Kalaburagi: Nearly 500 women arrived from different villages, hostels and slums to take out candlelight processions through the major streets of Kalaburagi on Saturday night to symbolically assert their rights and offer resistance to the growing assaults on women.

Divided into four teams, they took out candlelight processions from Rangamandir, Appa Temple, Supermarket and Tirandaz talkies at 11 p.m. raising slogans against the increasing violence on women and children and asserting women’s right. The fifth team, led by Zilla Panchayat Chief Executive Officer Hepsiba Rani Korlapati, started from the Zilla Panchayat office.

Organised under the slogan: “These nights are ours, these streets are ours and fearless living is ours”, the women converged at Jagat Circle where a public meeting was held near the Basaveshwara statue. The women associated with Boomitai Balaga, a cultural outfit, played musical instruments, sang and danced.

Addressing the gathering, K. Neela, a social activist associated with Janawadi Mahila Sanghatan, said that fascism was imposing prohibition on women to enter into streets at midnight in a new form. She called upon the people to fight patriarchal forces in society, particularly the right-wing driven by Manusmriti.

Ms. Hepsiba Rani Korlapati commended the organisers for mobilising the women for an unique agitation and urged women to assert themselves in their daily life and to build strong resistance to male-domination creating a more equitable society where both men and women live on equal-footing with self-respect and dignity.

The public meeting went on till 1.30 a.m. the next morning. The women who participated in the agitation walked down to their hostels in groups. Those who came on two-wheelers too returned home by the same mode. The women who arrived from far away villages returned in trucks.