Kolkata doctor death: Can SC task force stop descent into disorder?

The least that outraged citizens probably expected when the Supreme Court took it upon itself to examine the alleged sexual assault and murder of a young trainee doctor in Kolkata’s state-run R.G. Kar Hospital, was more than a paper chase.

The National Task Force, comprising medical top brass of the army, navy and air force, various Central government hospitals and private medical facilities, the cabinet secretary and other senior bureaucrats, has been tasked with looking at data and making recommendations for safer working spaces and against “the lack of institutional safety norms at medical establishments”.

Given how the State in India works, the paper work is unlikely to reveal how “the more malevolent manifestations of the structural deficiencies in public health institutions” are the source of “gendered violence”. It is entirely likely that every public health institution will, on paper, have rest rooms for its women staff, including doctors, separate toilets, a modicum of security staff, CCTV cameras, all sorts of technological solutions to monitor the entry and exit of personnel from within the building and from outside.

The paper chase will not tell the country whether all the CCTV cameras outside the seminar room where Kolkata's 'Abhaya' was killed were in working condition. The paper chase will not reveal how in various public health institutions “the hierarchy within medical colleges and the career advancement and academic degrees of young professionals are capable of being affected by those in the upper echelons”.

This one indictment says it all about how public sector and perhaps even other medical colleges and hospitals are administered. It reveals the evil that is embedded within the system and the failure of governance that has allowed it to grow stronger. 

When the Supreme Court knows where lies the source of the evil, it may have been appropriate to spell out what it meant by “malevolent manifestations”.

It is not difficult to infer what the judges possibly know that led them to conclude that there were institutional and systemic causes underlying the problem of gender violence that trashed the basic right to safety and dignity of every woman working in these public institutions.

If this reading of the Supreme Court’s order is correct, it points to a problem that is rooted in the State and its failures. The decades of evasion of accountability and taking responsibility for what is wrong by a succession of Union and state governments regardless of political affiliations is why the monstrous assault could happen in a government hospital in Kolkata. The Supreme Court’s order establishes the failure of the system in that it has asked for a report on the compliance of public sector health institutions to the Sexual Harassment Act.

India’s abysmal record when it comes to the unfettered decline of women’s participation in the work force, leaving aside a small increase in the post-pandemic period which is shown by data, has many reasons. One of them is patriarchy, the malevolent manifestation of which is the hierarchy within medical colleges that can ruin the careers and even acquisition of medical degrees of promising young, professional women.

The toxicity of the ecosystem within which the police and public institutions fail to provide basic safety and dignity is obvious; for 10 hours, the public in Badlapur in Maharashtra’s Thane district held other members of the public to ransom, blocking trains on the central line that serves Mumbai. The reason: two four-year-olds had allegedly been sexually assaulted in a school toilet and the police had failed to respond promptly.

The trope is familiar; school toilets as the location of sexual assault and the possible perpetrators being cleaning staff. Equally familiar is the local police’s lack of speed in responding to a crisis. It is just as possible that the police would defend itself by saying it did respond with speed; but then, speed is a matter of perception.

As demonstrations of public outrage mount over sexual attacks on women and girl children, the danger is that the cause can get buried under the effect. The politicisation of such incidents with the ruling party on the one side and the opposition on the other is more likely to divert attention from the problem and the urgent need to collectively find solutions by turning it into a fight over power.

In West Bengal, the opposition has demanded the resignation of the Mamata Banerjee government; in Maharashtra, the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government is the target. In Maharashtra which is set to choose a new government by the year’s end, the Badlapur incident is one more incident in the opposition’s arsenal of issues against the ruling regime.

While politics cannot be excluded from public protests over incidents that outrage large sections of voters, the problem is that politics tends to create an environment that allows ruling regimes to escape accountability and evade responsibility for systemic failures that lead to “few or no protective systems to ensure their safety” meaning doctors, nurses and para medical staff as the Supreme Court order points out.

The Supreme Court order is a chilling exposé of the magnitude and depth of the problems, and the politics that has enabled the continuation of such evil for decades. Set against this veiled but nevertheless explicit outline of why one young woman doctor lost her life, it is extraordinary that the highest court has tasked the National Task Force to check the inventory of facilities at public health institutions.

This is on par with the Mamata Banerjee government’s setting up of a special investigation team to look into long-pending complaints of corruption against the now infamous principal Sandip Ghosh of R.G. Kar Hospital.

Doctors have been badly treated by the system. In 2020, the Supreme Court told the world that India is callous in its management of doctors and medical staff. “In war, you do not make soldiers unhappy. Travel extra mile and channel some extra money to address their grievances,” it had ordered the public health system. In 2020, the highest court intervened in the oxygen supply crisis because there was gross mismanagement by the government.

When the Supreme Court is compelled to intervene through its orders and recommendations on how governments should do their jobs, there is something rotten for which the political establishment must be held to account. The fact that the political establishment gets away with its failures is a measure of how in public perception no party is better than another.