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Police fired tear-gas and water cannon to disperse protesters
marching towards the state secretariat on Tuesday, prompting
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),
which is in opposition in the state, to call for a 12-hour
state-wide strike on Wednesday, to protest against what it said
were police atrocities.
Thousands of protesters, most of them BJP workers, blocked roads
and railway tracks and forced shops to shut down on Wednesday,
while authorities braced for more protests through the day.
A top police official said 5,000 police personnel were deployed
to quell any violence across West Bengal.
The protesters on Tuesday, many of them university students,
were demanding the resignation of West Bengal Chief Minister
Mamata Banerjee, a staunch opponent of Modi, for her handling of
Aug. 9 rape and murder of a 31-year-old doctor in a
government-run hospital in the state capital, Kolkata.
The attack on the 31-year-old doctor has caused nationwide
outrage, similar to the widespread protests witnessed after a
2012 gang-rape of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in New
Delhi, with campaigners saying women continue to suffer from
high levels of sexual violence despite tougher laws.
A police volunteer has been arrested for the crime and the
federal police have taken over the investigation.
(Reporting by Subrata Nag Choudhary, writing by Shilpa
Jamkhandikar; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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