Some crimes produce an enduring sense of horror. The torture, rape and murder of a postgraduate trainee doctor in a government hospital in Calcutta cannot be easily forgotten; it is as horrible and cruel as the 2012 gang rape in a Delhi bus and the protests, including the call for an indefinite strike by doctors in different hospitals of the country, are understandable. A civic volunteer has been arrested but the tragedy is still unnerving. The assault occurred in a seminar hall of the hospital when the victim was resting there during her 36-hour stint of duty. The crime exposed the lack of security in the hospital and other lapses, which might be true of other government hospitals too. They point to the casual indifference of hospital authorities — senior doctors included — towards the safety of their juniors and an unthinking callousness about women on night duty. There were not sufficient closed-circuit television cameras in the hospital and no on-call room where doctors could rest safely. Neither the hospital’s security person nor anyone in the two nurses’ stations the accused passed asked him what he was doing there, after drinking, at three in the morning. The cameras showed he had gone in and out earlier at eleven. How was all this possible?

The protesting doctors say that everyone is allowed to enter hospitals and that there is no security at the door after nine. The accused was a familiar figure, since as a civic volunteer he was often on duty at the police outpost in the hospital. He had used his ‘connections’ to land this job by joining the police welfare cell, although he was originally in the disaster management group. He was allegedly engaged in shady activities such as extorting money from patients’ families with false promises. Did the police not know this? The police’s conduct seemed strange: they informed the family that the doctor had committed suicide when the body clearly showed signs of violence. They seemed cagey when asked about the accused, yet used force on the protesters. Forensics experts seem to think there was more than one perpetrator. Are the police looking further? They may not want to discuss details, but they have not inspired trust either. This was an avoidable tragedy for which hospital authorities and the police are both culpable. The doctor’s unimaginable shock, pain and suffering, and now her family’s, should not have happened at all.