Kolkata: West Bengal’s ruling party, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), led by Mamata Banerjee, has launched a desperate effort to regain the ground it lost in state-run medical colleges and hospitals after the brutal rape-murder of a postgraduate intern at Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College Hospital in early August.
Late last week, a message landed in the WhatsApp accounts of a few select journalists in Kolkata, containing details of a few bank accounts and the balances in each. Soon enough, these journalists, all working with media outlets who side with the TMC, started giving out the details in their private social media pages and handles.
These were allegedly bank accounts of those entities that were leading the protracted protests against the state government. The collective balance of the eight bank accounts was about Rs 4 crore.
All the journalists posed questions about how so much money was there in these accounts:
1. West Bengal Junior Doctors Front, HDFC, Rs 1.7 crore.
2. M/S West Bengal Doctors Forum, BOI, Rs 95 lakh.
3. Medical College Kolkata Resident Doctor’s Association, SBI, Rs 31 lakh.
4. Central Kolkata United Doctors Welfare Association, Axis, Rs 31 lakh.
5. Shramajibi Swasthya Udyog, PNB, Rs 7.5 lakh.
6. Service Doctors Forum, PNB, Rs 17 lakh.
7. Association Of Health Service Doctors, Indian Bank, Rs 20.5 lakh.
8. Priya Lakra/Riya Bera/Shivam Garodia, SBI, Rs 28 lakh.
The total figure stands at Rs 40,000,000, that is Rupees 4 crores.
The message also said: “NB: The last account has an interesting name. Dr Riya Bera. She is one among those five junior doctors who were present inside the Post Mortem room during autopsy conduct on the victim doctor’s body.”
Within minutes, the message was picked up and amplified by the TMC eco-system. From known members of the TMC’s IT cell to spokespersons on various TV channel talk-shows, everybody tried to highlight how the “huge amounts of money were being collected by the protesting doctors in the name of fighting for justice for Abhaya”.
“This was the first effort to discredit the doctors’ movement by the TMC government which is smarting from the long-drawn protests. After all, Mamata Banerjee herself is a vengeful politician. You can be sure that there will be more such efforts to discredit the doctors’ front,” says veteran journalist Suman Chattopadhyay whose career in journalism has paralleled Mamata Banerjee’s political journey.
The next day saw the emergence of another doctors’ body: West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Association (WBJDA). Its members said that the Front which had been leading the protests was a “sham body out to take advantage of the death of our beloved doctor-Didi”. In outraged tones, the speakers said that the WBJDF had collected huge funds and demanded an inquiry.
The link between this association and the TMC was clear when the official YouTube and Facebook channels of the party live-streamed the proceedings from the Calcutta Press Club.
Many view the formation of the new doctors’ association as a TMC tactic to stir chaos among the doctors and ultimately divide the medical community. After all, the alleged attempts to cover up the heinous crime and destroy evidence evoked widespread condemnation and censure against the state government, the TMC also found itself battling grave charges of corruption, nepotism, misuse of office, malfeasance and malpractices by many doctors affiliated to or close to the ruling party. All these charges, especially that of a widely prevalent “threat culture” in government medical colleges and hospitals, surfaced after the rape-murder at RG Kar.
The “threat culture” that many doctors close to the TMC have been accused of perpetuating is a loose term for various grave misconducts. These include forcing medical undergraduates, postgraduates and junior doctors to either join or support the ruling party, awarding them marks in exams in exchange for large sums of money, manipulating transfers and postings of doctors, giving admissions in postgraduate courses to party faithful, issuing threats to even senior doctors and hospital administrators who do not toe the party line and sexual exploitation of students and interns.
Many doctors belonging to the notorious “North Bengal lobby” close to the top leadership of the TMC have faced disciplinary action, including de-registration, cancellation of their licences and disbarment from campuses for their misdeeds.
The widespread and intense public outrage over alleged attempts to cover up the rape-murder and destroy evidence at the crime scene and misdeeds of doctors close to the TMC put the state government and the ruling party, including Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, on the back foot.
Realising the public mood, Banerjee and her party wisely refrained from trying to thwart the long agitation by the junior doctors under the banner of the West Bengal Junior Doctors Front (WBJDF) through harsh administrative measures or other means.
Even though the agitation had crippled healthcare services in medical college hospitals in the state, Banerjee held her patience and even sat with the agitating doctors, made sympathetic noises and ultimately agreed to almost all their demands which led to the doctors calling off their hunger strike and returning to work on 20 October.
But the WBJDF has kept up token protests and has set a deadline for the state government to meet their demands which include implementing fool-proof safety and welfare measures for junior doctors and interns in government hospitals, holding elections to students’ bodies in medical colleges, and conducting impartial probes into the misdeeds of a section of doctors affiliated to the ruling party in the state. The WBJDF has warned of resuming its stir if it feels that the government is going slow in implementing its demands. The Front said it would monitor the state government’s actions very closely.
TMC sources say that this threat looming over the ruling party and the government has triggered grave concern in the party’s top leadership, which is also smarting from the humiliation it endured over the last three months since early August.
They felt that allowing the WBJDF to go unchallenged now would embolden other sections of the citizenry to take on the government and the ruling party, which the party could not afford since the Assembly elections are just 15 months away. Thus, the TMC’s “dirty tricks department” got into action immediately after the agitating junior doctors scaled down their stir and resumed their duties early last week.
The party got several junior doctors, who are the party’s silent supporters, to form an association to rival the WBJDF.
“Only the most notorious doctors who over-exposed themselves and had gone overboard with their misdeeds found themselves outed and their names coming out in the media. But the TMC has quite a number of junior doctors who are its supporters and have kept their heads down. These junior doctors have now been marshalled to form the West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Association (WBJDA),” a functionary of the WBJDF, who was at the forefront of the agitation, told The Sunday Guardian.
The WBJDA was formed on 26 October. Shockingly, it even included some doctors accused of grave malfeasance. Most WBJDA leaders and members owe allegiance to former TMC Rajya Sabha MP Santanu Sen and former Minister Nirmal Majhi. Both Majhi and Sen are doctors. While Sen was the national president and state secretary of the Indian Medical Association (IMA), Majhi served as the IMA’s Bengal branch president.
WBJDA president Rajib Biswas, who is a junior doctor at Diamond Harbour Medical College (Diamond Harbour is Abhishek Banerjee’s Lok Sabha constituency), lost no time in firing salvos at the WBJDF.
“The WBJDF has been infiltrated by left and ultra-left elements who have hijacked the movement for their own political gains. We supported the movement initially to demand justice for ‘Abhaya,’ but were dismayed at the manner in which our fellow doctors in the WBJDF were manipulated by left and ultra-left politicians and ideologues and how the whole movement turned into an anti-TMC stir,” said Biswas. He added, “We were also sad to see that the whole movement had turned into one whose sole aim was to malign the TMC and the state government and besmirch the fair name of our state. Hence, we decided to form an apolitical body that will articulate the genuine concerns of junior doctors.”
But there are no takers for Biswas’ contention that the WBJDA is apolitical.
“The WBJDA has been formed by the TMC to undermine our movement. That association comprises doctors who are accused of many crimes. It is a completely political platform,” said WBJDF’s Debasish Haldar.
The WBJDA has also levelled charges of financial impropriety against the WBJDF. WBJDA convenor Shreesh Chakraborty said his organisation wrote to the state Chief Secretary on Sunday, a day after it was formed demanding an audit of the Rs 1.7 crore reportedly raised by the Front during its stir.
Haldar of the WBJDF retorted that the “baseless allegations” hurled by the WBJDA only prove that the new association has been formed to undermine the junior doctors’ movement and create divisions within the state’s medical fraternity.
But the TMC’s “dirty tricks department” did not rest just there. It spawned another body of junior doctors—the Progressive Junior Doctors Association (PJDA), formed on 29 October.
The PJDA has very cleverly positioned itself against the WBJDA and accuses the latter of being a body of tainted junior doctors accused of various misdeeds.
“The gang of Sandip Ghosh (the disgraced former principal of RG Kar Medical College) has formed the WBJDA. We fully support the WBJDF that led the doctors’ movement,” said PJDA general secretary Rituparna Koyal, a junior doctor at the SSKM Hospital.
Several senior doctors told The Sunday Guardian that the formation of the two bodies—the WBJDA and the PJDA—is a ploy by the TMC to create chaos among the doctors and ultimately divide the medical fraternity.
“While the WBJDF has taken on the WBJDA directly and has levelled allegations against the latter, the PJDA has overtly taken the WBJDF’s side and is opposing the WBJDA. However, the WBJDA and PJDA are two sides of the same coin and are working in tandem to create confusion in the ranks of the junior doctors,” said a senior doctor who has mentored the WBJDF from the beginning of the protests.
“This is a clever move by the TMC to weaken and sabotage the junior doctors’ stir,” said a senior cardiologist attached to the government-run NRS Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata.