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| TMCP supporters staged a protest outside North Bengal University near Siliguri on Friday, demanding the death penalty for the accused in the junior doctor's murder case. |
On Friday, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee wrote a second letter to PM Narendra Modi in which she requested the Centre to enact more stringent laws on sexual offenses. This letter, after another on August 22, is written as the Bengal Assembly is to consider and pass what its authors call a ‘stringent’ anti-rape law.
Mamata also stressed the need for a central law that making the punishment for rape or rape-murder a case an exemplary one and also importance of trial. On the same, she was not well satisfied with the reply of the Union Minister of Women and Child Development, Annapurna Devi that she thought was still lacking substance to address the severity of the problem.
The Trinamul Congress party is in the news again over Mob menace that forced a dalit junior doctor to strip on August 9 while undergoing treatment. In the same letter, Mamata also pointed out that Bengal has initiated certain action, including setting up fast-track as well as exclusive Pocsa courts that were not mentioned by Devi.
Mamata’s demands came under the political fire from the BJP that said that she was fudging her earlier call for a 15 day trial time frame to an unknown period. Criticism of her statement came from a politically opposite group, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) which criticized her decision to call for the death penalty for rapists as a distraction from the incompetent handling of the recent rape and murder case by the state government.
