When Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced plans to step down on Wednesday, he vowed that his departure would clear the way for a new leader who could bring change to Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

The party has managed to keep a stranglehold on power despite deep public dissatisfaction over political scandals and economic stagnation — and despite repeatedly steering away from candidates popular with the public.

Here are five politicians likely to figure in the party’s deliberations over whom to promote to prime minister next month.

Taro Kono

Mr. Kono, 61, is a popular and somewhat unconventional figure who could significantly shake up Japan’s governing party.

Mr. Kono, a graduate of Georgetown University, is Japan’s digital minister. He came within a hair’s breadth of becoming prime minister in 2021, narrowly losing a runoff vote to Mr. Kishida despite a surge of public support for his more progressive stance on issues like legalizing same-sex marriage.

However, Mr. Kono’s outspoken nature, left-leaning views and popularity on social media have not endeared him to the party’s conservative elders.

As digital minister, Mr. Kono has gone to war against Japan’s reliance on outdated technologies like fax machines and floppy disks.

While Mr. Kono has not formally indicated he would run in this year’s election, for months he has told government officials that he was strongly considering it.

Shigeru Ishiba

Mr. Ishiba, 67, is the only candidate who has officially declared his intention to run in the upcoming L.D.P. election. Before Mr. Kishida’s decision to step aside, several polls showed Mr. Ishiba as the public’s favorite to become prime minister.

Through much of his career, Mr. Ishiba has been criticized by fellow lawmakers for his abrasive, populist style. Still, he is popular, known for what some describe as a “nerdy” enthusiasm for manga, trains and pop songs from the 1970s.

In recent months, Mr. Ishiba has argued for policies that would help rein in the inflation squeezing Japanese households and tackle widening income disparities in Japan that he asserts are the foundation of the country’s declining birthrate.

In a book published this month, Mr. Ishiba said that Japan should revise the pacifist clause of its Constitution to permit it to retain military forces.

Mr. Ishiba has held several senior positions, including those of defense minister, agriculture minister, and L.D.P. secretary general. He ran for the leadership four times in the past, narrowly losing to Shinzo Abe and Yoshihide Suga in 2012 and 2020.

Toshimitsu Motegi

Mr. Motegi, 68, is the secretary of the Liberal Democratic Party, and he served as economy minister from 2012 to 2014 and foreign affairs minister from 2019 to 2021. He was first elected to Japan’s House of Representatives in 1993 after working for the consulting firm McKinsey. He is a graduate of the University of Tokyo and Harvard’s school of public policy.

Known for his short-tempered, commanding personality, Mr. Motegi has been nicknamed “Moteking.” Following tough negotiations with the United States on a new trade pact in 2019, local news media also began referring to him as “Japan’s Trump whisperer.”

Like other prominent candidates, Mr. Motegi has called on the Bank of Japan to raise interest rates to stabilize the yen. He also champions deregulation, including a complete lifting of Japan’s longstanding ban on ride-sharing services, and the use of government subsidies to support economic growth and lift incomes.

Sanae Takaichi

Ms. Takaichi, 63, is Japan’s economic security minister, and has served as the minister of internal affairs and communications. She came in third in the party’s runoff in 2021, and if elected this time, she would be the party’s first female leader.

She has positioned herself as a right-wing champion, supporting policies like requiring married couples to share a surname.

Ms. Takaichi argues that Japanese atrocities during World War II have been overstated, and she regularly visits Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial in Tokyo honoring Japan’s war dead that is a flashpoint for historical sensitivities in China and South Korea. She has criticized past L.D.P. prime ministers as being indecisive leaders.

Shinjiro Koizumi

Mr. Koizumi, 43, would represent another potential candidate of change if the party chooses him.

He is the son of a former prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, and holds a master’s degree in political science from Columbia University. Mr. Koizumi was one of the youngest lawmakers to join Japan’s cabinet when he was appointed environment minister by late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2019.

During his stint as environment minister, Mr. Koizumi gained global recognition for promoting renewable energy and criticizing Japan’s continued use of fossil fuels. At a United Nations summit in 2019, Mr. Koizumi said that taking on big issues like climate change needed to be “fun,” “cool,” and “sexy, too.”

While Mr. Koizumi has not indicated he plans to enter the running for leadership, he is seen as a favored candidate of former Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. This week, Mr. Koizumi told reporters that the upcoming party election would be a chance to change the Liberal Democratic Party and restore the public’s trust.

Sudan’s military announced Thursday it would reopen a major border crossing with Chad whose closure had become a major obstacle to increasingly urgent efforts to reach millions of starving people in Sudan.

Until just a few days ago, the military was insisting it had to keep the border closed at Adré, in eastern Chad, to prevent weapons being smuggled to the Rapid Support Forces, the powerful paramilitary group it has been fighting in Sudan’s vicious civil war since April 2023.

But the six-month closure throttled the flow of U.N. trucks carrying vital relief aid at a time when Sudan is plunging into a famine that experts warn could be the world’s worst in decades.

In an unexpected reversal, Sudan’s military-dominated Sovereign Council announced Thursday that it would immediately reopen the Adré crossing for three months. U.N. and aid groups, caught unaware, welcomed the decision, with one U.N. official saying it could make a “significant difference” to relief efforts. But those providing aid were also seeking clarification from the Sudanese authorities about any potential restrictions.

The sudden decision followed weeks of growing international criticism of Sudan’s military for the border closure. It also coincided with the start of an American-led effort to revive peace talks in Switzerland aimed at halting the civil war ripping apart one of Africa’s biggest countries.

Adré is the main gateway from Chad into Darfur, the region in western Sudan that suffered a genocide two decades ago, and which is now the center of a famine that threatens the entire country.

A famine, the world’s first since 2020, was officially declared on Aug. 1 in the Zamzam camp in Darfur. Across the country at least 26 million people, over half Sudan’s population, are in a food crisis, the world’s leading body of hunger experts estimates.

At the United Nations Security Council last week, James Kariuki, Britain’s deputy permanent U.N. representative, accused the Sudanese military of obstructing aid by shutting the Adré crossing, which he called “the most direct route to deliver assistance at scale.”

At least 100 people are dying from hunger every day in Sudan, Mr. Kariuki added, calling the famine “entirely man-made.”

Aid workers and U.N. officials in Adré repeated those assessments during a visit by a New York Times reporter and a photographer last month. Nearly 200,000 people are crammed into a crowded camp around the city. But U.N. aid trucks were forbidden from driving into Sudan because of the shuttered border.

The Rapid Support Forces, which controls most of Darfur, has also been accused by rights groups and American officials of obstructing humanitarian aid and using starvation as a weapon of war. Since the war started in April 2023, R.S.F. fighters have attacked aid convoys and burned a factory that makes baby food, officials say.

Adré is key to scaling up aid deliveries because it offers relatively easy access to the parts of Darfur where the hunger crisis is greatest. Until February, aid trucks filled with food could easily cross.

After the Sudanese military closed the crossing in February, it directed the United Nations to send its trucks through Tine, Chad, a remote crossing 150 miles by road to the north. But that alternative route proved slow, expensive and dangerous, allowing just a fraction of the needed aid to get through.

And then Tine closed entirely in recent weeks as heavy seasonal rains made local roads impassable.

Sudanese commentators said the military may have reopened the border to direct attention away from its refusal to attend the American-led peace talks in Geneva, which the R.S.F. is attending.

The military’s decision will increase pressure on the international aid community to do more for Sudan at a time when money is scarce. The United States, which gives more than any country, announced another $204 million for Sudan last month.

But the United Nations says it has received just $1 billion of the $2.7 billion it needs to deal with the growing famine.

The tables had turned: Yesterday’s victims of brutal suppression were today’s perpetrators of brutal revenge.

Mobs wielding bamboo sticks and pipes thrashed supporters of Bangladesh’s toppled ruling party on Thursday, preventing their first major gathering since their leader, Sheikh Hasina, fled the country last week.

The sticks arrived in sacks on the back of electric rickshaws, the pipes as flagpoles that soon became weapons as their flags were removed. The attackers were largely supporters of opposition parties that had endured abuse and violence from the former prime minister’s party, the Awami League. They beat anyone they suspected of belonging to the party, flogging their legs before dragging them with shirts ripped and faces bloodied.

The student protesters who rallied to oust Ms. Hasina have become de facto police officers on the streets. But on Thursday, they were mostly on the sidelines, and their unanswered pleas for calm laid bare what they have called one of their chief concerns.

Into the vacuum, they worry, will walk the established political opposition, not only to unleash revenge, but also to restore the kind of dynastic politics that defined Ms. Hasina’s party, too. Breaking the cycles of vengeance that have afflicted Bangladesh through many turbulent periods is a monumental task for the interim government now running the country.

The purging of her party from the government has continued over the week and a half since Ms. Hasina was toppled and fled to India. Protesters are calling for the former prime minister to face justice for the deaths of about 500 people during the monthlong uprising, most of them in the crackdown that she unleashed.

At least two senior members of Ms. Hasina’s government were arrested by the security forces on Tuesday as they tried to flee the country by boat. When they appeared in court on Wednesday, their opponents prevented their lawyers from defending them, local news media reported, continuing a pattern of injustice that had long bent to those in power.

The chief of Bangladesh’s army also appeared to confirm reports that some leaders of Ms. Hasina’s party were being housed in its quarters, saying the military would shelter anyone facing the threat of “extrajudicial action.”

“We have given shelter to those whose lives are under threat,” the army chief, Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, told reporters on Tuesday. “No matter what party, religion or opinion, we will do this.”

Officials in the interim government, which is led by the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, said they were facing multiple crises while trying to carry out a more fundamental overhaul of the state.

The caretaker government has struggled to get police officers to return to work after they had vanished in the face of retaliatory mob violence for their role in the protesters’ deaths. The country’s long-persecuted Hindu minority has been gripped by fear of increased attacks.

The economy, largely reliant on the garment export industry, has also been on a downward spiral, with foreign reserves dwindling.

Bangladesh’s interim leaders have said the country needs “a strong element of reconciliation” to avoid falling into the usual violent cycle. But what shape such a reconciliation might take is still being figured out by an overwhelmed week-old government.

“We have formed this advisory board standing on the dead bodies of no less than 500 people,” said Rizwana Hasan, a member of the cabinet and a spokeswoman for the interim government. “It’s no easy task. It’s very depressing.”

The interim government must pick up the pieces of a state in near-total collapse, while also preparing for an election that the organized political parties will soon be demanding. Establishing security is a prerequisite, and that has been made more difficult by the retreat of the country’s 200,000-strong police force, which was deeply politicized under Ms. Hasina.

“Police has also lost its confidence to do policing — that’s the reason they could not even come out of barracks, because they thought the people would bash them to death,” said Muniruzzaman, a retired general in the Bangladesh Army and the president of the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies. “And the people have lost the trust.”

He said the interim government needed to convince the political parties that crucial reforms must be carried out before a free, credible election could be held.

Moving forward will be difficult for a nation still coming to terms with its past.

Much of the action in recent days has been around the home of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s founding leader and Ms. Hasina’s father. Four years after Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971, Sheikh Mujib was killed at this house in a military coup, along with much of his family. Bangladesh’s short history since then has been marked by coups and counter-coups.

The reign of Ms. Hasina over the past 15 years was increasingly shaped by revenge for the massacre of her family. Everything she did was in the name of her father, whose face was plastered everywhere.

In the hours after Ms. Hasina fled the country, a mob believed to have been led by her political opponents vandalized the house, looted it and set it on fire.

Since then, the home has become a sad museum for the country’s layered trauma. The staircase where Sheikh Mujib was killed in 1975, with nine bullet holes marked on the wall, is now covered in soot from recently lit fires.

The student protesters tried to distance themselves from the vandalism, arriving in large numbers to clean the house and collect what was left of the family archives. They handed to the army scraps of diplomatic correspondence, a deck of antique cards with naked pictures, and the packaging of an old shampoo that declared “Really Does Clear Dandruff.”

“I am feeling very sorry,” Mohammed Haroun Rashid, 69, said as he held back tears while going through the burned house. “This is barbaric.”

He said that Ms. Hasina had done a great deal for the development of the country, but he admitted that “she had lost it” by turning autocratic. Another older man, a senior court lawyer, was shaking in anger at the sight of the damage. He also highlighted Ms. Hasina’s development work.

Aahir Amin, 18, who had on plastic gloves and was helping with the cleaning, listened quietly. He said nothing as the men finished their monologues.

“We are not denying the development,” he said after they left. “But you can’t deny everything else she did.”

He added: “He is entitled to his free speech.”

On Thursday, the scenes unfolding in Dhaka, the capital, weren’t so understanding.

The Awami League demonstrators had planned to gather at Sheikh Mujib’s old house to mark 49 years since his assassination. But as they tried to mobilize on Thursday morning, the roads leading to the site were blocked by the mobs of people, who sought to prevent journalists from documenting the violence that ensued.

Mohammad Shamsuddin, a member of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party — one of the parties long repressed by the ousted government — said its followers would not let the Awami League gather while the blood from Ms. Hasina’s crackdown was still fresh. He said Ms. Hasina must face trial.

“Everyone has the right to protest,” he said. “But no one can protest on the side of the killers.”

The situation began to calm down in the afternoon, as the mobs were replaced by the student protesters, many of whom had patrolled the streets late into the night and had just awakened around noon. The tense scenes of earlier in the day yielded to a dance party not far from Sheikh Mujib’s home.

Young men danced under a large banner that read “Dictator-Free Day.” The music they danced to was further salt on the wounds: The singer of many of the songs was a former lawmaker in Ms. Hasina’s now-toppled party.

A court in Russia sentenced a dual citizen of Russia and the United States on Thursday to 12 years in prison on accusations that she committed treason by donating money — about $50 — for Ukraine’s armed forces.

The court, in the city of Yekaterinburg, claimed to have found that the funds donated by the woman, Ksenia Karelina, 32, “were subsequently used to purchase tactical medicine, equipment, weapons and ammunition” for Ukraine.

The prosecution nearly always gets its way in treason cases in Russia’s stage-managed judicial system, but her lawyer, Mikhail Mushailov, said he would still appeal to try to get her sentence reduced.

“I was not surprised by the prison sentence or the way the trial was conducted,” Mr. Mushailov said by telephone from Yekaterinburg.

The conviction of Ms. Karelina, also known as Ksenia Khavana, was the latest in a series of treason and other cases by Russia against citizens of Western countries. The surge in such cases in recent years has raised concerns that the Kremlin views the accused as valuable assets to be traded for high-profile Russians held by the United States and other countries in the West.

Mr. Mushailov said that in addition to appealing Ms. Karelina’s sentence, he would be “taking all the legally required actions” to make her part of any future prisoner exchange between Russia and the West.

Russian investigators accused Ms. Karelina of donating $52 to Razom for Ukraine, a New York-based nonprofit that sends assistance to Ukraine, according to Perviy Otdel, a group of Russian lawyers who specialize in cases involving accusations of treason and other politically charged issues.

A Razom for Ukraine spokeswoman said on Thursday: “We are a New York-based nonprofit providing humanitarian aid and assistance to Ukraine. We do not provide weapons to Ukraine’s military.”

Ms. Karelina, who is from Yekaterinburg and lives in Los Angeles, pleaded guilty, according to Mr. Mushailov and the court.

He has not disclosed further details about the case, because it is classified.

Ms. Karelina, whose trial began on June 20, was arrested in February while visiting Yekaterinburg, an industrial city about 850 miles east of Moscow. Her case was heard by the same judge who presided over the trial of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was freed this month in a prisoner swap after receiving a 16-year sentence in July.

That prisoner swap was the largest between Russia and Western countries since the Cold War. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, his ally, released 16 prisoners, including Mr. Gershkovich, the Russian American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine. They were exchanged for a convicted assassin and seven other Russians, including hackers and spies.

But Russia still has several Americans in its prisons. One is Marc Fogel, a history teacher who worked for almost a decade at the Anglo-American School of Moscow. In 2021, when trying to enter Russia, Mr. Fogel was arrested and accused of smuggling drugs after customs officers found a small amount of medical marijuana in his luggage. His relatives have said it was to treat severe pain.

In June 2022, Mr. Fogel, a native of western Pennsylvania, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for drug smuggling. In Russia, people convicted of murder have often received shorter sentences.

Another American in Russian custody is Michael Travis Leake, a rock musician who was sentenced last month to 13 years after prosecutors accused him of organizing a drug-trafficking ring.

Perviy Otdel, the legal group, said that Ms. Karelina’s case revolved around $52 donated to Razom for Ukraine, a New York-based nonprofit group that sends assistance to the country.

According to Ms. Karelina’s profile on VK, a Russian social network, she became a United States citizen in 2021. Her profile, which identified her as a student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, said that she had graduated from Ural Federal University in Yekaterinburg in 2014.

The number of state treason cases in Russia has been growing steadily since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Last year, about 50 people were accused of the offense, according to Perviy Otdel, including high-profile critics of the Kremlin and a student accused of photographing Russian Army formations in his town.

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

Ana Beatriz da Silva still remembers her first home: a tiny room behind the kitchen of a beachfront apartment in Rio de Janeiro, where her mother worked as a maid.

The room was barely bigger than a closet, hot and stifling, she said, with only a small window for air. Ms. Silva shared the cramped space with her mother and older brother until she was 6.

“We lived like that — stuffed in a cubicle,” said Ms. Silva, 49, a geography teacher.

The experience convinced Ms. Silva that she could never have a maid’s room in her own home. So when she rented an aging apartment in a middle-class area of Rio, she swiftly turned the servant’s quarters into an office.

“The maid’s room is our colonial heritage,” Ms. Silva said. “It’s shameful.”

Many Brazilians increasingly feel the same way.

Maid’s rooms have been a fixture in Brazil’s homes for generations, a vestige of its long history of slavery and a tangible marker of inequality in a country where, after abolition, many affluent families relied on low paid, mostly Black domestic workers to clean, cook and care for children. Some worked around the clock for pennies; others toiled only in exchange for room and board.

But Brazil is undergoing a reckoning with its legacy of enslaving people and how this painful past has shaped everything from the economy to architecture.

The debate has spilled over to the maid’s room, which many say is a racist, classist relic with no place in modern homes.

“Architecture only reflects what society says is normal,” said Stephanie Ribeiro, an architect and designer who has been studying the maid’s room for over a decade. “And, for many people, the maid’s room doesn’t make sense anymore.”

Unlike their parents’ generation, younger people are calling out inequities in Brazil, which has a majority Black population.

The face of the country’s middle class is changing, too, as Black and mixed-race Brazilians make economic strides but reject some markers of affluence, like maids.

A raft of labor laws — a guaranteed 44-hour workweek, a standardized minimum wage and sick pay — have made live-in maids more costly, pushing what was once a symbol of financial success out of many Brazilians’ reach. As a result, fewer domestic workers live in their employers’ homes.

Some people say having a dedicated space is useful for maids to store belongings or take a lunch break. Others argue that the rooms provide essential housing for domestic workers who move to urban centers from distant rural areas, or those living on the poorer fringes of the city, hours away from their employer’s homes.

But many disagree.

“There’s no need for this worker to spend the night,” said Luiza Batista, coordinator of the National Federation of Domestic Workers, a union representing about 14,000 maids. “This person works all day. She needs a decent place to rest. She needs to be able to clock out.”

Ms. Batista, 68, said she started working as a live-in maid when she was 9 and spent decades cleaning, cooking and caring for wealthy families. In one home, Ms. Batista and another worker shared a room filled with cleaning supplies, construction material and a gas canister.

“You spent the night,” Ms. Batista recalled, “breathing in cleaning products.”

Maid’s rooms still often double as storage closets, crammed with everything from broken appliances to spare tools, she said. “This space is never just a place for the worker to rest.”

Maid’s rooms, of course, are not unique to Brazil; they are often built into the homes of wealthy families across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

In Latin America, they have gradually disappeared from countries like Chile and Argentina, where worker protections have made live-in maids less affordable. But they persist elsewhere, including Colombia, Bolivia and Mexico, despite pushback from labor activists.

Now, as Brazilians sour on maid’s rooms, they are turning them into libraries, lounges and walk-in closets.

Rising real estate prices in Brazil’s major cities mean more developers are building smaller apartments without maids’ rooms, and home buyers are choosier about how to use their shrinking square footage.

“Brazilian architecture is seeking a new identity,” said Wesley Lemos, an architect who has designed luxury homes across Brazil. “So the maid’s room is disappearing from blueprints.”

The idea of a servant’s room always made Diogo Acosta uncomfortable. The maid who worked for his family would sometimes spend the night in a cramped room behind the laundry room of their spacious home, in Rio’s wealthy Leblon neighborhood.

“It was so small, the room basically only fit her mattress,” said Mr. Acosta, 34, a professional saxophone player. “Even as a child, I thought it was so strange.”

Once he moved out, Mr. Acosta lived in a string of rentals where he turned the maid’s rooms into something else. In one apartment, it was a study. In another, a brightly painted guest bedroom.

And when he moved into a new apartment two years ago, the designated maid’s room measured just 37 square feet and lacked a window, which both horrified him and made the room perfect for a soundproof music studio.

“It’s sad to think that, before this, someone slept here,” he said.

The renovation was more than just practical. For Mr. Acosta, who hires a worker to clean his home once a month, reimagining the maid’s room also carried a symbolic meaning. “When we give it other uses, we are not just changing an apartment,” he said, “we are changing social relations, too.”

Historians trace the maid’s room back to slave quarters, known as senzalas in Portuguese, attached to the slave owner’s house. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, later than any other country in the Western Hemisphere.

But many freed people — lacking financial means — remained on these same properties, serving families that once enslaved them in exchange for room, board and a small salary.

When industrialization fed a wave of migration to cities, wealthy families translated the idea of servants quarters for an urban setting: In Rio, sprawling oceanfront apartments were built in the 1930s and ’40s with tiny, windowless rooms for maids.

“Maid’s rooms are the modern-day slave quarters,” said Joyce Fernandes, a historian, rapper and writer who shot to fame after sharing her own experiences as a third-generation maid.

In Brazil, where the gap between rich and poor is wider than anywhere else in South America, the rooms went unquestioned for decades.

When the country’s capital, Brasília, was built from scratch in the late 1950s, renowned architects like Oscar Niemeyer designed buildings with servant quarters, maid’s bathrooms and service elevators, cementing historic inequalities into a modernist landscape.

In the 1980s and ’90s, popular television soap operas featured wealthy, white families being served by mostly Black maids who lived in rooms tucked away inside luxurious mansions. In the early 2000s, Brazil’s most popular children’s shows featured maids who never left the kitchen.

“Even the poor, who often worked in these jobs, dreamed of one day becoming rich and having someone serving them,” said Joice Berth, an urbanist and architect.

Still, some people, even domestic workers, believe there remains a place for a servant’s room.

Rosângela de Morais, 48, a domestic worker in the Brazilian city of Salvador, started working as a live-in maid when she was just 10.

Ms. Morais no longer lives in the homes where she works. But, as maid’s quarters disappear, she says domestic workers are left with no place to change into uniforms, store belongings or take a lunch break.

While she considers maid’s rooms in their traditional form inhumane, she doesn’t think removing them altogether is the answer. “It would be better to keep this space, so we have a corner of our own,” she said. “A clean, airy room with a window, where you can rest with dignity.”

Letícia Carvalho, 34, a lawyer from the city of Aracaju, employs four domestic workers, one of whom lives in her home.

“She can’t go back and forth every day,” Ms. Carvalho said.

Still, Ms. Carvalho wanted a different kind of maid’s room. She made it bigger than usual, with a large window, air-conditioning and a hot shower. “We wanted to bring a bit more comfort to the people working for us,” she said.

Even as Brazil shifts away from maid’s rooms, social divisions persist in other ways. Most homes still have service bathrooms reserved for workers. And most buildings have separate entrances and elevators for maids, nannies, dog walkers and food delivery workers, though some are also moving to remove those divisions.

Still, Ms. Silva, the teacher, sees the vanishing maid’s room as evidence that Brazil is grappling with its painful past.

When Ms. Silva made a down payment on her first home this year, she was happy to discover that it didn’t have a maid’s room.

“It’s freeing, not to have this heavy history,” she said. “Instead, I’ll have a really big kitchen.”

After a long shift last Thursday, a junior doctor went to sleep in a seminar room at the Kolkata hospital where she worked. The next morning, her colleagues found her dead, her body showing signs of rape and extreme physical brutality.

The killing, at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, has stirred angry protests over entrenched misogyny and violence against women and led thousands of doctors to walk out of major public hospitals across India to demand a safer working environment.

Attacks on doctors in hospitals are common in India. Last month, doctors in New Delhi went on strike after an assault on a hospital by dozens of people, many of them relatives of a woman who died during surgery after giving birth.

In the days after the killing of the junior doctor, a 31-year-old physician trainee whose name may not be published under Indian law, intense anger boiled over into nationwide outrage. On Wednesday night, thousands of women protested on the streets of Kolkata, the largest city in West Bengal.

Outrage among doctors has also continued to build, with many government hospitals suspending all but emergency treatment as medical workers protest to demand better protection from such violence.

After protests by doctors, the head of R.G. Kar Medical College stepped down from his position, but hours later he was reassigned to another hospital by the state government. On Tuesday, a top court in Kolkata asked him to go on leave.

As the women marched, in another part of the city a mob stormed the R.G. Kar hospital, attacking protesting doctors and ransacking its emergency area. Videos from the clash showed the police using batons and firing tear gas.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the rising discontent on Thursday during an event to mark the anniversary of India’s independence, without directly mentioning the killing in Kolkata. As a society, he said, Indians should “seriously think about the kind of atrocities which are taking place against our mothers, sisters, daughters.”

“There is anger about that in the country. Common masses are angry. I am feeling that anger,” Mr. Modi said. “Our nation, our society and our state governments need to take that seriously. Crime against women should be investigated more urgently.”

During the initial investigation, the police arrested Sanjoy Roy, a volunteer at a police post within the hospital. Mr. Roy, who was in police custody, could not be reached for comment.

However, Subarna Goswami, an official with the Federation of Government Doctors’ Associations, a nationwide doctors’ organization, said evidence described in a postmortem report “indicates a strong possibility of the involvement of multiple persons.”

Unsatisfied with the investigation, doctors have accused the police of a coverup.

The chief of the Kolkata police, in response to protesters accusing officers of shielding other suspects, said the police had never indicated that there was only one person responsible in the case.

As the protests continued, a top court in Kolkata transferred the murder case from the local police to the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s premier federal investigations agency.

The protesting doctors are demanding a more stringent law to protect them from violence, including by making any attack on a doctor an offense with no bail. In 2019, a draft bill was floated among lawmakers by the government but never gained traction. Federal health ministry officials have now assured doctors they would consider introducing separate legislation in Parliament specifically prohibiting violence against them.

In India, about 75 percent of doctors say they have experienced violence, and a majority of them feel stressed by the profession, according to a 2019 study in The Indian Journal of Psychiatry. Shashi Tharoor, a lawmaker, alluded to this data in urging stronger protection for medical workers before the Indian Parliament, a doctors’ association said.

Many doctors’ organizations have said their members will not return to work until the law to curb attacks on doctors is passed in both houses of Parliament.

Shreya Shaw, a postgraduate medical student at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, said she could no longer work night shifts, and that it was deeply unsettling to watch doctors who were protesting peacefully being attacked by mobs inside the hospital on Wednesday night.

“We can’t do emergency, night duties anymore,” she said. “We can’t rely on the hospital security, we cannot rely on the police.”