The longest doctors’ strike in India’s post-independence history is into its sixth week. Junior doctors from 26 hospitals-cum-medical colleges across West Bengal are calling for “justice” for the victim of the indescribably horrific rape-murder at Kolkata’s premier hospital-teaching college. The government, unwilling to allow a televised confabulation with the strikers, has finally conceded to most of their demands, including the depowering of senior bureaucrats and the Kolkata police commissioner, who the strikers view as responsible for fiddling with the evidentiary trail.
Convinced that they are backed by most Bengalis, the doctors think of the strike as a “people’s movement”. Others see the agitation as confined to middle-class Kolkatans with no involvement of the hardscrabble in mofussil Bengal, the main sufferers from the state’s decrepit and corrupt medical superstructure—a malcondition that tracks back to the Left Front years, now perpetuated by the TMC government.
This agitation is agitprop (a protest form that has many global precedents): it has rocked many fence-sitters off their porches; and has hardened oppositional views. But what is it actually accomplishing?
As complex as the event is—there are cases ongoing in the Supreme Court and a special court in Kolkata—perceptions about it have devolved into a Manichaean standoff, never good news for those pursuing the truth or its closest approximation, in a biome infected with the maggots of evidential fake-news, the pull-and-push of political agendas, louring and infinitely-manipulative state power, and the noost brought about by un-self-doubting protestive self-belief.
The protest is tailor-made for oppositional parties—the BJP and CPI(M)—to exploit. For all their assertions of apoliticality, there is enough evidence that the protestor’s ranks have been infiltrated, if not actively subsidised, by the two parties, whose predictable realpolitik objective is destabilising the Mamata Banerjee government. While the protestors have denied this, they have Mamata’s back to the wall because of the BJP’s strength in the state. Mamata has been reduced to being uncommonly accommodating because she knows that cracking the whip would only feed the BJP wolf.
The protesting doctors have accomplished much of immediate import; and yet have accomplished nothing of lasting value. The Bengali tendency to historicise protests carries the risk of over-conflation with past movements. A liberal observer compared the doctors’ representatives who sought to consult their compeers before deciding the future course to Mexico’s Zapatista movement—forgetting that it remains, after 30 years, a frozen conflict.
A Left critic of the TMC government said that with the transfer of two senior bureaucrats and the police commissioner, accountability had been fixed, and that fixing accountability had its own value. But fixing accountability without consequent systemic changes means functionally little—band-aid on a festering wound.
For the face-off between Bengal’s doctors and the state goes back to the Left Front years. The calls for doctorial reparation have remained the same: safety in hospital surroundings, and end to the stranglehold of the embedded ‘medical mafia’ comprising politically-connected administrators and doctors. But none of the protests succeeded in forcing systemic changes. Each one ended in loosely-complied promissory notes, so-called ‘nameplate changes’, and prestidigitation with hierarchs.
Meanwhile, the TMC government is taking a deserved hammering, both in the streets and in the Supreme Court, which has decided to run with the populist refrain, turning its face away from indications of insidious political processes at work. This is not the first time the top court has done so, and it won’t be the last. But to its credit is also its surprising anti-statism, which, if it creates a precedent, will stand future non-violent unrest in good legal stead.
The court is buttressing the protest into a cogency it did not initially have by validating the appeals made by the protesters: from demanding the removal of senior health bureaucrats and police commissioner, increased security for health workers, and an end to what they called the “threat culture” in state-run hospitals; to more granular demands such as monitory committees of academics, doctors and nurses, grievance redress systems, complaint committees to handle sexual harassment allegations, and a counselling centre in each hospital to help doctors and students.
These new sub-structural introductions to the state’s medical system would take time to implement. But such is the momentum of the Supreme Court’s ambitions that the state is left with little leeway in terms of time and finance. “Each aspect would merit serious consideration,” it said, giving the Bengal government just three days to take “remedial action”. Presumedly, that remediation would also involve installing all 415 CCTV cameras the state had promised, but of which it has only put in place 37.
The court simultaneously asked for district collectors to oversee the expenditure for security measures in hospitals. The interval between the order and its fulfilment does not gel. This immoderation seems to inform the handling of this case.
As this protest winds to its protracted conclusion, harrying the impoverished most affected by the strike, it is clear that the system will remain intact. Its structure and hierarchy will remain unchallenged. The ground will remain ripe for another protestive reprise a few years from now against the very same iniquities that have been haunting Bengal for decades.
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)
(Views are personal)