DOCTORS rallied outside the Health Ministry in New Delhi today, demanding new laws to protect health workers following the rape and murder of a trainee doctor in Kolkata.

Police intervened to stop the doctors setting up stalls for free outpatient services on the spot, intended to attract the public and promote the cause.

Doctors at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata, capital of West Bengal state, said they would continue an “indefinite cease-work and sit-in” until demands are met. Though a police volunteer has been arrested in connection with the August 9 murder, the 31-year-old woman victim’s family say more people were involved and it was a gang rape and killing, some of whose perpetrators are being shielded.

The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) called for the government to urgently legislate to protect medical workers, and condemned West Bengali authorities for their “efforts to conceal and protect the criminal nexus that made such a barbaric crime possible.”

India was ranked the world’s most dangerous country for women in a 2018 study, which cited widespread female infanticide, dowry killings and high incidence of sexual violence. Its National Crime Records Bureau noted an 87 per cent rise in crimes against women between 2011 and 2021.

The Narendra Modi government has responded to public outrage over rising violence by restoring the death penalty for serial rapists and rapists of children under 12, but the CPI-M has tied the increase in femicides to the ruling BJP’s Hindutva ideology and the blind eye BJP politicians and police turn to assaults on Muslim or lower-caste women by upper-caste Hindu men.

In April, leading CPI-M politician Brinda Karat published a study entitled Hindutva and Violence Against Women, arguing the Hindu-supremacist ideology has directly fed the rise in misogynist violence.

It points to the BJP’s promotion of a warrior-cult model of masculinity as well as its “othering” of Muslim women and those who defy its sexist stereotypes, leading to scandals like public rallies in defence of eight men who kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered eight-year-old Muslim girl Asifa Bano in Kashmir in 2018.