NEW DELHI: Protesting junior doctors in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal returned to duty on Saturday to provide emergency services to flood victims, as they partially withdrew from a month-long strike over the rape and murder of a female colleague in Kolkata.
The 31-year-old trainee doctor was brutally raped and murdered on Aug. 9 at a state-run hospital in West Bengal’s capital, where she worked.
The murder has triggered daily protests across India, especially in Kolkata, where thousands of young medics called for safer working conditions.
They continued their protest despite the Supreme Court ordering them last week to return to work, and said they would only follow if their demands for justice for the victim and better safety measures in hospitals were met.
“The strike is partially over. We have partially joined the duty, the emergency duty. We have only started, not the regular duties, because our demands have been partially fulfilled,” Dr. Anustup Mukherjee, member of the West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Front, which represents some 7,000 physicians in the state, told Arab News.
Heeding to the doctors’ demands, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee sacked on Tuesday Kolkata’s police chief and two top health ministry officials. But the demands for accountability for the murder and better security remain to be met.
“The demand for justice is still to be fulfilled, the demand for the eradication of the threat culture is yet to be fulfilled, even in the security and safety security issues, infrastructural issues are only partially fulfilled,” Mukherjee said, adding that the state’s administration told them it had ordered CCTVs, panic buttons and would arrange separate restrooms and bathrooms for on-duty doctors.
“We have got confirmation from the State Secretariat that our infrastructural demands for safety and security will be fulfilled ... But we are waiting.”
The doctors’ strike was lifted only at hospitals due to the ongoing floods in the state.
“We thought that a large number of people were suffering due to the flood, so we thought that ... a humanitarian decision should be taken,” Mukherjee said.
Dr. Ashfaqullah Naya, also a member of the West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Front, told Arab News that the protest was not over.
“This partial withdrawal is also because there is a flood in some parts of the state. But the protests in medical colleges will continue. We are just doing essential services, not the regular services,” he said.
As the probe into the gruesome murder has been moved from Kolkata Police to India’s federal Central Bureau of Investigation, doctors were waiting for all the perpetrators to be caught.
One man has been charged with the murder and was arrested last month, but following an autopsy, doctors assessing the report suggested the victim might have been subject to gang rape.
“The culprits should be caught,” Naya said. “Some of the culprits are roaming free.”
Last week, the CBI arrested the former principal of the college where the murder took place and a local police officer on charges of mishandling and tampering with key evidence in the case, and misleading the investigation team.
Protesting doctors return to duty after long strike over rape-murder of Kolkata medic
https://arab.news/y6hru
Protesting doctors return to duty after long strike over rape-murder of Kolkata medic
- West Bengal government dismisses the city’s police chief and top state health ministry officials
- Investigators arrested ex-college principal, police officer on charges of tampering with evidence
Faced with Trump, Greenlanders try to reassure their children
- Since Trump returned to the White House last year with a renewed ambition to seize Greenland, international politics has intruded into the Arctic island’s households
NUUK: In a coffee shop in Greenland’s capital Nuuk, Lykke Lynge looked fondly at her four kids as they sipped their hot chocolate, seemingly oblivious to the world’s convulsions.
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House last year with a renewed ambition to seize Greenland, international politics has intruded into the Arctic island’s households.
Dictated by the more or less threatening pronouncements of the US president, it has been an unsettling experience for some people here — but everyone is trying to reassure their children.
Lynge, a 42-year-old lawyer, relied on her Christian faith.
“There’s a lot of turmoil in the world,” she said. “But even if we love our country, we have even higher values that allow us to sleep soundly and not be afraid,” she said.
As early as January 27, 2025, one week after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Greenlandic authorities published a guide entitled “How to talk to children in times of uncertainty?“
“When somebody says they will come to take our country or they will bomb us or something, then of course children will get very scared because they cannot navigate for themselves in all this news,” said Tina Dam, chief program officer for Unicef in the Danish territory.
- Unanswerable questions -
This guide — to which the UN agency for children contributed — recommends parents remain calm and open, listen to their children and be sensitive to their feelings, and limit their own news consumption.
As in many parts of the world, social media, particularly TikTok, has become the primary source of information for young people.
Today, children have access to a lot of information not meant for them, said Dam — “and definitely not appropriate for their age,” she added.
“So that’s why we need to be aware of that as adults and be protective about our children and be able to talk with our children about the things they hear — because the rhetoric is quite aggressive.”
But reassuring children is difficult when you do not have the answers to many of the questions yourself.
Arnakkuluk Jo Kleist, a 41-year-old consultant, said she talked a lot with her 13-year-old daughter, Manumina.
The teenager is also immersed in TikTok videos but “doesn’t seem very nervous, luckily, as much as maybe we are,” she added.
“Sometimes there are questions she’s asking — about what if this happens — that I don’t have any answers to” — because no one actually has the answer to such questions, she said.
- ‘Dear Donald Trump’ -
The Arctic territory’s Inuit culture also helped, said Kleist.
“We have a history and we have conditions in our country where sometimes things happen and we are used to being in situations that are out of our control,” said Kleist.
“We try to adapt to it and say, well, what can I do in this situation?“
Some Greenlandic children and teenagers are also using social media to get their message out to the world.
Seven-year-old Marley and his 14-year-old sister Mila were behind a viral video viewed more than two million times on Instagram — the equivalent of 35 times the population of Greenland.
Serious in subject but lighthearted in tone, the boy addresses the American president.
“Dear Donald Trump, I have a message for you: you are making Greenlandic kids scared.”
Accompanied by hard stares, some serious finger-wagging and mostly straight faces, he and his sister go on to tell Trump: “Greenland is not for sale.”
“It’s a way to cope,” his mother, Paninnguaq Heilmann-Sigurdsen, told AFP of the video. “It’s kid-friendly, but also serious.
“I think it’s a balance between this is very serious, but also, this is with kids.”
