The rape and murder of the 31-year-old postgraduate trainee at the state-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Calcutta was a “state-sponsored crime” and “institutional murder”, doctors from Bengal said in Delhi on Monday.
The protesting doctors, along with their colleagues from beyond Bengal, held a media conference on Monday, hours after the Bengal government reached out to the junior doctors with a “final” invitation for a meeting at 5 pm at the residence of chief minister Mamata Banerjee.
The government outreach and the doctors’ media event came a day before the next hearing in the RG Kar case by the Supreme Court’s three-member bench led by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud.
“This particular crime is a state-sponsored crime. It was an inevitable outcome of the health syndicate run by those close to the current ruling dispensation, the health and the police administration and the political patronage,” said Subarno Goswami, additional general secretary of All India Federation of Government Doctors’ Association and joint secretary of the Association of Health Services Doctors.
“You cannot justify this crime with any other incident. An on-duty lady doctor was raped and killed in her own hospital… All of these are connected… This is not a normal crime.”
The Kolkata Police and the hospital authorities have been accused of tampering with evidence in the case.
The CBI, which was handed over the probes into the rape and murder and the charges of corruption against the former principal of RG Kar Medical College and Hospital Sandip Ghosh, has arrested Ghosh in connection with both cases.
The CBI has also arrested Abhijit Mandal, the officer in-charge of Tala police station.
“The chief Minister went to the protest site. She addressed the people of Bengal but not those protesting at the site. There is a difference between talking to the doctors and talking with the doctors, the Bengal government needs to talk with the doctors,” said a member of the Resident Doctors’ Association, an all-India outfit.
The West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Front, which is spearheading the movement, has demanded impartial and speedy probe and trial into the rape-murder case, action against former principal Ghosh, the dismissal of the state health secretary, the director of medical education and the director of health services.
The doctors also want the resignation of Calcutta police commissioner Vineet Goyal as well as action against the deputy commissioners of police of north and central division along with an end to the “threat culture” prevailing in Bengal’s teaching hospitals.
“The police officer who was arrested by the CBI on Saturday, the chief minister on September 9 had on record asked why the private hospitals in Calcutta were not admitting him. The cover-up of the crime and corruption is being orchestrated from the highest level of the administration,” Goswami said.
The doctors said they also wanted to question the CBI how far its investigation into the rape and murder had progressed.