Raveendran/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesPolice unleashed water cannons and tear gas on protestors staging demonstrations outside the government secretariat building and the president's mansion in New Delhi on Saturday. The crowds demanded safety for women in the country. Â Â A week of growing anger about a recent rape in Delhi ended in violence Saturday after police and protestors clashed near the India Gate monument.
On Sunday, Delhi police closed nearby Metro stations, evacuated protestors who had camped out overnight and reportedly imposed “Section 144,†a law prohibiting gatherings of more than four people. Like the protestors, the police took to social media to notify people of the crackdown, albeit without explanation:
Parliament street has been closed.
Saturday's protests resulted in dozens of injuries.
“Thousands of protesters streamed into the heart of New Delhi on Saturday to demand justice and better policing in the wake of the brutal rape of a 23-year-old medical student, †Gardiner Harris and Hari Kumar wrote in The New York Times about the incident.
Protesters scuffled with the police throughout the day. Some police vehicles were damaged, and the police eventually used tear gas, water cannons and sticks to disperse the crowd. Officials said 35 protesters and 37 police officers had been injured, two officers seriously, and that six buses and several police vehicles were damaged.
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The Dec. 16 rape has been a tipping point for India, galvanizing women and men to demand the government do more to prot ect women and punish those who harass them.
“Political parties even make rapists members of parliaments and state assembly,†said Minal Kumar, 20, a journalism student at Delhi University, who attended Saturday's protest. The Association for Democratic reforms, a research group, issued a study Thursday that showed that more than Indian political parties had given tickets to 27 men accused of rape in the last five years. “At least they should stop doing that,†Ms. Kumar said.
In “Notes From Raisina Hill,†Nilanjana Roy wrote:
I went to the protests at Raisina Hill expecting very little. Despite the anger over the recent, brutal gang-rape of a 23-year-old by a group of six men, who also beat up her male friend, protests over women's violence in the Capital have been relatively small.
But the crowds walking up the Hill, towards the governmen t offices of North and South Block, from India Gate are unusual. It's a young crowd-students, young men and women in their twenties, a smattering of slightly older women there to show their solidarity, and it's a large crowd, about a thousand strong at the Hill itself. There are two small knots representing student's politicial organisations, but otherwise, many of the people here today are drawn together only by their anger.
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