Durga Puja begins on sombre note in Bengal, no breakthrough in talks between state govt and protesting junior doctors

Kolkata: The annual Durga Puja festival formally commenced in West Bengal on a sombre note on Wednesday with seven junior doctors continuing with the fast-unto-death stir for the fifth consecutive day and the senior doctors of several public hospitals and medical colleges resigning en masse expressing solidarity to them.

The state’s chief secretary, Manoj Pant, and other officials late in the evening on Wednesday had a meeting with the representatives of the junior doctors, who launched a cease-work stir immediately after one of their colleagues at the R G Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata had been found raped and murdered on August 9.

The meeting however ended without any breakthrough.

The junior doctors had paused the cease-work stir on September 21 but resumed it on October 1. They again returned to work on Friday but launched a fast-unto-death stir on Saturday.

“The government did not commit any timeline to fulfill our 10-point charter of demands,” Dr Debasis Halder, one of the representatives of the protesting junior doctors, said after the meeting at the Swasthya Bhavan, the headquarters of the Department of Health and Family Welfare of the state government, on Wednesday. “We have told the officials of the state government to visit the venue where our seven colleagues have been fasting for more than 100 hours. They asked us to convey their request to our colleagues to end fast. But how can we do that when the government has not shown any positive approach?”

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s government started talks with the protesting junior doctors shortly after the state’s governor, C V Ananda Bose, reached the venue of the fast-unto-death stir and met the agitating medics. Eminent film personality Aparna Sen also met the protesting doctors and appealed to the chief minister to visit the venue of the fast-unto-death stir too.

A day after nearly 50 senior doctors of the RGKMCH resigned en masse in solidarity with the agitating juniors, nearly 100 others did so on Wednesday at the Calcutta National Medical College and Hospital, Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College and Hospital and College of Medicine and Sagore Dutta Hospital in Kolkata as well as at Jalpaiguri Government Medical College in North Bengal. The senior doctors of the Institute of Post-Graduate Medical Education and Research and Seth Sukhlal Karnani Memorial Hospital also threatened to follow suit if the state government failed to accept the demands of the protesting junior doctors.

The widespread outrage over the rape and murder of the 31-year-old postgraduate trainee doctor not only put the state’s Trinamool Congress government in a tight spot but now cast a shadow over Durga Puja in the state too, with many organisers avoiding festivities, cutting down on the paraphernalia and opting for low-key celebrations. Some even turned down the financial assistance provided by the state government. The parents of the 31-year-old victim lit a lamp and sat on a ‘dharna’ in front of the family’s home on the outskirts of the city and launched. The bereaved parents said that with their daughter, who had started holding Durga Puja at their home a few years back, gone now, they decided not to have the annual ritual ever again. The family would hold the dharna till the end of the festival on Bijaya Dashami on Sunday, mourning and seeking justice for her.

The puja pandals in the city however witnessed moderate to normal crowds. The protesting junior doctors went to some of the puja pandals and raised slogans demanding justice for the victims, defying police restrictions. Nine of them were detained by police after they tried to raise slogans in one of the puja pandals. Some of the protesters marched to the Kolkata Police headquarters to demand the release of the detained. They were however stopped much before they could reach the police headquarters.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which had taken over the probe from the Kolkata Police on August 14, filed a chargesheet in a special court in the city on Monday, naming Sanjay Roy as the only prime accused. The central agency did not name anyone else in the chargesheet filed on Monday.

Neither did it accuse Roy of being involved in gang rape, indicating that the investigation so far did not find any evidence of the crime being committed by more than one person.

Roy, a member of the contractual support staff of the Kolkata Police, had been arrested by the city cops a day after the postgraduate trainee doctor had been found raped and murdered inside the seminar room of the Department of Chest Medicine on the third floor of the R G Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata on August 9. The Calcutta High Court, hearing a petition filed by the parents of the victim, had on August 13 ordered the CBI to take over the probe. The Kolkata Police handed over Roy to the central agency a day later.

Apart from justice for the 31-year-old young medic, who was raped and murdered at the RGKMCH, the demands of the junior doctors include the removal of the state health secretary, appointment of male and female police personnel in medical college campuses instead of civic volunteers (contractual support staff of police), filling up of vacancies for doctors, nurses and healthcare workers, holding student elections and recognition of Resident Doctors Associations, inquiries into alleged irregularities of the state medical council and setting up of college-level inquiry committees to punish those responsible for the culture of intimidation in the healthcare institutions of the state.

The state government reiterated its appeal to the protesting doctors to end the agitation, promising that it would complete 90% of the works for enhancing safety and security measures in the hospitals by October 10, including the installation of closed-circuit cameras and alarm buttons.