India doctors stay off job after strike over colleague's rape and murder

KOLKATA (Reuters) -- Some Indian junior doctors remained off the job on Sunday, demanding swift justice for a colleague who was raped and murdered, despite the end of a 24-hour strike called by the country's biggest association of doctors.

Doctors across the country have held protests, candlelight marches and have refused to see non-emergency patients in the past week after the killing of the 31-year old postgraduate student of chest medicine around the early hours of Aug. 9 in the eastern city of Kolkata.

Women activists say the incident at the British-era R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital has highlighted how women in India continue to suffer despite tougher laws following the gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in Delhi in 2012.

"My daughter is gone but millions of sons and daughters are now with me," the father of the victim, who cannot be identified under Indian law, told reporters late on Saturday, referring to the protesting doctors. "This has given me a lot of strength and I feel we will gain something out of it."

India introduced sweeping changes to the criminal justice system, including tougher sentences, after the 2012 attack, but campaigners say little has changed and not enough has been done to deter violence against women.

The Indian Medical Association, whose strike ended at 6 a.m. (0030 GMT) on Sunday, told Prime Minister Narendra Modi that as 60% of India's doctors are women, he needed to intervene to ensure hospital staff were protected by security protocols akin to those at airports.

"All healthcare professionals deserve peaceful ambience, safety and security at workplace," it wrote in a letter to Modi.

But in Modi's home state of Gujarat, more than 6,000 trainee doctors in