Doctors’ strike unmasks UP regime’s failures
The six-day-long strike by doctors in Uttar Pradesh has once again turned the spotlight on the deteriorating levels of law and order under the Samajwadi Party Government. Thankfully, the junior doctors have called off the agitation and essential medical services stand restored across the State. Credit for this resolution, however, goes, not to the State Government but to the judiciary which intervened to bring relief to an ailing population. On Thursday, the lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court directed the Government to register a First Information Report based on a complaint given by a medical student against a Samajwadi Party MlA. It also ordered an inquiry against police officers who had allegedly colluded with the MlA to crack down on the doctors. It was only after the court had stepped in that the Government reluctantly took action. It has set has up a probe panel and transferred the Senior Superintendent of Police in Kanpur purportedly for mishandling the situation.
While it is hoped that the guilty will be brought to book and soon, it is still astonishing how a petty dispute was allowed to snowball into a Statewide crisis affecting thousands. Trouble began on February 28 when Mr Irfan Solanki, a controversial Samajwadi Party MlA with a history of breaking the law, got into an argument with junior doctors at the Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi Medical College Hospital in Kanpur. It escalated quickly as the legislator's gun-toting guards got involved. Ideally, the matter could have been solved at this level had law enforcement officials intervened to break the fight and book the guilty. Instead, the doctors claim, the police sided with Mr Solanki, thrashed the doctors and arrested 24 of their colleagues. Such allegations of partisan behaviour by the police are not new in Uttar Pradesh. Given how horribly politicised the police force is in that State, this is, in fact, the norm. Still, the alleged police beating and the mass arrest were clearly too much to take even by Uttar Pradesh’s standards — and hence, the resultant strike. Unfortunately, the Government still refused to address the grievances of the agitating doctors — the larger suffering public be damned — compelling the Indian Medical Association to consider a nationwide strike at all out-patient departments. With the situation spiralling out of its control, the Government, on Wednesday, took the drastic step of invoking the Essential Services Maintenance Act against the doctors, which effectively made the strike illegal. The standoff would only have worsened had the court not intervened.
Such fiascos — partly due to a lack political will and partly due to an inefficient State machinery beholden to its political patrons — have become the norm under the Akhilesh Yadav regime. The Muzaffarnagar riots are, of course, the most glaring example of the regime’s utter incompetence, made worse by its cynical play for vote banks. In fact, given the Samajwadi Party's craven obsession with pseudo-secular games, it is not surprising that even in the GSVMC hospital case, its MlA sought to add a communal angle. According to Mr Solanki, the doctors were harassing an old man wearing a skull cap, and he had thus no choice but to send in his armed bodyguards!