A watercolor painting of a faceless female doctor, framed and garlanded with white tuberoses, stands erect on a makeshift podium. It’s the first thing one sees upon entering the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital premises in north Kolkata. Melted candle stubs and incense sticks surround the podium, while an effigy of a woman doctor on the right, blindfolded, gazes down at visitors. It is an uncanny sight, especially for those unfamiliar with the events that transpired on August 9th, 2024, at the hospital. 

Once a premier institution—deemed Asia’s first private medical college and hospital at the time of its establishment—R.G. Kar Hospital is now the site of a violent rape and murder. In the early hours of August 9th, the body of a woman was discovered in the seminar hall of the hospital’s Emergency building; the authorities and some senior doctors were instantly alerted. The body, as it turned out, belonged to a 31-year-old female postgraduate medical trainee who had been on a 36-hour long shift at the hospital the previous night.

A post-mortem report, then circulated by news channels and released on forums like Reddit and X, vividly described the multiple injuries and wounds on the body of the doctor, compelling most Indians into fury and outrage. The woman, whom we’ll call Abhaya, had been through unimaginable pain and violence, and ultimately death—a death in the workplace, a death in the hallowed halls of a hospital, the death of a woman in a profession that Indians have, time and again, claimed to honor and revere. 

An only child, Abhaya was ambitious and hardworking. And perhaps, imaginative too. A run of her social media accounts shows she loved cats, flowers, and clothes — but more than everything else, how much being a doctor meant to her. She was set to marry later this year. 

Abhaya’s parents — her father being a tailor — toiled hard to pay off their daughter’s education fees. An MBBS degree in India comes at a great price, and the price is not always hard cash.

Her murder opened up fissures across the length and breadth of the country, fuelling fiery protests and renewing conversations on sexual violence in India and Indian diasporas worldwide. All major streets in Kolkata and elsewhere have been adorned with posters and graffiti that cry ‘Aamra Bichar Chayi!’ or, in English, ‘We Want Justice!’

To many, the rape and murder of the doctor feel like a cruel mockery of the effort, dedication, and pain it takes to complete an MBBS degree in India, let alone move ahead to pursue a Masters or specialization in any field. In 2023, 2.1 million students registered for the NEET UG (the centralized entrance exam to secure admissions to undergraduate medical courses), of which only 183,600 would go on to qualify for a seat. Out of the 200,000 students who appeared for the NEET PG, only 45,000 would stand the chance of getting an MD, MS, or a postgraduate diploma. In both cases, the acceptance rates are staggeringly low, indicating an extremely high-stakes race to the finishing line, one from which most bow out. 

Once you manage to get your degree and start as a junior resident or nurse, work conditions are bad. “We’re much too overworked — nurses, often more than doctors. This incident was the rock bottom,” said a nurse who works at Calcutta Medical College. “Our hospitals have no emergency bells or alarms, no advanced security technologies, nothing that can keep us secure. We have exactly one phone per ward and, before this incident, no CCTV cameras either.”

CCTV cameras have since been installed across sections of her workplace.

Are there gender-separate washrooms? Rooms for doctors and staff to take a break or rest? “Nothing of that sort. There’s a changing room for nurses, but other than that, we are on our own. Staying safe is completely up to us,” she said. 

The fact that there is so little public or government concern for women professionals in hospitals and elsewhere comes as no surprise. A woman is raped every 16 minutes in the country, and this is only the tip of the statistical iceberg. Violence against women, regardless of economic class, profession, and marital status, is teeteringly close to being normalized. A deep dive into the history of the accused in the crime mirrors the validity of this sentiment. 

On the morning of August 10th, Sanjay Roy, a member of the “Civic Police Volunteer Force” in Kolkata, was arrested in connection with the crime, and as of now, stands accused of raping, murdering, and strangulating Abhaya, allegedly while drunk.

Who was Sanjay? Once a cook in the very hospital where he chose to rape and murder Abhaya, Sanjay has been described by many of his peers, family, and neighbors as a “womanizer” who would often come home drunk and beat his wives. Sanjay was married four times, and all four wives would eventually tire of his ways and leave. The last wife lodged an FIR (First Information Report) with Kolkata Police against him, first in late 2022 and then in early 2023, accusing him of assaulting her while she was three months pregnant. The assaults ultimately killed their unborn child. 

After being a cook for some time, Sanjoy would leave and return in a few years, now as a Civic Police volunteer, again at R.G. Kar Hospital. It seems like he was a habitual lurker on the hospital premises; R.G. Kar was his hunting ground. Early this year, a patient filed an FIR against him yet again, accusing him of harassing and assaulting her on one of her hospital visits. 

The police seemed not to care. Sanjay was allowed to work and, with the help of political connections he’d made, masqueraded as Kolkata Police. His bike bore a sticker saying “Police,” much to the chagrin of his neighbors. He used the sticker as a foil to manhandle, scare people around him, and exercise “power.” In India, power is a mightier currency than real money.

The Civic Police Volunteer Force is known to send out men and women to hospitals, disaster-ridden areas, and festivals as an additional form of security and crowd-management measures. This begs the question: how was a man like Sanjay allowed to work in the Force?

In a conversation with a psychiatrist currently posted at a medical college-cum-hospital in West Bengal, I asked what she thought of Sanjay and the circumstances that empowered him to carry out an act like this. 

“There’s no such thing as a born rapist. They are often the products of anti-social tendencies, learned misogyny, drug or alcohol addictions, social unacceptance, or worse, child abuse,” she told me. “In fact, I would go ahead and say that had the Civic Police volunteers been trained and subjected to psychological evaluation, something of this scale would never have happened.” 

She added, “The situation in Indian hospitals doesn’t help. As someone who works in a psychiatry ward, I’ve had to deal with violent patients—many of them, in fact, in my lifetime—and never had an inch of security to protect me. It was usually my fellow doctors and nurses who made things easier for me.”

This led to me asking how someone with a history like Sanjoy’s was allowed to work in a hospital, of all places. “A lot of these civic volunteers work as middlemen trying to extract money from the poor. The patients are usually from villages and smaller towns, and in return for money, they are promised beds and special care,” she said. Sanjoy, too, is reported to have engaged in a similar racket. 

For several decades, the IMA (Indian Medical Association) has demanded that the government instate a central security protection act for healthcare professionals amidst safety concerns and incidents of violent assaults against them. Its demands, to date, have not been met. The Indian government insists it has ordered the tightening of security at government-run hospitals and refuses to bring about a central act as state legislations are already in place. The Civic Police Volunteer Force was one of many such state measures, first announced in 2012 by the West Bengal government. 

The nurse I spoke to earlier mentioned that there are only about 1-2 guards posted at the hospital where she works, even though there’s always a bunch of unknown people going around, often unrelated to patients or the staff. There’s usually no dress code to tell these people apart, either. 

When news of the R.G. Kar incident broke out, it brought to life yet another nationwide reckoning with sexual violence in the country, reinforcing the common notion that if you’re a woman in India, you’re one bad day away from being raped or murdered. Every woman I talked to seemed to agree with this notion. Nowhere is safe. Not your workplace. Not even if you’re a doctor on duty.

A report by The Scroll details how government workplaces are inherently patriarchal and unsafe in India. A friend who works for an IT company in Hyderabad remarked that this might not have happened had the hospital been like many of the posh corporate offices of private companies that litter the country today. But the presence of well-lighted spaces and air-conditioned rooms doesn’t guarantee safety in a country where workplace harassment and violence are often hush-hushed or, worse, ignored altogether. 

To check the veracity of this, we spoke with Persis Sidhva, an advocate with the Bombay High Court who has worked on numerous domestic and sexual violence cases for over a decade. Persis is now the Director of the RATI Foundation for Social Change, an organization that helps create safe online and offline spaces for women and children and protects them against sexual violence. 

When asked if corporate employees had it better, she remarked wryly that the ICCs (Internal Complaints Committees) created in compliance with the PoSH Act in India are often limited to investigating cases of harassment, not rape. The effectiveness of the ICC depends on how empowered that committee is and immune to the whims of senior management. What happens if the perpetrator is more valuable to the organization than the victim? 

Even the R.G. Kar case, according to her, is a fine example of workplace power dynamics. Sanjay Roy, the accused, had close ties to the ex-Principal of the institution, Dr. Sandip Ghosh, who is currently being questioned by the CBI. Incidentally, Sandip Ghosh has also had several cases of corruption filed against him in the past. A biomedical waste racket and the misappropriation of hospital funds are two of the many allegations leveled against him. 

Abhaya’s murder blew Sandip Ghosh’s cover as a well-known orthopedics surgeon in the city and laid bare the deep connections he’s had with the ruling Trinamool Congress party and the Mamata Banerjee-led state government. Many early reports also suggested that the rape and murder of Abhaya might have had multiple perpetrators. After much prodding and public outrage, the CBI lodged an FIR against Sandip last week on grounds of corruption, cheating, and criminal conspiracy. The IMA (Indian Medical Association) has also confirmed the suspension of Sandip’s membership. 

Persis also remarked on the strange Indian law that stipulates that the names of victims of sexual violence, in particular, rape, be hidden. “This law that asks to hide the names of victims, especially the ones who are dead, perpetuates the cycle of patriarchy and victim shaming that’s already so prevalent in the country. There shouldn’t be a blanket rule on this. The decision should come from the victim’s family. That agency must be allowed to them. Hiding their names dehumanizes the victim.”

The dehumanization of victims and women is pervasive in India. It is perhaps the greatest indicator of a virulent rape culture that films and music videos, unthinking politicians, and internet culture further propagate.

An undergraduate student I spoke to commented on how cheap and fast internet access has pretty much blown up rape culture like an over-inflated balloon. He argued that while not all men who watch violent pornography or engage in “dark” humor and rape jokes end up committing sexual violence, these behaviors contribute to the dehumanization of women, reinforcing the notion that they are lesser humans. He’s seen many of his college mates indulging in similar habits. 

An IT engineer in his late twenties, however, says that despite the internet’s rabidity, early sex education and sensitization could have helped prevent such a heinous crime. But he contends that films like “Animal” and internet content that promote abject misogyny should be censored and not let through under the garb of “freedom of speech.” 

He then adds that parents in India would probably rebel if a much more liberal and holistic curriculum (with sex ed, for instance) were introduced in Indian schools. I asked him, “On a scale of 1-10, how worried are you for your sister?” “It’s a 10,” he said. 

Abhaya’s murder saw many Indian women lose their sleep and appetites. Many, like me, began to register our deep peril as a country. The grief outweighed the hesitation and fear people felt when deciding to go on the streets. Doctors and healthcare professionals went on strike to demand justice for Abhaya and increased protection. On August 14th, the eve of Independence Day in India, hundreds and thousands of women and men thronged the streets of Kolkata and elsewhere to “Reclaim the Night,” in defiance of an increasingly patriarchal society that has failed, time and again, to protect its women. 

Can India hope for things to get better for its women? Everyone we interviewed agreed that, despite the challenges, it’s crucial to keep hope alive. The problem of sexual violence against women won’t go away in the next decade, not unless a sea change comes about, one of them tells me, but education and swift justice could move things faster. 

Persis agrees, “I’m hopeful because the protests have been happening on a particularly large scale. The Nirbhaya case led to considerable changes in the law. Protests like these help keep public memory alive.  People are reminded of the crimes and the statistics.” 

But then she argues why women must die after rape for citizens to demand punishment. Why do we not allow that dignity to the women who survive?  Why has law enforcement seen such a downward spiral in India in the past few years? It takes 10-12 hours for a victim to register a mere FIR in any Indian city. These are followed by lengthy waiting times for medical exams and other legal processes. 

The criminal justice system, too, is infested with problems. The process is a highly challenging and time-consuming one, and very expensive in most cases. Justice is mostly slow, and rarely ever arrives on time. 

“There’s just no empathy towards these victims. Heinous rape cases like Abhaya’s often cause knee-jerk reactions. But knee-jerk reactions only cause a sensation. There’s no atomic change.” Most rape incidents in India are enveloped in a conspiracy of silence, with families and the police rushing to hush it up. 

Retribution is a planned act; it seldom arrives in the blink of an eye. As Persis says, the certainty of punishment should overpower the severity of punishment.  

The people of Kolkata have barely stopped to take a breath since that night, protesting and marching every day, every hour almost, against the cruel, dishonorable system that snatched from Abhaya her life and her right to work as a doctor. Social media and news channels have been filled to the brim with salacious details of the crime and speculations about Sanjay and Dr. Sandip Ghosh. Meanwhile, in quieter quarters, many artists and civil society members have adopted a softer but perhaps stronger approach to seeking justice. They maintain that the protests must go on; the songs, the marches, and the art must keep coming. The graffiti should be louder, brighter, brasher. 

Have patients been affected by the strikes? Since the doctors’ 21-day strike, nearly seven lakh patients have been denied OPD treatment, and many others have been debarred from admission or diagnostic tests at government-run hospitals. A fruit seller who came to the R.G. Kar hospital to get his wife to consult a doctor says, “I was born here, and this is where I’ve always come, even for the tiniest ailments. But now I’m afraid. I’m afraid to admit my wife here and have her stay for the night. It gives me shivers.”

I’m reminded of the story of Lucretia and the Roman people who protested against her rape. The marches ushered in the fall of the Roman emperor and the story would later feature in a series of widely known paintings by the artist Artemisia Gentileschi. In the wake of Abhaya’s passing, will the state government in West Bengal, led by Mamata Banerjee, have its throne taken away? Will there be accountability? Only time will tell.

On my way out of the R.G. Kar hospital premises, I look back at a bouquet of pink roses someone has left at the feet of the podium: a prayer for Abhaya and a hope for change.