Indian Medical Association has over 325,000 doctors as its members. As with everything in India including the Republic itself, the upper castes inherited whatever the Brits left behind. There was no revolution to democratise society after Independence. Instead the ideology of this ruling upper class that took over was nothing other than the ideology of various professional associations be they lawyers, doctors, engineers or scientists: a mix of hypocrisy, self-aggrandisement, greed and class hatred of the majority of the people who are backward caste and tribes.
It was nothing short of a miracle that there was a socialist secular Government that monetised the deficit and invested in public services even for the decade or three after Independence as it did. But from 1991 onwards this miracle evaporated like a dream. Since the Hindu Nazis came to power in 2014 at least a quarter of all jobs in Government hospitals are vacant. Just like the Central Bureau of Investigation, the National Investigation Agency, the Supreme Court, the High Courts, the Defense Services, the Home Ministry and the Finance Ministry were prepped for a future under an absolute dictator whose only interest is the self-preservation of the upper castes of the subcontinent, the Government hospitals on the subcontinent too will after this June 17th 2019 strike by Indian Medical Association be nothing but Hindu Nazi self-aggrandisement schemes for Hindu Nazi doctors. There will be fewer and fewer public hospitals, and they will serve neither people nor country but only their self-serving professional staff.
Against this background, the answer to the question why the Indian Medical Association called for a national strike on 17th of June 2019 to demand from the Home Minister that he enact a central law along the lines of the Prevention of Violence Against Medicare Persons and Institutions Acts that are already on the statute books in 19 states, becomes self-evident. Follow the money. The aim of Hindu Nazi doctors is not to serve the people and the country but only themselves.
The IMA plastered an enormous welcome to the new Hindu Nazi Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on its webpage after he was inducted into the Cabinet after the May 23rd 2019 Parliamentary election results were out. Why instead of striking for more police control over patients did IMA not immediately launch a full frontal demand for better health services in the country? Obviously there are so many assaults in the first place because there is a conflict between upper class doctors and backward caste and tribal and Muslim patients. Privatisation has exacerbated this basic conflict and so the laws against patients must be tightened.
Nationally we have one private doctor for around 1100 people, one government doctor for around 12,000 people; and an average of 35 doctors per district each with around 1 million population on average. After independence it took a few decades to overthrow socialism and outlaw the system of monetising the deficit to pay for public services, but having succeeded there is no looking back. Such is the efficiency of the social violence of upper class professional rule in India that Hindu Nazi doctors along with other professionals now brought to power the Hindu Nazis at the Union level: to number every person and commoditise our needs. Muslims must be divided from backward and forward caste Hindus and tribals and sent to Pakistan. Workers must be individual consumers with a unique identification code and proof of citizenship. Once a person has jumped through all the hurdles, – and woe to those who must depend on the Government education system to teach them how to get where they need to go, – the Government will give us money to give to private insurance providers or to give to private service providers to do what if the Government did itself would actually be done with decency and compassion; – and less violence. But if it did so it would spoil the party for the Hindu Nazi doctors, and then where would support for the Hindu Nazi politicians be?
The Hindu Nazi doctors have a typical Nazist mix of ideologies: privatisation for the benefit of themselves and anti-Muslim hatred as a way of mobilising and brainwashing and sedating the backward castes and members of tribes. The Bhartiya Janata Party is a Hindu Nazi party ruling over one of the poorest countries in the world.
Around 1.3 billion people live on the subcontinent of whom at least 1 billion are unemployed, malnourished, ill, and poisoned by various kinds of avoidable harm. These include arsenic in drinking water, anti-biotic resistance due to water pollution, cancer due to industrial agricultural pollution, diabetes, attempted suicide, anaemia, death in child birth, cancers due to avoidable lack of cleanliness, and food contamination. Hundreds of avoidable childhood diseases afflict the poor and the hungry. The average life expectancy of the one billion or so members of the thousands of backwards castes and tribes is 15 years less than that of the upper classes. Thousands of them are raped and sexually abused by upper castes every year. Workers routinely are left to fend for themselves after agricultural work place accidents where most workers are self-employed and indebted. Around 10 million children are underage workers. Hundreds and thousands are bonded, with all the gruesome health impacts of being enslaved that go with it. Government hospitals in the various states of India vary vastly in the quality of their service and cost; no states barring West Bengal ruled by Trinamool Congress party of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, and Kerala ruled by the Communist Party of India Marxist of Pinarayi Vijayan, provide free treatment and medicines.
In all the BJP run states, – that is all states barring Kerala and West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Punjab, – there are hundreds of injustices of direct physical bodily and mental suffering against backward classes by upper classes every day. The remedies against injustice in these states are practically non-existent. It takes decades for legal cases to come for judgement if the plaintiff is a member of a backward caste or a Muslim or a member of a tribe; and as for treatment in a hospital, it is the worst thing that can happen to a person. Illness is the biggest cause of poverty in India apart from birth; and yet it is estimated that every person in all these states at least once in their life suffers some form of physical or mental ill health, injury, torture or hardship inflicted by others that ruins their financial security for years; and thus further ruins their health. Most Muslims and most members of backward castes and tribes on the subcontinent are landless. They have practically no chance of getting a house or a homestead let alone any social welfare support except with either Union or state government support. Private land is absolutely in the hands of upper castes.
For all these reasons the Republic of India is considered by most of its citizens and residents to be a torture chamber and a concentration camp; – and yet it is nonetheless the hope against hope of the majority that the Government will do something, anything, of a million things it could do to ameliorate their suffering. And so the Hindu Nazis on May 23rd 2019 got the majority of the votes.
Of course, most regions would like to be liberated from the Union and be free to look after their own nationals. But the Hindu Nazis are violent in their subjugation of any uprising against them; and so this option for a better life for the many is for the time being closed. And so despite constant complaints, protests, revolts and rebellions by sufferers, the basic structure of this world’s most unequal and now on its way to becoming most anti-Muslim society remains untouched and unchanged.
Like any professional association the IMA has been fantastically successful at creating a lucrative profession for its upper class members by means that include lobbying, monopoly practices, price fixing, policy making directly and indirectly, and simply by its members holding Government office. Harsh Vardhan himself is a member of IMA. Being so fixated on their own terms of professional engagement, class status and knowledge as power, doctors in this Republic of India treat patients not as human beings first and last, but as class enemies. Recently in Rajkot a general surgeon and professor of general surgery department in a public hospital refused to treat a patient or give them medicine and threatened that the patient was free to do whatever they wanted to do including die. Today the age of retirement of doctors in Telangana was raised from 58 to 65 because in one teaching hospital alone 226 out of 456 positions are vacant and no one can be found to fill them. Similarly, there were 204 vacancies of associate professors out of 597 posts and 1,133 out of 1,750 posts of assistant professors were also vacant. Even when eligible candidates were recruited, doctors did not join service, absented themselves or disappeared after joining service, the Hindu reported.
Like with any other professional association, the purpose of the IMA is to get free education and infrastructure from the Government and then mobilise the members to privatise the benefits. Patients are mere means to an end. But also like any other professional association, the IMA is super efficient at supporting its members to spread the lie in society that they are actually doing good.
If the doctors are truly concerned about their own safety, why they are not demanding a free public health service for all? According to any medical journal article on the topic, patients are usually violent because of lack of infrastructure and lack of quality treatment. Why does IMA not strike against the capitalist Hindu Nazi central government that thinks “government should not be in business” and has reduced the number of public hospitals whilst doing nothing to prevent doctors going into private practice? Why is the IMA not mobilising doctors to ask Harsh Vardhan and Narendra Modi for more health sector investment and public health care provision from the BJP government?
The reason is that the deal is that the Hindu Nazi Union Government will get the support of the IMA in return for the Union government supporting the IMA for greater financial benefit to its members. The IMA are not striking for the people or the country but to bring in private health insurance based private hospitals and more massive remuneration for themselves; if the Hindu Nazi politicians support them, the Hindu Nazi doctors will support the politicians in turn.
And both the Hindu Nazi doctors and the Hindu Nazi government will collude to brainwash the members of the backward castes and tribes and Muslims to create the impression that they are indispensable to the glory of the nation and the life of people living here. Of course no one believes it. That is why the Hindu Nazis need the new central Prevention of Violence Against Medicare Persons and Institutions Act and more police powers to deal with those who don’t buy their lies.
This is also obviously why the IMA is not demanding an end to the anti-people Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana National Health Protection Scheme which leaves Government hospitals to rot whilst forcing unimplementable private health insurance for spending in private service providers on the hapless people. They only want paying patients. Whether the strike is in private or public hospitals or both, it is not aimed at addressing the fundamental and absolute injustices in society or the reasons for ill health in the country, but rather it is a political and economic move on behalf of the Hindu Nazis doctors whose Hindu Nazi class buddies are currently in charge of the Union.
The point is, never in their wildest dreams did the Hindu Nazis really believe they could take over the Republic of India. Now that they have they really do not care what happens. The country is theirs. They can do what they want. And it seems that as far as the health sector is concerned the IMA is determined to see to it that the new Government helps them to fleece patients more efficiently, and that the police will be called more regularly to stop complaining patients who give in to their despair. Doctors will be able to charge the earth and keep back dead bodies until bills are paid. If patients get violent then the Home Minister Amit Shah has been petitioned to make a law to jail us for 7 years. Instead of genuinely looking for solutions for country and people, the IMA is using the unfortunate harm that happened to one of their members in West Bengal to achieve greater Hindu Nazi recruitment of the police to protect their lucrative private profession. They are least interested in preventing harm. It is obvious that Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana or National Health Protection Scheme leads to more violence against doctors. But these Hindu Nazi doctors are least bothered to work to eradicate this scheme and the ideology behind it.
The more neglected, destitute, hungry, weak and depressed a person, the more it will cost in health and welfare support to heal them. The more the community and society has looked after their members from the day of conception to the day they breath their last the less likely it is that they get ill at all. The IMA has revealed itself to be more interested in an unhealthy, ill and wounded society that it can exploit as it medicates it, than in a healthy society that needs least healing because it is happy.
Anandi Sharan is a social activist. She can be reached at [email protected]