A day after withdrawing 58-day long cease-work programme completely in government medical colleges and hospitals across West Bengal from Friday night, agitating junior doctors on Saturday threatened to continue their sit-in-protest at Esplanade though Kolkata Police denied them permission.
This afternoon, Lalbazar, KP headquarters, while responding to an email sent by the agitators on Friday night seeking permission for their dharna, lobbed a counter email to them denying permission for their programme.
According to the email sent by the KP, sit-in-protest won’t be allowed at Esplanade, a busy crowded area for shopping, particularly on the eve of the Durga Puja festival. There would be traffic disruptions in the Esplanade area, one of the busy shopping hubs, if such event is allowed there, police informed the agitators.
Demanding justice for the heinous rape and murder of the woman postgraduate trainee doctor at R G Kar Medical College Hospital on 9 August and safety and security for doctors, nurses, patients and others inside state-run healthcare facilities, and removal of Narayan Swaroop Nigam, principal secretary, in-charge of health department, the agitating doctors under West Bengal Junior Doctors front (WBJDF) on Friday evening brought out a huge procession from SSKM Hospital that reached Esplanade around 7.30 pm.
Police allegedly assaulted two junior doctors on Friday night when the agitators were trying to erect their dharna site at Esplanade.
Today, junior doctors with support from their seniors stuck to their decision to continue their sit-in against police highhandedness.
They said, “Esplanade will be a rerun of our earlier 10 day-long sit-in-protest in front of the Swasthya Bhawan complex at Salt Lake last month. Here at Esplanade, we are protesting peacefully but police are preventing us from agitation demanding justice for the incident. The city police should be more proactive on how to fulfil our 10-point demands instead of sending us email denying permission for dharna.”
“We will withdraw the sit-in immediately after the administration meets our unresolved issues. We are getting massive support from common people. But the police have been threatening our decorators to erect dais since last night. The decorators have left and we erected the dais ourselves,” said one junior doctor.
Wooden cots and several bio-toilets were being installed at the sit-in site at Esplanade this afternoon.
“The administration is afraid of the prolonged protest of junior doctors demanding justice for brutal murder and rape of their colleague. Police are ruthlessly taking repressive measures on them. Today, I saw police threatening the agitators not to instal bio-toilets and cots that they had done in front of the Swasthya Bhawan. We support the untiring protest movement of our juniors,” said Dr Tamonash Chowdhury, alumni of R G Kar Medical College Hospital.
“We are resuming work after 58 days but it doesn’t mean that we are afraid of the government. We would start protesting at Dorina crossing from tonight and intensify our protest till demands are not met by the administration. We are giving 24 hours to solve our issues. We will sit on fast unto death if the government does not solve our demands within this deadline,” Dr Debashis Halder, one of prominent faces among the protesting junior doctors, had said on Friday.