A social media call, which went viral, urged women to participate in a march on the night of India’s Independence Day, with the message “For women’s independence on the midnight of Independence,” as stated in a Facebook post by Rimjhim Sinha, a 29-year-old student. As India celebrated its 77th year of independence from British rule on Aug. 15, women across the country took to the streets, fueled by anger over a brutal alleged rape and murder case that took place in Kolkata the previous week.
Tens of thousands of women and men participated in a “Reclaim the Night” march at midnight on Thursday in Kolkata and other cities. Holding candles, signs, and flaming torches in the rain, they demanded swift justice for the victim. In Kolkata and other cities, many women have expressed frustration about having to fear for their safety in public.
The victim was a 31-year-old woman training to be a doctor at RG Kar Medical College, a government-run hospital. She fell asleep in a seminar room after a 36-hour shift. The following morning, on Aug. 9, her colleagues discovered her severely injured body on the podium. Local police arrested a hospital volunteer worker as the main suspect but faced accusations of mishandling the case. This prompted Kolkata’s High Court to transfer the investigation to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Tuesday.
In response, thousands of doctors and healthcare providers went on strike this week to demand better protections for women in the medical workplace. The Reclaim the Night march was seen as an additional way to mobilize women nationwide, urging authorities to do more to protect them. For many, the timing of the march coinciding with India’s Independence Day served as a stark reminder that the country’s women were still fighting for their freedoms and liberation.
“A doctor was raped and killed in her workplace—it could have been any of us,” one marcher told Scroll, an Indian digital news outlet. “The streets, homes, and public spaces were already spaces of brutalization. We did not expect the rot to find us at our offices too.”
The case has brought renewed attention to India’s long-standing problem with sexual violence. In 2012, a 23-year-old student named Jyoti Singh Pandey was raped and killed on a public bus in a case that garnered widespread global coverage and became known as “Nirbhaya,” meaning fearless. Since then, India has made headlines for rapes that occurred in Delhi in 2017, in Unnao in 2018, and in Hathras in 2020. Sexually violent crimes against women in India are now so prevalent that a report by the National Crime Records Bureau revealed that the country recorded one rape case every 16 minutes in 2022.
During Independence Day celebrations at New Delhi’s Red Fort, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told crowds that crimes against women “should be investigated expeditiously” to foster greater trust in society. “There’s outrage against the atrocities being committed against our mothers, sisters, and daughters,” Modi said in his speech.
The Kolkata case has also raised alarms within the medical community. A 2015 survey conducted by the Indian Medical Association found that over 60% of doctors had experienced some form of violence while on the job, with women accounting for nearly 30% of India’s doctors and 80% of its nursing staff. The safety concerns for medical workers aren’t new: The BBC reported that one of the most shocking cases involved a nurse in a Mumbai hospital named Aruna Shanbaug, who was raped and strangled by a ward attendant in 1973, leaving her in a vegetative state. She died in 2015 from severe damage and paralysis.
Since the most recent incident, medical associations have called for an overhaul of security measures at hospitals after several female doctors and nurses expressed concerns about their safety at work. “When I was in college, we would not go to the restroom alone during night duty… because it was often in an area which was isolated and we were scared,” one doctor based in Bengaluru told the local outlet Scroll on Aug. 14.
In an open letter penned on Tuesday, the Indian Medical Association told Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda that doctors “are abused, trolled, sued and even beaten to death” due to “violence unleashed on them” in the medical profession. It warned that the Kolkata case would not be the first or the last if “corrective measures are not taken.”
As the Independence Day gatherings grew in numbers in various locations across Kolkata, and then spilled into neighboring towns like Siliguri in the north and Canning in the south, the marchers chanted about justice, safety, and respect, undeterred by the rain. “From time to time, women’s individual anger, fear, and hope coalesce with one another,” says women’s rights lawyer Karuna Nundy. “Reclaiming the night is a reclaiming of freedom and of women as a whole.”