It has been two weeks since the brutal rape and murder of a resident doctor at R.G. Kar Hospital. The protests that erupted in its aftermath have not subsided in West Bengal, despite pleas from the political establishment and the judiciary for the doctors to return to work.
The protests have united disparate sections of society in a unified condemnation of corruption within the health institutions of the state of West Bengal and rampant sexism in society. It was the issue of sexual violence that helped unite the largest number of masses in support of the agitation. The initial outpouring of support came mainly from the middle class, members of the labor aristocracy and the petty bourgeoisie. Soon, working class people from the slums and members of the urban poor joined in.
By now, it would not be entirely accurate to call the protests a “doctors’ protest,” with marches in the hundreds or thousands and spontaneous gatherings on street corners all over the state of West Bengal, the numbers alone would be impossible if it were limited to resident junior doctors. However, the leadership of the movement remains with the doctors’ associations, and it is their strike that has created an outpouring of solidarity and sympathy among the masses.
The outpouring of support was spontaneous, and the initial slogans for justice for the victim were expanded to include slogans against the ruling TMC party. The protests were not planned or led by any political party or politically affiliated organization, but a spontaneous mass uprising against corruption and sexual violence. This put the various political parties on the back foot.
On the eve of India’s Independence Day, protests were held to ‘take back the night’. These were midnight protests where the doctors would hold a midnight vigil to challenge the patriarchal notion that ‘women should not work at night’, a sentiment that even the Chief Minister of West Bengal (who is a woman) has supported. The protests were peaceful, but the response was not; armed goons linked to the TMC attacked the peaceful vigil at R.G. Kar Hospital and tried to disrupt the scene. This gave the police an excuse to crack down on the protesters and issue an ‘unlawful assembly’ order, which prevents more than 5 people from gathering in the designated area.
The order was challenged in the Calcutta High Court, where it was quashed. The Supreme Court took suo motu cognizance of the case and heard it. As a result of the Supreme Court’s intervention, a national task force will be set up to monitor the safety of health workers, and central paramilitary forces of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) will be deployed for the security of doctors at the R.G. Kar Hospital.
These steps are a victory, but they also represent the efforts of the bourgeois state to pacify the nationwide doctors’ strike. Following the order of the Supreme Court, the doctors of two hospitals in Delhi withdrew their strike, but the doctors of West Bengal have continued their strike.
The attacks by the goons of the ruling TMC party and the police did not deter the protests in West Bengal, on the contrary, the protests continued inside and outside West Bengal. The anger of the people did not subside as new protests were planned by the doctors and civil groups across the state. The opposition parties, especially the BJP, have also stepped up their efforts to control the movement and benefit from its momentum
The character of the protests so far
The protests were started by junior residents, who are the most overworked, underpaid and exploited of all doctors. Their situation, while better than that of other hospital staff and nurses, is far worse than that of senior doctors and those in administrative positions. The junior doctors and resident doctors form the middle of the hierarchy of health care in an Indian hospital.
They have come out time and again to protest violence against them, to demand safety, better working conditions and better pay. It wasn’t long ago that the junior doctors of Calcutta Medical College, along with medical students, protested unsafe working conditions in public hospitals.
Public hospitals provide the bulk of subsidized medical care in India and carry a disproportionate burden, while private hospitals focus on profits. India’s highly privatized health care system means that most people have no choice but to seek care at the nearest large public hospital. The burden of treating the masses of poorer patients falls largely on the shoulders of junior doctors.
This situation would not have arisen if the government had adequately funded health care, improved conditions in public hospitals, and built or improved more public hospitals to serve the large number of patients. But health care has been left to the private sector, leaving the public sector overburdened and underfunded.
The protests provide a unique opportunity to push for systemic change that challenges this status quo. However, the focus remains on the issue of safety for practicing doctors and justice for the victim. While this is certainly an important issue, it also limits the scope of the movement.
While it is true that the victim was targeted for her role in trying to expose the corruption racket at R.G. Kar Hospital, it is also true that she would not have been in the vulnerable situation she was in had it not been for a 36-hour shift. Such punishing shifts should be impossible for any administrator to hand out, corrupt or not, but there is no law regulating the working hours of healthcare workers. The hospital lacked rest areas and sanitation has remained a problem.
The crime was committed by a civilian volunteer; hiring such part-time volunteers should not even have been an option. Had there been enough employees or staff to cover the night shifts, with medical professionals instead of “civilian volunteers” with no training whatsoever, the doctor might be safe and alive today.
Add to these burdens that of institutional corruption in the healthcare sector, which subjects every hospital to the mismanagement of corrupt officials and turns health institutions into money-making rackets. Had R.G. Kar Hospital not been subjected to such corrupt management, perhaps this crime would not have happened.
At the root of it all is the lack of government investment in health care, which in turn leaves the field open for private hospitals and a very unregulated private health service. Both patients and health workers suffer in this system, where public health workers are overburdened with serving the majority of patients who are poor, and patients end up being victims of exploitative practices in private hospitals.
ASHA workers, the frontline health workers who serve millions of poor Indians with limited access to health care, have long struggled for regularized jobs and wages. They have sacrificed much during the pandemic, but have been ignored by state and central governments alike.
The scale of the protests offers a unique opportunity to unite all health workers in a common struggle with a common program for systemic change. But there is still no strategy in this direction.
The ruling party’s tactics
The Trinamool Congress (TMC) has been ruling the state of West Bengal since 2011. It came to power on the back of the agitations against the forcible land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram villages under the then CPIM[i] led Left Front government.
Since then, the TMC has projected an image of being an ally of the peasantry and a leader of rural Bengal. To bolster this image, the party has introduced a series of welfare measures aimed at direct transfers or benefits that largely benefit the rural population and the urban poor. These have helped secure its vote base and hide its more nefarious side. The TMC is a bourgeois party that was once allied with the BJP and then switched to an alliance with the Congress party before abandoning it to go it alone in the state.
The party has institutionalized a mechanism of corruption where it loots from the people by subjugating all state institutions, the bureaucracy and public institutions like schools, hospitals and administrative offices. The party has been under the scanner for a series of scams like the municipal recruitment scam, the chit fund ponzi scheme scam, the ration scam, the government teacher recruitment scam and now attention is increasingly focusing on the party’s link with a massive corruption racket in the health sector.
The TMC is one of the richest political parties in the country, though it is confined to the state of West Bengal. The TMC also had the highest amount of electoral bonds after the BJP. The alleged hidden wealth of its leaders runs into tens of millions. Much of the party’s wealth is derived from such corrupt scams and support from the big builders in the state. Thus, any protest against corruption always puts the TMC on notice.
While institutionalized corruption may earn the TMC money, it is violence that helps it maintain power. Time and again, rural panchayat elections have been a clean sweep for the TMC, because it’s in the rural areas that the party can most freely deploy its army of thugs. This army of thugs is only possible because it’s able to buy gangsters and integrate them into the party.
Coercion through its army of thugs and concessions through welfare are the twin pillars on which the TMC’s rule in West Bengal rests. Their aim is to enrich the local bourgeoisie at the expense of the people. A key strategy adopted by them is to isolate and contain the protests by limiting their reach in the cities, where they are growing weaker, while enforcing their monopoly of power in the countryside through a carrot and stick strategy.
The TMC’s strategy for dealing with any mass mobilization against it involves a strategy of coercion and, when that fails, appeasement with some concession while trying to distract with whataboutery. Usually this involves painting any opposition to their rule as a BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) ploy, or implying that something worse is happening in a BJP-ruled state. We see all these being used against the doctor’s protest, but these strategies seem to be failing.
The TMC began by trying to create a scapegoat to limit and isolate the protests, and when that didn’t work, the party unleashed its goons on peaceful protesters on Independence Day, August 15. That didn’t stop the protests either, and it turned to distraction, trying to paint the movement as a BJP plot against its rule, but that too seems to be failing. Attempts at concessions where the TMC and especially Chief Minister and party supremo Mamata Bannerjee came out in protest demanding justice for the rape and murder victim.
Social media collectively and rightly mocked the show, but missed the point. This show was enough to sow illusions among those who still believed in ‘didi'[ii] while showing off the party’s organizational abilities. This event came a day after the thugs attacked the peaceful gathering at R.G. Kar Hospital during the Reclaim the Night protests.
With the courts intervening in the matter, the TMC finds itself on the back foot. Solidarity protests across the country and the world have put the spotlight on their rule in West Bengal, as well as the appalling conditions in which health workers in India find themselves. The TMC’s corruption is also coming under the spotlight, with new and more horrific revelations coming out every other day. Under such conditions, the TMC cannot resort to coercion and must rely on concessions. Here again, it finds itself on the back foot as the protests have gained a momentum that refuses to die. Urban Bengal is up in arms against the rule of Mamata Bannerjee, and she cannot find support from rural Bengal.
Going forward, the TMC has little or no option but to hope that the protests die down and find ways to appease the masses. In such a situation, every opposition party in West Bengal is mobilizing to take charge of the protests and assume its leadership. All the while, the doctors continue to shun any political leadership, while not denying the parties and its organization space to give support.
The Opposition’s Tactics
Early on, the CPI(M)-affiliated Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) played a positive role in protecting the body of Dr. R.G. Kar from being hastily disposed of. The hospital authorities were ready to cremate the body before an autopsy could be conducted to support their claim that her death was a suicide. It was the timely action of DYFI and local doctors that prevented this. But the role of the DYFI would not be known until much later.
The approach of the Stalinist left was to take part in the protest without showing their banner. Among its demands, the CPIM has raised the demand for a CBI inquiry, but nothing more.
India has seen many “leaderless” protests in the recent past, such as the anti-corruption agitation in 2011, the anti-rape protests in 2012. The farmers’ agitation was led by farmers’ unions, but not under the aegis of any political party, and did not have an explicit political program, although it soon developed a program to take on the BJP. In the aftermath of the anti-corruption agitation, the Aam Admi Party was born, with Arvind Kejriwal at the helm. This party now governs Delhi and Punjab.
What may have started as a non-political agitation with no political program or direction quickly turned into an anti-TMC movement with slogans directly targeting the TMC and especially the Chief Minister and party supremo, Mamata Bannerji.
In this context, every opposition party in West Bengal mobilized support for the protests to one degree or another. The Stalinist Left, clamoring for a comeback after successive electoral defeats, is seeking an opportunity by joining the protests. The BJP, which is both the ruling party at the federal level and the largest opposition party in the state of West Bengal, is gearing up to use the momentum of these protests to support it’s own cynical political goals.
The clearest evidence of this is the August 27 protest, one of the main organizers of which is linked to the RSS. No sooner had the dust settled on the so-called “student march to the Secretariat” than the BJP mobilized to stage a protest march to the police headquarters on Lal Bazaar Street.
The BJP has also called for a 12-hour general strike on August 28. These tactics, along with the BJP’s control of the mainstream news media, have ensured that the spotlight is on their protests, diverting attention not only from the doctors who are actually leading the movement, but also from their own horrific record of rape and sexual abuse. Finally, we must remember that the BJP is the party in power in Manipur[iii] where Kuki women have been dragged out naked and paraded by Meitei militias, this is the party that ensured that Brij Bhushan Singh[iv] remained in power in the Wrestling Federation of India. This is the party that is currently trying to shield the BJP-linked headmaster of the school in Badlapur, Maharashtra, where a minor was brutally raped. How else can this party hope to lead the doctor’s protest against sexual violence and corruption, other than to cover up and distract from its own crimes?
In this context, the Stalinist Left led by the CPIM has decided to hide its banners and put forward a very limited agenda, instead of trying to advance the protests further towards systematic change, it’s content to participate in the legal struggle in the courts and become an indefinable part of the protests among the doctors. There is no separate effort to bring all health workers into the ambit of this movement, nor any effort to use this opportunity to push for systematic change in health care in India.
The conscious decision not to carry banners or attempt to intervene with a program to broaden the struggle will only result in an apolitical protest like this falling into the hands of the most organized bourgeois or reactionary political organizations. In the case of West Bengal, this is the right-wing BJP.
In the aftermath of the August 27 march to the Secretariat, the BJP and the RSS have gained prestige and secured the limelight, putting themselves in a position to vie for the leadership of the movement as a whole.This will have two effects, not only will it divert the agenda of the doctors towards the political goals of the BJP, it would also result in the division and isolation of the movement.
The BJP’s massive intervention in the doctors’ agitation has given the TMC and Chief Minister Mamata Bannerjee a propaganda weapon, those who are against the BJP may end up being against the doctors’ agitation as well, it gives her a chance to paint the movement as a whole in political colors, enabling her to isolate and eventually weaken the movement. Over time, the protests may lose momentum and many supporters may end up demoralized and confused, helping the ruling party to continue to cover up the corruption angle and secure the status quo.
What must be done
The doctors’ protest has the potential to grow into a larger and more powerful movement that sweeps the country and forces systemic change. It has exposed the nexus between power and sexual oppression in the most direct way possible. The exposure of corruption in the health care system and the institutionalized corruption in the state of West Bengal.
The solidarity protests that arose in the aftermath of the Calcutta protests have since died down, but it was enough to force the state of West Bengal, its police, its courts and the TMC party to shun violence. The Supreme Court’s intervention has now managed to partially calm the situation, but the problem cannot be solved by the stopgap measures initiated by the Supreme Court.
Beyond beefing up security at public hospitals and handing over the security of R.G. Kar Hospital to central paramilitaries, we need to push for systematic change. At a minimum, we need better health infrastructure and more staff to provide better services to patients and better working conditions for health workers.
Furthermore, the movement can’t be limited to resident doctors; to be successful, the doctors’ protests must open its doors and welcome all health workers, including ASHA workers who have served as frontline health workers and put their lives on the line during the COVID pandemic, but are still demanding their basic pay and job security. One of the great strengths of the movement has been it’s ability to inspire action across class lines and bring in a wide cross section of support.It has highlighted We must build on this!
The doctors’ agitation is not unorganized, but it has no political program or leadership. This is both a strength and a weakness. The strength of the movement comes from its ability to keep away corrupt bourgeois political parties, but it’s also a weakness because such “leaderless” protests also open the possibility for other organized bourgeois political parties to come in and hijack the movement and divert its direction. The other great strength of the movement has been the solidarity it has received from India and beyond. Solidarity not only boosts the morale of those struggling, but it can also serve to keep the spotlight on the protests, focusing the attention of the nation and the world on the issues being raised. It keeps repressive governments in check and creates political pressure.
To keep the momentum of the protests going, it is essential that the doctors play to their strengths, one of which is to keep the corrupt bourgeois political parties on the sidelines. There can be no faith in the BJP or the TMC or even the Congress Party. These parties play their cynical games with people’s emotions, for them the rape and murder of a doctor and the rape and murder of the baby in Badlapur Maharashtra are just pedestals to increase their own power and prestige.They are not interested in justice!
The CPIM and it’s youth organizations, which played a positive role in the doctors’ protests from the beginning, also have to answer why they share the INDIA alliance with the TMC. It cannot be allied with the TMC at the national level and oppose the TMC within West Bengal at the same time.
The protesting doctors have the momentum, sympathy and support of the masses of Indians on their side. This must not be allowed to slow down!
FULL SUPPORT TO THE RESIDENT DOCTORS !
DOWN WITH THE TMC!
NO TRUST IN THE MAINSTREAM POLITICAL PARTIES !
[i] Communist Party of India (Marxist)
[ii] Didi means sister in Bengali and is one of the more endearing nicknames for Mamata Bannerjee.[iii] https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/in-manipur-horror-2-women-paraded-naked-on-camera-allegedly-gang-raped-4223105
[iv] https://litci.org/en/we-support-indias-protesting-women-wrestlers/
