GUJARAT: Mijaya Meghwar is married today, but she remotely recalls that when she was 3 years old and suffering from a cold and cough, her parents took her to a local quack healer who, claiming to cure her, branded her with an iron rod on her chest. Her health deteriorated further. Then her parents took her to Masoom Children's Hospital run by Dr Rajesh Maaheshwari. Vijaya says if it wasn’t for doctor Maheshwari, who treated her, she might have been lost.
Vijaya is not the only one to have got a new lease of life at the hands of Dr Rajesh Maaheshwari, a paediatrician, who after completing his specialisation in children’s medicine, joined the government-run GK General Hospital in Bhuj in August 1994.
In the early days, medical resources were scarce. Despite these limitations, Dr Maaheshwari treated and saved the lives of several infants. During his one-and-half years' stint at the hospital, he came across a number of infants brought in with serious ailments from remote areas like Vagad, Bhachhau, and Rapar, most of the children branded on their bodies.
Interacting with their parents, Maaheshwari learned that in remote areas, in the absence of awareness and access to health services, superstitions of generations have bared their fangs; parents ‘choose’ to take their ailing children for treatment to the local ‘Bhuva’ (black magician), a cure by branding. The doctor was shocked.
After quitting the government hospital, he started a private clinic, Masoom Children at Gandhidham, also working at the hospital in Bhachhau. He came into contact with poor and socially backwards families, deeply invested in superstitious rituals and practices.
To his surprise, children were not only branded when they were ill but even as preventive measures; children were branded with red-hot iron rings on their backs to ‘prevent’ Tuberculosis in many villages of Rapar taluka. The situation was worse in the Vagad taluka.
The high number of branding cases deeply distressed the paediatrician. He says it felt like standing before a steep cliff, a mountainous obstacle of tradition and superstition. It was more than just curing medical symptoms, the doctor says. It was the eradication of centuries of inhumane belief from areas where little literacy had penetrated.
“I had made up my mind that I would eradicate branding of children at any cost, knowing well that just medical prevention would not resolve the issue. It needed awareness, not only among those who practice it but among society too, who need to be sensitised about the issue through mass media. I approached a leading daily in Kutch and shared details about the deep-rooted inhumane practices. I provided a case study of a child from Vagad taluka, suffering from ‘hydrocephalus’, a condition where fluid accumulates in the brain. Such an illness demanded emergency medical treatment, but the parents instead got the child branded on his forehead. The study was widely circulated; it jolted society and even the medical fraternity. Now, there were other people to support me,” Maaheshwari said.
Maaheshwari then headed for the remote rural belts, creating awareness among the population, attending religious gatherings, visiting educational institutes, addressing masses from one village to the next.
His incessant awareness drive was not without toil. A slander campaign was orchestrated against him, his private practice drastically dropping. He received threats over phone and in person, a cost of standing up against toxic superstition. However, this was little impediment to Dr Maaheshwari, his resolve indomitable in his aim to eradicate the practice of branding.
Maaheshwari realised to effectively counter the bane, govt intervention was required. In 2011, when a disturbing branding incident of a girl in Vagad taluka was reported by the media, NHRC was jolted from slumber. It issued a notice to the Gujarat govt for details on the issue and action taken by it. The govt flung into action, not only taking action against cases of branding and issued a public notice stating, “If any child is found branded, parents and the person who branded will be held accountable and action will be taken against them.”
Maaheshwari said this public notice came as a ‘booster dose’ to his awareness campaign. It created fear among the parents and the local quack doctors. Branding cases started to dwindle; by 2014-15 results started showing, and in 2019, Vagad reported zero cases of child branding.