You, more often than not, become a product of the times and the circumstances that you live in. If you live in a conflict zone, the incessant bloodletting gets to you sooner than later. Either you become inured to brutalities, or start believing that killing one’s fellow human beings is the only to either to gain salvation or to solve your immediate existentialist problems.
But suppose you were to extend this analogy to a place where cattle-rearing is one of the mainstays of the people. Would that mean that the government of the day there would start treating its own people as cattle? Yes, lots of folks indeed take care of their cattle, but one is alluding to livestock in the most pejorative sense possible. Agreed, this is stretching things too far. Yet, if you take a few disparate incidents that have occurred in Rajasthan in recent times, you would probably think likewise.
On Saturday (April 16), it came to light that four private hospitals in the state’s Dausa district removed the uterus of 226 women last year and earned about Rs 14,000 from each patient. Since the hospitals were recognised for delivery under the government scheme Janani Suraksha Yojna, the shocking facts could be revealed through an RTI from the office of state medical and health department. Akhil Bharatiya Grahak Panchayat, an NGO, had filed the RTI application.
The state government has since withdrawn the Janani Suraksha Yojna licences of the hospitals. You can bet some heads will roll. And soon the real issue will go unheard in the din that the opposition in the state will create over the issue. The macabre incident will slip out of the public’s ephemeral memory.
The Rajasthan health minister AA Khan’s squeal, that since private hospitals do not come under purview of the state government it can do little till a criminal complaint is filed against the hospitals, does not wash. It is the business of any government to protect human rights. And it has every right to do so.
While the media has been hammering away at us over the panacea that market forces are, giving the telecom liberalisation for instance as an apt example, this incident ought to show us the nefarious side of market forces. Agreed these are not market forces legally and legitimately speaking, but when lowlifes resort to such horrifying practices to make money, you can’t really disregard the demand side of a supply chain, can you?
If you are a free market fundamentalist you would probably keep harping on the technicality here and skirt the main issue. But what you cannot refute was the inhuman way in which the hospitals made their money. One of the women who underwent the surgery told a news agency, "I had a constant stomach ache and they removed by uterus, but the pain did not go. Then I went to Jaipur for treatment and it was found that I was wrongly operated upon. " Another said, "The doctor asked me to get my uterus removed, otherwise I would die. So I underwent the operation for which we spent about Rs 15,000. I am still not cured. " If you don’t seethe at reading this, something’s surely wrong with you.
Yes, seethe. Pain after a point does not make you cry. It makes you fume, it makes you gnash your teeth, clench your fists.
Now, please don’t seethe. This is a society where human beings are farmed. The governments are either too indolent or callous to act. We pay a price for the kind of society that we live in. I really have no idea how the women must have felt. But by and large that’s not too difficult to fathom, isn’t it?
Were this to be an isolated incident, I would still have beaten a retreat. But this incident comes on the heels of the death of 17 pregnant women in Jodhpur district after being given contaminated glucose. Last year, children suffering from thalassemia contracted the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) during blood transfusion in Rajasthan. If there were more reports, there would be a lot more to make you move to tears with unbridled anger. Of course, you need to be a human being to feel such rage.
That’s not all. Were you to look at this in the backdrop of the relatively-frequent strike calls by doctors in the state who go off duty because of security issues created by patients or their kin who turn violent, you know the helpless world that our poor, rural women live in. True, Rajasthan must not be the worst of the states. But these cases are being contextualised to drive home a point.
With so much of politically brouhaha over gender issues and the sweet girl child eating our media-bombarded head bloody day in and gory day out, this is a bit too much to take. The medieval ages were probably better. Women were treated like sh*t and burned at the stakes. At least you can today console yourself with the fact the regimes of the primeval ages were indeed illiterate and medieval. But under the establishments of the day, you don’t want such things to happen even as an exception. The exception, as Sherlock Homes tells Dr Watson, disproves the rule.
No, this is not an issue over which we can afford to create more Facebook groups or light candles. We need to be intolerant – of macabre practices.
PS: The NGO in question needs to be lauded. The fact that an RTI brought this to light necessarily means that the government had been in the knowr, but had not acted so far. I ain't even raising the issue of skewed sex-ratios. Let’s grapple with this first.
