Being a doctor in India is a thankless job. The system is designed against you. Exams get politicized, patients get aggressive, work is endless and exhausting, and the one institution, your workplace, that is meant to keep you safe is where you can be the most unsafe. The heinous rape-murder case of a resident doctor in Kolkata shows becoming a doctor in our country can be dangerous.
The 31-year-old victim was a resident doctor in the respiratory medicine department at the Government-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata. She was on duty on Thursday night. She was resting in the hospital’s seminar room when she was violently sexually assaulted and murdered.
“There was bleeding from both her eyes and mouth and injuries over the face, nails, belly, left leg, neck, right hand, ring finger, and lips. The victim was also bleeding from her private parts”, according to the autopsy report that also revealed she was subjected to ‘genital torture’.
She wasn’t outside alone in the night; she was working. Her clothes weren’t provocative. She was well within society’s parameters of how women can be safe. You know, the parameters that tell women they can keep safe if they curb their freedom because society is flawed. Yet, she was brutally tortured and killed. At her workplace. While she was resting. So, why did this happen? How did this happen? Safety is an illusion, really.
You know, violence isn’t unknown to doctors. They experience it in many forms almost every day. Patients can be very aggressive. Their families can be violently possessive. Many resident doctors face harassment from their seniors and teachers. This has been ongoing for years.
Aruna Shanbaug was a junior nurse at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai. In November 1973, she was sexually assaulted and choked with a dog chain by the hospital’s ward boy in the basement where she was reportedly changing her clothes. Because of the attack, the oxygen supply from her brain was cut off and it left her blind, deaf, and paralyzed. She remained in a vegetative state for almost 42 years until she died of pneumonia in 2015.
In 2019, a group of armed goons in Bihar attacked a doctor, tied him to a tree, and gang-raped his wife and daughter. Last year, Vandana Das, a resident doctor in Kerala, was stabbed to death by a patient who was in police custody. Reportedly, Sandeep was a drug addict police brought to the Kottarakkara Taluk Hospital for a check-up. He fatally stabbed her to death with a ‘surgical scissor’ and also injured the police who tried to intervene. Earlier this year, Dr Divesh Garg, another junior resident doctor in Dehradun allegedly died by suicide after relentless harassment by his professors and rejection of his thesis.
Speaking of resident doctors, their lives are particularly uneasy. They live in dangerous conditions and operate under immense pressure with little to no time to rest and recuperate. Shifts up to 24 hours are very normal, and, on most days, they stretch up to 36 hours or more. There are no proper facilities in place either.
On top of this, they live in filthy hostels with unclean restrooms; their duty rooms are unsafe, that is, if there exists a duty room at all. They try to rest in whatever space they can manage. Exhausted, many of them are too tired to think about being safe, because that is expected, right? You’re working after all. We shouldn’t have to worry about something as basic as safety at our workplaces. Aren’t they supposed to be safe by default? RG Kar Medical College and Hospital does not have a duty room. That is why, after her 36-hour duty, the resident doctor went to the seminar room to rest at around 2 AM. Her semi-nude body was found on Friday morning.
The barbaric nature of this incident has sparked nationwide protests. Several doctors in India have gone on an indefinite strike and called for ceasing all non-emergency duties The Federation of Resident Doctors Association (FORDA) has announced a nationwide halting of elective services, demanding justice and safety for resident doctors, while the emergency services are to continue as usual. Reportedly, The Indian Medical Association (IMA) has also written to Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda seeking a special central law to limit the violence against doctors.
The question then arises – what then is a safe space for doctors, for a woman? Is one really safe anywhere? Kolkata’s resident doctor had come to work and the kind of pain and horror she was subjected to is beyond imagination. There’s a lot of unsettling agony in us right now. It comes each time we read and hear of incidents like this that are so horrifying we’re numb with pain. It angers us, and we should stick to that. We shouldn’t forget this, we can’t, and we must not. This has to change. The system has to change. Being a doctor in India shouldn’t have to be dangerous.
