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What kind of doctor would you
prefer?
Dilip D’Souza
 Been thinking of
doctors of late.
First, some
budding doctors at a medical college in Tanda, Himachal Pradesh. In
the middle of learning about anatomy and disease and healing and
whatever else prospective doctors study , these young men took a
break. I mean, sure, all hard-working students need a break every
now and then, why not these guys?
So they took a
break and set out to rag some freshers in their college. As part of
this noble, time-honoured tradition, they beat up one of those
freshers: Aman Kachroo, who wanted to be a doctor one day .
Instead, he
ended up a victim of four young men — Ajay Verma, Abhinav Verma,
Naveen Verma and Mukul Sharma — who ostensibly wanted to be doctors
too.
Instead, Aman
ended up dead.
It’s a tragic,
nauseating story.
Ragging like
this is horrible enough; but somehow ragging like this by boys who
plan to be doctors is both nauseating and frightening. What kind of
care for the health and well-being of a patient can you expect from
a doctor who, as a student, thrashed juniors purely for being
junior?
Put it this way:
would you go to a doctor if you knew he had beaten up freshers?
Maybe killed one?
Second, a
gynaecologist in Gujarat.
In the middle of
attending to her patients sometime in early 2002, this doctor took a
break too. Why not, again? If she’s like most doctors in our cities,
she was probably flooded with patients. Besides, she was also a
people’s representative at the time, a legislator, and we know how
busy those folks can be. No doubt she needed to get away from it
all. Recharge her batteries, a good idea.
So yes, she took
a break. She led a shouting, angry mob to the Naroda Patiya and
Naroda Gram areas of Ahmedabad, only a kilometre or so from her
gynaecological clinic. Reports say she distributed swords to men in
the mob and harangued them into action.
There was action
all right: with those swords, the mob butchered nearly one hundred
people.
Carnage
finished, the doctor returned to her clin ic to resume work. A few
years later, she became her state’s Minister for Women and Child
Development.
As Minister, she
kept up her gynaecological practice.
Leading a
murderous mob is horrible enough; but somehow knowing that it was a
gynaecologist who did it is, again, nauseating and frightening. A
news report captures some of that sense of wonder: “On the one hand
she helps bring in new life into the world, and on the other, she is
arrested for inciting and arming a communal mob that slaughtered and
burnt alive 98 people.” What care for the health of women can you
expect from Dr Maya Kodnani, who distributed swords to a mob intent
on massacre?
Put it this way:
if you were a pregnant woman, would you go to such a doctor?
Third, there’s a
doctor in Raipur.
A gold medallist
paediatrician from one of our finest medical colleges, Vellore’s
Christian Medical College, he could have picked a lucrative career
anywhere in the country, indeed anywhere in the world. Instead he
chose to work in rural
India,
taking health care to some of India’s most forgotten people.
In doing so, he
began to under stand the processes that keep them forgotten, and to
realise that he had to speak out about that. Because he took a stand
against pervasive injus tice and neglect, he was arrested and jailed
in Chhattisgarh. He was branded with the term that even sceptics are
strangely unwilling to question — ‘Naxalite’.
Next month will
mark two years that Dr Binayak Sen has been in prison. Two years,
during which a doctor who spurred on murderers in Ahmedabad
practiced gynaecology , during which some would-be doctors in
Himachal Pradesh beat a junior to death.
Two years that
an outstanding son of
India
has languished in jail for reasons that would be laughable if they
were not so tragic. So: Doctors on your mind too? Whom would you go
to?
29
April 2009
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