The 24-hour-long face-off between the junior doctors and the police ended this afternoon with the police succumbing to public pressure and removing barricades to allow the crowd to march to the police headquarters in Lalbazar. Currently, a group of medics are meeting the police chief, who, they say, must step down. The protesters are carrying a symbolic spinal cord, which they quipped, they would present to the police chief.
Yesterday’s arrest of Sandip Ghosh — the former Principal of the hospital where a woman doctor was raped and murdered last month — has come as a shot in the arm for the protesters. They said it was time to see the police chief out.
The march to Lalbazar started yesterday. But as the police put up barricades, it could not progress to Lalbazar. The doctors conducted a sit-down protest at the spot, around a km away, and continued today.
The junior doctors had placed the replica of a spine and red roses on the barricade. The replica is to emphasise the duty of the police force to protect citizens, they claimed.
“This was not in our plan. We did not know that Kolkata Police were so scared that they would put up a 9-foot high barricade to stop us. Our agitation will continue till we are allowed to reach Lalbazar and meet the CP,” one of the doctors was quoted as saying by news agency Press Trust of India.
The police finally lifted the barricades after the civil society joined in the protest.
This evening, multiple protest marches by people are being held across the city.
The medics allege that the police have been negligent in the handling of the case. Some have even accused them of participating in a cover-up, pointing to the misinformation given to the parents.
The parents of the woman were initially told that their daughter was not well and later that she has committed suicide. The calls were apparently made by the hospital’s assistant superintendent.
The partially clothed body of the young woman was found in the hospital’s seminar room on the morning of August 9.
It had created a furore, especially after it became known that the parents of the woman were misled about the cause of her death, the delay in filing of FIR and the comments of then hospital principal Sandip Ghosh that the woman should not have gone alone to the seminar room at night.
