By giving a call for an all-India strike the Indian Medical Association has dexterously tried to shrug off the responsibility for whatever had happened in the R G Kar Medical College Hospital in Kolkata on
August 9. After all, the doctors at the helm of affairs cannot wash their hands from the ghastly rape-cum-murder incident which took place as the victim had reportedly gone to sleep in an insecure place after 36 hours of uninterrupted duty.
Besides, notwithstanding all sympathy for the late resident doctor, one cannot allow the lives of thousands of patients across the country to be threatened. No, the issue involved is not just the security in the hospitals across the country. Is it not the fact that Sanjay Roy, the main accused, was a civic volunteer of Kolkata Police posted in the outpost of the said hospital?
Though the media has not given any figure of how many patients have lost their lives due to doctors’ agitation in the last week, one can go to Google Search to know the number of deaths caused
by each such strike in any one hospital in the past—they are often in dozens. The toll throughout India this time may have been much higher. The doctors not only went on Strike on August 17 but
are on the warpath in many parts of the country since the tragic incident took place.
Untold hardship
The untold hardship faced by the patients for no crime of their own is not getting highlighted as the issue has been politicized. The disease of many critical patients has become complicated due to the total absence of treatment.
True, the latest incident took place in a Kolkata hospital, but this is not the first kind of victimization of young junior doctors and resident doctors. The latter are not just raising the issue of security as is being made out by the media, but they are also drawing attention towards the highhandedness of the full-fledged doctors of the medical college hospitals all over the country. They leave the functioning of the entire hospital on the shoulders of the junior doctors, resident doctors that is those doing MD and MS and subsequently super-specialization.
It is these reputed doctors of medical college hospitals who are the worst exploiters of the young trainees–not an appropriate expression as these PG scholars are after all MBBS degree holders who have treated crores of us in the past decades when the concept of MD or MS was not much in practice.
Physical and emotional torture
In several places, these PG scholars are subjected to physical harassment and public humiliation leading to suicide. Many of them had lost their mental balance and gone into depression or emotional breakdown.
Only a few months back a PG doctor wrote an article in a reputed national daily narrating the harrowing experience he had to undergo in the name of training and discipline.
Since the latest anger is also targeted against the full-fledged doctors of the medical college hospitals across the country the IMA cleverly gave a new twist by giving the strike call. As the West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee government has been cornered and left alone the IMA fully utilized the opportunity to shield the doctors, not only of R G Kar Hospital but of the entire India.
Many electronic media journalists went to town without knowing the actual ground situation. The big question is as to why the victim lady PG student was not allowed a break in 36 hours. What type of work culture is it when such talented brains are compelled to work as bonded labourers?
Yes, there might have been shortage of full-fledged doctors in many hospitals, but this issue should be raised forcefully by the IMA before the state governments. Medical college hospitals at least have junior doctors and PG students, what about the district and sub-division or block hospitals?
Apart from this, in those medical college hospitals where there is no seat for PG and super-specialization the inexperienced junior doctors run the hospitals as the consultants come only for a few hours.
This system has been going on for decades with neither the government nor the doctors themselves doing anything to rectify it. Doctors in the medical college hospitals situated in the state capitals have strong connections as the politicians and bureaucrats want to keep them in good humour for obvious medical reasons.
As the main sufferers in any such strike or deadlock are the poor patients the powers that be are least bothered about them.
Chopping off doctors’ hands
Whatever hype the media is creating in the name of the latest strike by the doctors the subalterns who throng these hospitals every day are now least interested in it.
No doubt, the rape-cum-murder initially invoked sympathy and was widely condemned by society as such. But the moment the agitators went overboard and the people started suffering the whole exercise
backfired. So, the political parties which are thinking that they have got an opportunity to score a brownie point are living in Fool’s Paradise.
The National Democratic Alliance leaders may have been baying for the blood of Mamata Banerjee and are showing a lot of sympathy for the doctors. But the truth is that the then Bihar chief minister Jitan
Ram Manjhi (now a Union cabinet minister) had in October 2014 warned the doctors by saying that jo gareebon ke saath khilwar karenge unka hum haath kaat lengey (I will chop off the hands of those who
will play with the lives of the poor).
Two years before this statement Ashwini Choubey, the then health minister under the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar, warned that the doctors who dared to go on strike would have their hands chopped off.
Choubey, a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, then went on to become minister of state for health in the second Narendra Modi government.
Where do these two gentlemen stand now?
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