Massive clashes broke out between protesters and police this week during the march to the state secretariat Nabanna over the rape and murder of a woman junior doctor at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata. Earlier, following emergence of details of the gruesome crime and seeming police inaction, people across Bengal and elsewhere in the country had taken to the streets to ‘reclaim’ the night. But demonstrations encountered some organised violence, and at the hospital which was the site of the crime, acts of targeted vandalism attempted to destroy the possibility of gathering reliable evidence.
We may still never know for certain what the young woman stumbled upon that led to her brutal silencing. The chief justice of the Calcutta high court condemned the “failure of the state machinery”. But the mob itself isa part of the state machinery. Note that the governing Trinamool Congress has distanced itself from the violence of its alleged cadres, and has attempted to make common cause with the protesters.
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