Protests singe Kolkata streets, CBI continues quizzing RG Kar hospital's former principal

Kolkata: Protestors from across walks of life, who joined in solidarity with the ongoing junior doctors’ agitation against the alleged rape and murder of the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital medic, on Wednesday took the streets of Kolkata and beyond by storm, even as public healthcare in West Bengal continued to remain sorely affected.

Although no fresh arrests were reported in the case, the CBI continued with its questioning of top officials of the RG Kar Hospital.

A former administrator of the hospital, meanwhile, moved the state’s top judiciary seeking an ED probe into the former hospital principal’s alleged financial irregularities.

Senior doctors, nurses and wannabe medics from across medical colleges of the state, numbering a few thousand, conducted a march to the state health department headquarters, Shwasthya Bhavan, and laid siege to the premises till representatives of protestors met the department’s top officials and submitted a memorandum this afternoon.

“Our newly-appointed principal Dr Surhita Pal has gone missing. She is supposed to be our guardian but she has not turned up at the campus since the night the hospital was vandalised. We have heard that she is operating out of Shwasthya Bhavan. So we are headed there to find her out,” a junior doctor said.

Coming out of the meeting, the protesting doctors said they were “deeply disappointed” with the demeanour of the officials.

“We did not come here to seek justice. We came here to tell the government it should immediately remove all hospital authorities who were in charge of administration on the night of that crime and ensure they do not get to serve administrative positions ever again. But the health authorities couldn’t ensure that. They looked helpless before invisible higher powers,” a doctor said.

The CBI, meanwhile, grilled former RG Kar hospital principal Sandip Ghosh for the sixth consecutive day.

The agency sleuths also summoned various other top authorities of the hospital, including its current superintendent and vice-principal Bulbul Mukhopadhyay and her predecessor Sanjay Vasishth, for questioning.

Mukhopadhyay previously served as the dean of student affairs.

Sources said a day before the agency was supposed to submit its investigation progress report to the Supreme Court on Thursday, investigators were trying to crosscheck a bunch of “inconsistencies” found in Ghosh’s statements.

A former deputy superintendent of RG Kar on Wednesday moved the Calcutta High Court, seeking an ED investigation against Ghosh, alleging financial irregularities by him during his tenure at the state-run facility.

The court granted permission to Dr Akhtar Ali to file the petition which is likely to be heard later this week.

Ali had earlier claimed that he had filed multiple complaints against Ghosh in 2023 to the state government before he was transferred.

Bengal government had on Monday formed a special investigation team (SIT) to probe into the alleged financial irregularities.

A day after the Supreme Court ordered the deployment of central armed forces at the state-run hospital, a CISF team visited the establishment on Wednesday and inspected its security arrangements.

The visit followed a Union home ministry communication to the West Bengal chief secretary seeking deployment of CISF at the RG Kar Medical College, official sources said.

Things, however, turned ugly at a protest rally of West Bengal Pradesh Congress workers in the afternoon when they attempted to march towards the Kolkata Police headquarters demanding the resignation of Police Commissioner Vineet Goyal.

Senior Congress leaders, including former PCC presidents Abdul Mannan and Pradip Bhattacharya, were stopped and detained, police said.

An ABVP rally at Siliguri in north Bengal headed for the local SDO office also turned violent as the activists confronted the police after the men in uniform allegedly snatched posters of Mamata Banerjee, intended to be burned as the chief minister’s effigy.

Meanwhile, in the Moulali area of central Kolkata, the state’s leader of opposition Suvendu Adhikari led a protest march of BJP sympathisers with flaming torches.

Several other party leaders including former MPs Swapan Dasgupta and Arjun Singh, were also present.

Filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri of 'The Kashmir Files' and 'The Tashkent Files' fame also joined the march where Adhikari sported a T-shirt on which a demand for resignation of the chief minister was written.

Referring to Banerjee's handling of the case, Agnihotri questioned why the principal of RG Kar was so quickly reinstated to another hospital following removal from his previous institution.

“In such cases, an instant FIR is registered, why did it get delayed? And finally, when we saw the CM coming out of her office and hitting the streets after all these, I felt this was the end of democracy,” the filmmaker said.

In Delhi, resident doctors staged a protest at Jantar Mantar, marking the 10th day of their indefinite strike over the alleged rape and murder of the medic.

"It's very important to understand that we are fighting for better working conditions in our own workplace," one of the protesting doctors said.

Kolkata also witnessed multiple protest marches including one held by the sports fraternity across sporting disciplines in the Maidan area, another by lawyers of the Calcutta High Court and even one by scientists, teachers and staff of the premier Bose Institute in the IT hub of Salt Lake.