Society

Someone Give Him A Light

A smokescreen separates Anbumani Ramadoss from the underperforming healthcare system

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Someone Give Him A Light
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Sanjay Dutt enjoying a smoke

Contrary to the impression generated by Ramadoss's current obsessions, the UPA government's common minimum programme has no reference to 'smoking' and only mentions 'drinking' in the context of drinking water. What it does contain, however, are commitments with far more serious implications for the health of millions, from raising public spending on health to 2-3 per cent of the GDP to ensuring the availability of life-saving drugs at reasonable prices and reviving public sector units for the manufacture of critical bulk drugs.

But, as health activists are quick to point out, towards the end of the UPA's term, GDP spending still hovers around 1 per cent and there is scant progress on the goal of having all essential drugs under price control. Far from psus being revived to manufacture bulk drugs, psus making vaccines have been shut down, amid an outcry from the public health community. The government's most significant health initiative, the National Rural Health Mission, is floundering in many parts of the country, its own review mission painting a dysfunctional picture of poor staffing, non-availability of drugs, and poor physical infrastructure; its failures driven home by depressing national statistics on maternal mortality and child malnutrition.

While a bad report card implicates not just Ramadoss but state health departments across the country, his has been a remarkably visionless stewardship of the health establishment, say health experts. "The minister has a sadistic trait of destroying institutions, like the Central Research Institute (CRI) in Kasauli, and aiims, by neglecting them and indulging in partisan politics," says Debabar Banerji, an emeritus professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University. What riles many like him is that while existing vaccine-producing units have been closed down, a Rs 150-crore vaccine park is being set up (a JV between Hindustan Latex Ltd and Acumen Fund of the US) in Chinglepet in Tamil Nadu, a stronghold of Ramadoss's party, the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK).

Ramadoss's official profile gives him credit for advances in TB and malaria control and the elimination of leprosy, but health activists say the claims are bogus. "Many of these statistical claims relate to efforts that are decades old, well before Ramadoss became health minister," says Amit Sengupta of the People's Health Movement. Doctors belonging to the Jan Swasthya Sansthan in Chattisgarh, who are struggling to combat these diseases, point out that the deeply misleading statistics conceal the health system's failure to detect and report the real incidence of these diseases.

In Chennai, the minister's home city, many political observers would characterise Ramadoss as, above all, his father's son. "Anbumani has no agenda and there's nobody to tell him what to do," says P. Radhakrishnan, professor of sociology at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. "His actions are all diversionary and he thinks he can attract the nation's attention. He is copying senior Ramadoss, whose one agenda is parochialism. Both of them may have medical degrees, but they practise the brash politics of Tamil Nadu."

Anbumani's stances on smoking and drinking, reasoned though they may sound when he's holding forth solemnly to the likes of Barkha Dutt, have their origins in the high-pitched politics of morality at which the PMK (founded by Ramadoss senior on a support base among the state's Vanniyar community) is a past master. This is the party that went after actress Khushboo for her remarks on premarital sex, and in 2002, began attacking Tamil movie star Rajnikanth, a threat to its political vote base, for his stylish cigarette stunts in films. Ramadoss senior managed to get the actor to stop doing them (indeed, the entire Tamil film industry was forced to stop the depiction of smoking heroes in films), but the actor was so incensed that he appealed to voters to electorally reject the PMK. Last week, it was payback time for actor Vijaykanth, a veteran of 150 films and several smoking scenes, who challenged Anbumani to do something about the death of four babies in Tamil Nadu, after they were vaccinated, rather than focusing on the smoking and drinking habits of actors.

As old-timers watch Anbumani play out his party's old tricks on a national stage, they remember Ramadoss senior once saying, "I don't hanker after posts. If I bring any of my relatives into politics you can flog me publicly." That position is, however, ancient history. In 2001, Ramadoss senior had hopes of anointing Anbumani as chief minister of Pondicherry, but voters did not oblige him. On the strength of joining winning electoral alliances, he did, however, manage to get his partymen into the Union council of ministers in two NDA governments, pitching each time for the health portfolio, which has always interested the PMK (the charitable explanation being that the party is run by medical practitioners). And in 2004, as a member of the UPA, he managed to secure a berth for Anbumani in the Union cabinet, giving the nation ample opportunity to ruminate on the vagaries of a brand of coalition politics that catapults unknown and untried politicians to the helm of important social sector ministries.

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By Anjali Puri with Pushpa Iyengar in Chennai and Debarshi Dasgupta in Delhi

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