DOCS' STIR PUTS BAND-AID ON A FESTERING WOUND

HE longest doctors' strike in India's post-independence history is into its sixth week.

- KAJAL BASU

Junior doctors from 26 hospitals-cum-medical colleges across West Bengal are calling for “justice” for the victim of the indescribably horrific rape-murder at Kolkata’s premier hospital-teaching college. The government, unwilling to allow a televised confabulation with the strikers, has finally conceded to most of their demands, including the depowering of senior bureaucrats and the Kolkata police commissioner, who the strikers view as responsible for fiddling with the evidentiary trail.

Convinced that they are backed by most Bengalis, the doctors think of the strike as a “people’s movement”. Others see the agitation as confined to middle-class Kolkatans with no involvement of the hardscrabble in mofussil Bengal, the main sufferers from the state’s decrepit and corrupt medical superstructure—a malcondition that tracks back to the Left Front years, now perpetuated by the TMC government.

This agitation is agitprop (a protest form that has many global precedents): it has rocked many fence-sitters off their porches; and has hardened oppositional views. But what is it actually accomplishing?

As complex as the event is—there are cases ongoing in the Supreme Court and a special court in Kolkata—perceptions about it have devolved into a Manichaean standoff, never good news for those pursuing the truth or its closest approximation, in a biome infected with the maggots of evidential fake-news, the pull-and-push of political agendas, louring and infinitely-manipulative state power, and the noost brought about by un-self-doubting protestive self-belief.