NDTV, woman’s rights activist and doctor Dr. Archana Dhawan Bajaj said that the issue of sexual violence against women in medicine was a decades-old one that had devastated the Indian medical system, as it deterred many women from going into a system wracked by insufficient staffing.
“We would be absolutely scared, we would move in bunches,” Bajaj said of her time as a young woman doctor on the night shift, walking from one hospital department to another. “I’m talking about way back, [the] ’90s, and I think we’ve reached back to the same time.”
NDTV reporter Saurabh Gupta noted that government-run hospitals are “obviously catering to the number of people thats far more than what it’s designed to cater to,” meaning not only that the hospital was populated when the rape and murder happened, but it was likely extremely busy, and yet no one moved to stop the crime.
“There simply aren’t enough protections systems in place to prevent incidents like these because government-run hospitals are very very crowded … they don’t turn away patients,” he noted.
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The local government moved to contain the outrage on Monday. West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee visited the family of the unidentified victim and stated the government would move to ensure the case was “fast-tracked” to ensure swift justice.
“I am shocked that there were nurses in the hospital, there was security of the hospital and yet this incident took place,” Banerjee noted, echoing the outrage of local doctors. “We have removed the principal, MSVP, HOD, and the ASP from this hospital. We have deployed the dog squad, video department, forensic department to investigate in the matter.”
Banerjee also stated that local Kolkata Police would have the case taken away to federal authorities if they could not fully solve the case by Sunday. “If Kolkata Police is unable to solve the case by Sunday… we will transfer it to CBI.”
The local official suggested the case still needed to be solved despite Roy’s confession because the family of the victim said “someone from inside is involved,” presumably a hospital worker.
The National recalled in its coverage of the incident that doctors in India often face violence, of both a sexual and non-sexual nature. “A survey by the Indian Medical Association found 75 per cent of doctors had faced some form of violence,” the newspaper noted.
Many previous reported incidents featured mobs attacking doctors they believed were not doing enough to cure patients. In one famous incident in 2021, for example, a Hindu mob attacked a Catholic hospital in Mokama, northeast India, beating a nun and an elderly woman patient while hauling a dead man into the hospital, demanding the doctors cure him. Police were reportedly present at the incident and did not intervene.
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