Mumbai: In September 2008, a Malad doctor accidentally left a surgical mop inside a patient’s stomach during surgery. A month later, the patient experienced excruciating pain. An examination revealed the forgotten mop and a case of medical negligence was registered. Not content to let the law take its course, ‘workers’ of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena party dragged the doctor out to the streets and blackened his face.
The incident was not the first of its kind. The darkening of skin as a form of punishment is not a rarity in a country where fair skin is a virtue. And mob justice is not unknown, neither is expressing ‘grief’ with violence and destruction of private or public property: in 2001, after Shiv Sena leader Anand Dighe died, after a heart attack, in the Sunitidevi Singhania Hospital in Thane, his party workers set fire to the hospital. The incident was widely reported and the hooliganism was condemned.
Nevertheless, such attacks on doctors were a rarity. Doctors, after all, with engineers and IAS officers, have long been part of the pedestalised trinity that Indian parents want their children to either become or marry.
But in a series of recent events, culminating in a two-week period earlier this month, the medical profession found itself at the receiving end of violence.
• March 12: A mob brutally assaulted Rohan Mhamunkar, a 35-year-old resident doctor at the Dhule Civil Hospital. Dr. Mhamunkar had earlier recommended that the patient be moved to a higher medical facility, which, allegedly, the patient’s relatives felt meant that he did not look after the patient properly. Video from CCTV footage showing them kicking and slapping Dr. Mhamunkar, even hitting him with a bed, went viral. The police arrested nine people. Dr. Mhamunkar suffered multiple injuries, including an orbital fracture, and is still in hospital; he may have some degree of permanent vision loss.
• March 16: A patient in Nashik Civil Hospital being treated for Swine Flu died. Aggrieved relatives allegedly assaulted three hospital employees — a trainee doctor, a medical officer and a staff nurse — while the post mortem was being done.
• March 18: A 60-year-old patient with chronic kidney disease died in Mumbai’s Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital (Sion hospital). Her relatives assaulted the resident doctor, Rohit Kumar Tated.
• March 18: Incensed at the unavailability of Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) bed, around 10 people attempted to attack Dr. Sarang Dave at Wadia Hospital, Parel, Mumbai.
• March 19: Relatives of a patient beat up a junior orthopaedic resident in Government Medical College, Aurangabad.
• March 22: The mother and other relatives of a child who was brought in for treatment allegedly assaulted a speciality medical officer in the paediatric ward of Mumbai’s Sion Hospital, hitting the doctor on her arm.
In response, resident doctors in the city’s civic hospitals went on mass casual leave, effectively a strike. They received support from the medical community not just in the city or state, but across the country, causing a lot of trouble to the sick. The agitation was called off last week, after the Maharashtra government and the Bombay High Court made assurances of better protection for doctors.
