Beyond The Kolkata Rape And Murder, A Longer History Of Medical Corruption In West Bengal

The brutality of rape and murder elicits a reaction that is not only ethical and political in nature. It also evokes a response that is deeply aesthetic. By aesthetic I mean that visceral reaction to the visual and sensory reality of the crime. The pall of violence across the body, the blood around the eyes, the decimation of limbs. The brutal nakedness of it all, the pair of jeans flung to the side. At the juncture of the aesthetic and the political is the corrosive reality of violation done to a woman, invoking the dark and primitive memory of civilisation, where male power has repeatedly etched itself through scars on the woman’s body and soul.

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The reality of this violence is so overwhelming that it cannot but take over the narrative around it. Indeed, our very humanity is in doubt if we cannot be stunned, shocked, and inflamed as a nation at this violence done to a woman. But this outrage has also done the job of shifting focus from what goes far beyond this single incendiary incident. It is something with a longer and colder history, and a chilling and inescapable geography.

This is the reality of the corruption of medical education in the state of West Bengal. Perhaps of corruption on the whole in the state, and perhaps of the corruption of medical education nationwide too. But we will never get anywhere if we see the problems as a gigantic, endless black hole. It will swallow us and leave us listless, dead. We need to focus on the very specific web of corruption whose reality was bared by this grotesque crime. And while we explode with rage at the violation and its grotesquerie, it’s crucial that we don’t lose sight of the great network of crime that has taken hold of the state, made bold by the championship by a government of nightmarish corruption. Not least because this is exactly what the perpetrators of the crime wanted—to be so shocked by the immediate so as to lose sight of the larger, well-oiled machinery behind it.

When a dying state turns criminal, it feeds on its own body. West Bengal is a state where there is nothing left to violate but the human body. Industry is gone. Revenues are depleted to the sorriest plane. A place where white-collar corporate crime might just feel absurd as there doesn’t seem to be enough capital left for such violations.

The sharpest exploitation of the human body has always targeted the poor and the vulnerable. Prostitution, human trafficking, the illegal trade in body parts and organs. Medical corruption in West Bengal today feeds off the only thing left here, and that in the saddest of states—the human body in pain and ailment. And proportions of this corruption have reached the level of a pandemic that is an open secret in the medical community. The accusations against the administrator of the institution, R G Kar Medical College and Hospital, where this horrific crime has taken place, Principal Sandip Ghosh are legion: corruption and bribes over exams and medical seats, bullying and blocking administrative transfers, even running a wide network of illegal trade in pharmaceutical drugs. In spite of the wide and persistent string of accusations—including administrators quoting bribe amounts on television—nothing has been conclusively proven, so legally speaking, it all remains speculation. But Ghosh’s connections with the ruling party in the state are far more than blatant. No matter what the allegations are, the man keeps bouncing back, even bagging the top post in another leading medical college in the city after being let go from R G Kar. The move is stalled only by students refusing to have “garbage” on their campus.

I talk to friends, alumni of this very medical college, a short walk from the place where I grew up. These friends are now esta­blished senior medical practitioners in different parts of the city and the state. News circulates on social and mainstream media, protest gatherings, endless shocked conversations. It is no secret that what was happening in R G Kar happens in all medical colleges in the city, perhaps all over the state. Lakhs and lakhs of rupees of bribe payments make up the pre-requisite before all of the hoops of medical-training exams, internships, traineeships. Rackets of illegal trade in pharmaceutical drugs, sold for five times their market price, sold and resold between pharmaceutical companies and doctors with the hapless patient in between. Everything took a nightmarish intensity in R G Kar under the dictatorship of Sandip Ghosh. There are several official complaints and allegations against him that reveal the darkness of his regime. The extent of his violations and the impunity with which he did it, the repetitive manner in which his transfers were blocked—everything indicates not only a deep connection with the state’s ruling party, but a deep connection to the highest echelons of the party.

Then came a brave and honest woman who refused to put up with this corruption and bullying. What a world is this where you need to pay an astronomical sum under the table just to get your thesis through the standard channels of examination? She was having none of it. Retribution came flying at her—in the form of inhuman rotation hours, threats, messages to her parents, and who knows how much more. When all failed, the night of the ultimate crime was stamped on her script. It was a stage prepared carefully, likely intruders, passers-by, other members of the hospital community, who might become accidental bystanders were pre-emptively removed. None of which could have been done without the support of the hospital administration, and possibly with larger blessing behind them.

The world found her the next morning, after a botched attempt at covering up her death as suicide. The behaviour of the police, their secretiveness over her body, keeping it from her family, the rushed post-mortem and the lightning speed cremation—everything points to the complicity of bigger powers in the crime. A deeply established nexus between crime and politics, any casual watcher of OTT crime dramas knows, requires the protection of all parties, or else the whole house of cards come crumbling down.

“Greed” among the current generation of doctors in West Bengal is a common enough subject for physicians from older generations in the state. Sometimes, the privatisation of the health industry and health education is named as the force that has pushed this greed beyond all measure. If it takes crores to get admitted to a private medical college, why would a doctor not put profit over everything else after they get the license to heal? Illegal traffic in pharmaceutical drugs becomes an inevitable and inescapable route to quick money. And once the blood of easy money becomes a real flavour, where does one stop?

Few things have made the glaring holes and violations in medical education more blatant than the recent fiasco over the NEET question papers. Privatise we must in order to respond to the needs of a changing market—but what happens when government refuses to hold its stake in the two defining spaces of its citizens’ lives—health and education? We’ve already seen the devastation of the nation’s public universities, under parties of all stripes. Medical education, at the intersection of these two key conditions of people’s lives, has become, in the “dead state” of Bengal, a means of feeding off its rotting body. But as long there is blood to be sucked from the ailing body, even the corpse, the vultures will float around it, changing colours between doctors, administrations, police, and the ruling party.

And then came a brave woman who refused to put up with any of this. But nearly eighty years after independence, in another fateful August, we have been brutally reminded what happens to the brave and honest in this country.

(Views expressed are personal)

Saikat Majumdar is a writer and an educationist

(This appeared in the print as 'Rage Against the Machinery')