Voters may outgrow freebies, but not progress in sectors like education and health, says doctor-politician Dr P Vinay Kumar, calling for a sharper focus on development. The son of former Union law minister P Shiv Shankar, he reflects on his father’s extraordinary rise from a humble background and his pivotal role in reforming the Indian judiciary including the appointment of the first BC and SC judges to the Supreme Court. Dr Vinay also explains why Telangana’s BC reservation bill may face legal hurdles. A renowned surgical gastroenterologist, he shares sharp insights into rising acidity among tech workers and busts popular myths around multivitamins.
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Not many in today's generation may know about P Shiv Shankar. He was the one who argued on behalf of Indira Gandhi after the Emergency during the Shah Commission, when many cases were filed against her. He came from a very humble background. He participated in the freedom movement and fought the Razakars. He came up the hard way. Legend has it that he polished shoes at Amritsar railway station while studying.
I was in my first year of medicine when I picked up the phone at home and Mrs Gandhi was on the line. “Main Indira Gandhi baat kar rahi hoon, kya main Shiv Shankar ji se baat kar sakti hoon?” I still remember those words. When I went and told him, he thought I was pulling his leg. That’s how it started. And when he won all her cases, she said, “I'm thankful to you for standing by me. Why don't you stand by me in Parliament too?” And that’s how he entered politics. She immediately made him the Union law minister, which was a point of great disbelief for us. For the first time, he had become an MP and suddenly, he became the law minister. He was sitting in the crowd among the MPs until the cabinet secretary came and said, “You’re supposed to go onto the swearing-in dais.”
As law minister, Shiv Shankar initiated the move to transfer judges. It was one of the first judicial reforms in India.
He found that in each state, there was one community dominating the judiciary. Since the chief justice was from a dominant community, he was also picking judges from that community... This was something he wanted to change. Someone coming from Gujarat or Bihar to Andhra Pradesh wouldn’t know the caste equations of the state. In fact, it was Damodaram Sanjeevaiah, when he was the chief minister in the 1960s, who complained to the then Union home minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and the chief justice that because of these dominant sections, judgments were biased.
Apart from that, the first judges from the Backward Classes and Scheduled Castes in the Supreme Court were appointed by Shiv Shankar. There were many other reforms. He also realised that the poor were losing out on justice, not because justice wasn’t on their side, but because they couldn’t afford it. It’s not just the court fee and the lawyer’s fee — let’s say someone from a village is arguing a case in the High Court of Telangana … the poor guy will have to bear the travel expenses, come here, find a place to stay, and it doesn’t end with one hearing. It goes on for years. It’s demoralising.
I’m going off track, but let me tell you about my experience. Over the last year, there has been a case against me. The judge has heard the case — it’s all online — about 7–8 appearances, but the lawyer doesn’t come cheap. The judge has written online that he’s not able to dictate the judgment because the clerk who takes the dictation isn’t there. That happened about four or five times. And at the end of the eighth time, the judge was transferred and a new judge has come. He has to start all over again because he doesn’t know the case.
Mr Shiv Shankar brought in free legal aid for the poor, under which he said the court fee would have to be paid by the government and court. He went to the Bar Council of each state and pleaded with them to reduce fees for such clients. The Lokayukta was also started by him.
Since you're editing the autobiography of your father, what are your thoughts on the current state of affairs in the judiciary, given what recently happened in Delhi?
A judge, when asked if there was corruption in the judiciary, said he wouldn’t answer it directly but would only say that judges haven’t come down from heaven — which means he was indirectly agreeing. So, how do we place this? Many things have changed in society. The courts are like Caesar’s wife — they should be above suspicion. But I can’t tell you one area of society where there is no corruption, not even religious places. Courts can’t be an exception.
What prompted you to float a new party?
I never charged in the general ward. I would do about 100–150 cases free of cost every month at the corporate hospital I was working at — Apollo. I could see that a person in the general ward would invariably have to sell something at home to pay the Rs 4–5 lakh bill. And if I charged Rs 30,000–40,000, he would have had to sell something else to pay that. At some point, I thought these 100–150 cases per month are nothing. If I get into politics, with one signature, I can change people’s lives. With that thought process, I entered politics.
You later merged your party with the Congress. Now it is in power after a long time in Telangana. It has promised the six guarantees and is implementing them…
My thought process on welfare measures is different. I believe that they don’t help a person’s growth at any level. The person doesn’t recognise that this is being done for him by a political party. He thinks they’re doing it for votes and gives them his vote. It ends there. The next time elections come, he doesn’t vote for them, even though they helped him. He says, “What next?”
I was reading a detailed study that said the Backward Classes, especially the Kurmas, voted for the Congress and that’s how it won. Now, it was the same Kurmas who got sheep from KCR. So they took the sheep and voted for the Congress. You can’t take it for granted that you’ve done something for them. People have got into a mode where they think: if we vote for them, we won’t get new measures. I don’t think there’s an end to that.
The second thing is, if you study the trend a bit, you’ll see that people have voted for development. When Modi won in 2014, his main slogan was development. He never spoke about welfare measures or freebies. Now he is doing it, but not at that time. Kejriwal said if we stop corruption, people will develop.
So I think if you can convince people that we will develop their lives if we come to power, then you can win. I don’t think these freebies are necessary. This is my personal opinion. How do you develop people’s lives? You can only do it through education and by giving them good health.
The Telangana government has conducted a survey of BCs now. They have brought in a Bill enhancing BC reservations to 42%. But that may or may not be constitutionally feasible.
That 42% — I think it is very difficult. The last time something like this was done was by Tamil Nadu in 1991. That was 69% reservations, which the Central government placed in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution. Before you do that, a constitutional amendment has to be brought in. The Central government at that time did it because the then prime minister PV Narasimha Rao was dependent on the Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa. It was a minority government, and one of the parties supporting it from outside was Jayalalithaa’s.
If something is in the Ninth Schedule, the High Court and Supreme Court cannot interfere in it. But in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that it could question the Ninth Schedule too. But that’s beside the point. At that time, Jayalalithaa got it done and gained the support of other opposition parties like the DMK because they knew the Centre was dependent on TN. So they went en bloc, requested the Centre, and it was done.
Today, the BJP government is not dependent on the Telangana government. Everyone knows they don’t need to do it. So the BRS will not go along. And the BJP has its way out — it will very simply say, “Remove Muslims, and we will do it.” And the Congress will never do that. So the constitutional amendment itself will not come, and once that doesn’t come, it will not stand in the Supreme Court.
You are a renowned surgical gastroenterologist. Your father was a famous lawyer. Why didn’t you choose the legal profession?
I badly wanted to be a lawyer. But my father was the one who pushed me into medicine. I was supposed to join a medical college entrance tutorial. My father gave me the money. I went and joined Nizam College for a BA. At the end of the year, when I didn’t get the seat, my father went and told the owner of the tutorial that he would sue him. He said his son is brilliant and couldn’t have failed to get the seat.
That man got scared, checked the register and told him, “Your son’s name is not in the register.” The next year, he took me to college and sat outside while I wrote the entrance. I left a few questions, thinking — you can take the horse to water…Unfortunately, I got the seat. But I enjoy the profession. I don’t think any amount of money can buy the feeling you get when a patient walks in and says, “You are a God, you saved my life.”
On social media, many prescribe vitamins for various issues. Are they of any use?
Most multivitamins are actually beneficial only to the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture them. They’re not really useful to patients. There are very few cases where they’re needed. There's so much multivitamin content in the food we eat that 99% of what’s taken in comes out the next day in the faeces, because the body already has enough of it. B-complex doesn’t really work either.
Vitamin D is necessary. Its deficiency has its own problems. In the US, it’s compulsory to take it monthly as a maintenance dose. Here too, when we get patients’ Vitamin D levels up, after 2–3 months we see them drop again. So we recommend taking it weekly for 6–8 weeks, and then a maintenance dose once a month.
But that’s only for Vitamin D. As for vegetarians — the stomach has a B-12 carrier in its wall. When B-12 comes in through food, that carrier latches on and helps absorb it into the bloodstream. Vegetarians don’t have that carrier. So they tend to suffer from B-12 deficiency. Even if they take it orally, it’s not absorbed properly. So they need to take it as an injection.
Are cases of acidity rising?
Previously, it was believed that spicy food triggered acidity. The stomach naturally secretes around 1,500 ml of acid daily. This helps digest about 60% of non-fatty, non-oily food. So things like spicy food, citrus fruits, heavy smoking, alcohol, and painkillers (especially in elderly people with joint pain) would increase acid secretion up to 2,000 ml, leading to acidity.
But now, only 20% of acidity cases are due to food or lifestyle. The remaining 80% come from people who don’t consume such things and whose acid secretion isn’t more than 1,500 ml — yet they have symptoms. The reason lies in food timing. Say someone eats breakfast at 8 am, lunch at 2 pm, dinner at 8 pm. Around 7.30 or 7.45, the brain tells the stomach to start secreting acid to prepare for food. If the person doesn’t eat till 10 pm, there’s no food to digest and the acid starts attacking the stomach lining.
Now take youngsters or techies — many don’t sleep until 2 or 3 at night, then wake up at 10 or 11 am. Their food timings are completely irregular. Invariably, 90% of IT professionals who come to us suffer from acidity because of this.
Many techies suffer from obesity too, said a recent study
Yes, because they’re sitting all day. Another big contributor is stress. And by stress, I don’t mean a catastrophe. Even regular, everyday stress — work stress, relationship stress. There’s a lining in the stomach that protects it from acid. In stressed individuals, cracks develop in that lining, and acid seeps in. We know stress causes more skin issues. It worsens asthma too and acidity.
The best way to manage stress is through regular morning exercise. It triggers the release of endorphins — the body’s natural stress-relievers. They’re released automatically — with cardio exercise. Even weight training increases heart rate and contributes. But you really have to get your heart rate up.