“Aruna [Ramachandra Shanbaug] is the bond that unites us” and “she means a lot to KEM Hospital” whose staff are “determined to take care of her till her last breath by natural process.”
These statements made by the Mumbai's KEM Hospital Dean Sanjay Oak weighed heavily on the Supreme Court which rejected the plea made on behalf of Aruna. Though “Aruna has lived in her own world for the last 37 years,” he said “every new batch of entrants, the student nurses, is introduced to her and they are told that she is one of us and she continues to be one of us. And then they whole-heartedly take care of Aruna.” Dr. Oak, who filed an affidavit in the case, recalled that on becoming the Dean in 2008 “he visited Aruna first to take her blessings.”
The court noted that all the seven Deans since 1973, when the incident happened, took care of Aruna. She loved listening to devotional songs rendered by Sadguru Wamanrao Pai. The Dean had said Aruna's relatives and her fiancé used to visit her initially. The KEM staff “never subjected her to intravenous food or fed her via a tube and all these years.”
