The assault-cum-murder of a doctor in Kolkata caused a wave of protest all across India, because it also raised several uncomfortable questions. First of all, the lady doctor was 30, and still under training. There has got to be something wrong with a profession where you are still der training at 30. What that means, I suppose, is that the poor girl was doing a house job in a teaching hospital, and was preparing for a postgraduate degree in some specialty. She had become a doctor all right, and was doing a doctor’s job, but was not yet a specialist. There were still exams to pass.
Well, I suppose the poor lass won’t be sitting any exams now. The protests are also about the conditions under which house jobbers like her must exist. They work amazingly long shifts, and get amazingly inadequate breaks to sleep, and to top it all, are not provided places to sleep. So they sack out on the floor or in unused corners where they can find them. The doctor who was killed had sought refuge in a seminar hall, where her corpse was found.
They seem to have caught the killer, who seems to have followed a strange itinerary. Before turning up at the hospital, he first went to two brothels in the red-light area, where he also got liquored up. Apparently, after he was shown the CCTV footage that showed him entering the seminar hall at the time the murder was committed, he confessed. Still, there are a number of unanswered questions.
Of course, we don’t have people visiting hospitals, and we certainly don’t have red-light area, well, not operational ones anyway. And any drinking would be illegal. Instead, we have a different scenario. It was purely a coincidence, I suppose but Lahore’s medical community joined Kolkata’s, but to protest, but not the murder of a doctor, but the attempted assault of a patient.
It was a girl, but she was only five, which is a bit much. It’s not clear if she was assaulted or merely harassed, because there was no case registered, the little girl’s family feeling that the beating that her father and other male attendants had administered to the offender was enough. The offender was a cleaner at the hospital.
The interesting thing is not that he was a cleaner, but that he was not a government servant, but rather an employee of the company which had been awarded the cleaning contract for the hospital. The Prime Minister has already gone on record urging such spinning off of functions, which is a form of micro-privatisation.
Would it have made any difference to the harasser if he had been a government servant? Did the knowledge that he had no pension to lose make him more ready to take a risk? Was he free of worry that his ACR could be spoiled?
Government service as a cleaner does not involve any risk of being killed. That can’t be said about service in the police. No less than 11 were killed in the katcha in Rahim Yar Khan when dacoits fired rockets at their broken-down vehicles. The Punjab government increased the head money on a number of dacoits. That’s known as throwing money at the problem. Or was it trying to create dissensions. I mean, if some dacoit felt that his head money hadn’t been increased enough, would he become resentful? Or thankful?
At least there was no money on the head of Alain Delon, the French movie star who died at age 89. He had been the rage about 50 or 50 years ago, basically because he was tall and easy to look at. But no one made him President of France. Our equivalent was Imran Khan, though he is much younger. We made him PM.
Imran must be watching the Test against Bangladesh with interest. Luckily, Shaheen Shah Afridi took only two expensive wickets, so his chances of getting on the same page were; limited. At the same time, I’ve received another suggestion for another disciplinarian World Cup-winning captain (T20 that is), Younus Khan. But he has two glaring defects: first, he went to the wrong sort of school; second, he doesn’t have any known illegitimate children.
