Communalisation of Public Space — Hospitals

Crime Against Humanity Volume 2 An inquiry into the carnage in Gujarat -- Findings And Recommendations by Concerned Citizens Tribunal -Gujarat 2002

Communalisation of Public Space — Hospitals

1.1. One of the most disturbing and sinister truths about some prominent master-minds behind the Gujarat carnage was the fact that many of them hailed from the medicalprofession and, despite their professional allegiance to the Hippocratic oath, violated it tolead mobs to rape, pillage, maim and kill and that too, in the most barbaric ways. Dr.Praveen Togadia, Dr. Jaideep Patel, Dr. Amita Patel and Dr. Bhartibehn, Dr. Maya Kotdani(the latter three are BJP MLAs) are all doctors by profession who were named by victimsas masterminds and leaders in brutal crimes.

1.2. Dr. Praveen Togadia, international general secretary of the VHP, is well-known forhis frequent threats of hatred and violence. He is a cancer surgeon by profession and alsoowns the Dhanvantri Hospital at India Colony, Ahmedabad. Doctors belonging to theMuslim minority testified to the fact that, on February 28, Shri Togadia had put in an ad-slide of his, which was telecast on Citicable in Ahmedabad city, asking all doctors andnurses to report to his hospital. He was making this appeal to all doctors. Many witnesseswho deposed before us raised the question of whether this was also part of a master plan,to keep, through threats and warnings, Hindu doctors away from Muslim-run hospitals.

1.3. Justice AP Ravani spoke of his personal acquaintance and knowledge of (Hindu)doctors being threatened and told (by the VHP) not to treat Muslims. He knew of onedoctor in the Shahibag area who must have attended to 17-20 deliveries for womenstaying in camps. The doctor was personally threatened by Shri Togadia himself, “Stopthis, otherwise consequences will not be good.” Other doctors have also confided toJustice Ravani saying they too had received similar threats.

1.4. Ahmedabad’s Sola Civil Hospital received the bodies of the ‘martyred’ kar sevaks at8 a.m. on February 28. This venue became the scene for sharp and focussed anger thatquickly progressed into the raising of hate-filled slogans. The VHP organised a religiousceremony where its vice-president, Acharya Giriraj Kishore said that the day’s violencewas “a natural outburst”. He also said, “Islamic terrorism was responsible for the Godhraincident and that Hindus had acted with restraint.” (The Times of India, March 1).

1.5. Soon after the bodies of the kar sevaks had been cremated, from the evening ofFebruary 28, the bodies of another set of victims started pouring in, this time bearing another identity. They were Muslims from Chamanpura, Rakhial, Bapunagar,Behrampura, and late, at night, Naroda Gaon and Naroda Patiya.

1.6. The ‘borders’ drawn within Ahmedabad have ensured a severely ghettoisedexistence. This has been an unfortunate fact for the past three decades and it has hadserious implications for inter-community interaction and relations. In the recent state-sponsored genocide, it was used cleverly by large, well-organised and well-armed mobsnumbering several thousand, through bloodshed, violence and intimidation, to restrictthe passage of ambulances from the inner, old city to either the Vadilal Sarabhai (VS)Hospital or the Sola Civil Hospital. This was another cruel method of preventingvictims from receiving urgent medical attention.

1.7. At least six injured persons rescued from Chamanpura (Gulberg society), testi-fied before the Tribunal confirming that the VS Hospital had refused them treatment,demanding that a police statement be obtained first. This, from a group of personswho had been brutalised and traumatised, having been witness to 60-70 of their closerelations or neighbours stripped, raped, cut into pieces, and burnt alive.

1.8. One eyewitness from Jamalpur stated, “The worst conduct was at the SolaCivil Hospital. Here Bharti behn and Anita behn, both BJP corporators (Bharti behn isfrom Mani Nagar), were actually telling doctors whom to treat or not to treat.” At theVS Hospital, which gave more access to the minorities initially due to the presence ofCongress corporators on the hospital’s managerial board, there were attempts to denytreatment to Muslims that were not entirely successful.

1.9. Even in the second week of April, while violence in the city of Ahmedabadhad trickled down to stray incidents, fear stalked public spaces — hospitals, schools,government offices and even the Gujarat High Court. One witness told the Tribunalthat on April 11, groups of 15-20, armed with unsheathed swords, stalked the corri-dors of the VS Hospital each night and no one challenged them. They did not directlyharm or kill but the message spread through nurses and class IV staff was that thearea was out of bounds for the marked — the Muslim population in Gujarat.

1.10. But no incident can typify the extent of communalisation of hospitals more thanthe brutal murder of a Muslim who had brought a severely injured person to the VSHospital by ambulance on May 7, while the Tribunal sat. The youth was stabbed when healighted from an ambulance carrying a patient who had been stabbed in the Juhapuralocality. The assailants were sangh parivar activists who were demonstrating against thealleged “partisan attitude” of the hospital authorities against Hindu patients. The fact thatsuch brazen incidents could take place in broad daylight is a clear indicator that theseforces, murderous and threatening, have no fear of the arm of the law.

1.11. As bad as the perpetration of crimes by medical professionals during the Gujaratcarnage, and the attempts to brutally communalise hospital spaces, were the attemptby the police in Ahmedabad and Vadodara to actually harass and stop ambulanceservices belonging to the minority community. At the height of the carnage, theseambulance services were the only ones to provide desperately needed medical sup-port, reaching help, saving groups, carrying mutilated bodies, etc. The fact that even they were stopped, as were trucks carrying relief, indicated the premeditation of thecarnage at the very top levels as also the genocidal nature of its entire execution.

1.12. Several witnesses who deposed before us actually detailed how, in Ahmedabad,one police officer, stopped the Nobel Ambulance Service personnel at Bawa Lababito prevent it from reaching Danilimda, Char Rasta, Sardarbridge and Calico, despitethe fact that they had curfew passes.

1.13. The Tribunal recorded the written statement of Dr. Ishaq Shaikh, vice-presi-dent, Al Ameen Garib Niwas General Hospital, Ahmedabad. This 40-bed hospitalhad over-stretched itself in service of the community from February 28 onwards. Hedescribed how, from 12.30 p.m., there was a flood of patients – virtually a patient perminute. With this pressure they had to make painful decisions of which patients totreat and which to leave to their fate.

1.14. Twice on February 28, when Dr. Shaikh tried to drive a grievously injured patientto the Vadilal Sarabhai Hospital in his ambulance, he was attacked at Raipur between 4and 5 p.m. When this happened a second time, mayor Himmatsingh Patel helped them outby calling for an ambulance from the Ahmedabad municipal corporation.

1.15. A severe strain on community health services was evidenced during and afterthe carnage, with the state abdicating its primary role. In the numerous relief campsthat sprung up across the city/state, there was a severe problem of clean drinkingwater, sanitation facilities and adequate food. Children were suffering from jaundice,a water-borne disease, diarrhoea and dehydration. One child died in a camp in mid-April. The strain on small privately run hospitals increased. On April 3, Dr. Shaikhwas brutally beaten by inspectors Modi and Parmar as he tried to take his ambulanceto Shamser Bagh, Gomtipur, where two persons had been shot in the leg. He waspounced upon by the police and beaten badly.

1.16. This most appalling state of affairs can be appreciated and properly understood fromthe fact that victims and doctors had petitioned the NHRC, pleading for SRP protectionwithin hospitals. This is a sad commentary on the situation in Gujarat during those months,and reflects the depth of communalisation of Gujarati state and society. Muslims wereterrified to go to government run hospitals to claim their dead because systematic effortswere made to create an atmosphere of dread and terror there. Menacing groups of BajrangDal and VHP youths would stalk the casualty departments of hospitals, 50-60 at a time.

1.17. It appears that these were well-organised and coordinated efforts to deny medi-cal aid to the Muslim community. Since most of the Muslims, dead or injured, werebeing taken to VS Hospital, it was made the target of the mobs. Muslim drivers wouldbe so scared that they would refuse to go there. In 1992, this sense of fear did not prevailwithin hospitals. Though initially the injured were not attacked while in hospital, therewas enormous psychological fear. Hence, victim-survivors started going to small hos-pitals, which had neither adequate facilities nor staff. “They never struck the victims,they merely showed us the swords, but it was enough to frighten us” said ShariefKhan Pathan of the Nobel Ambulance Service.

1.18. The Tribunal also heard the account of a doctor who practised in Vadodara and another government hospital 40 km away. He stated that in the virtual deluge ofpatients pouring into this hospital from on February 28 and March 1, there were inju-ries on their person that he had never seen before.

1.19. There were countless injuries caused by swords. The mutilation of breasts in thecase of women was common. There were some cases of mutilation of the penis. In yetanother Vadodara hospital, a doctor conducted 17 post-mortems, the majority of whomwere women who had been gang-raped. There were three survivors of gang rape. In onecase, the police had intervened and saved the victim from death. A woman from Khedadistrict who was gang raped, had her head shaved and an Om cut into her head with aknife by the rapists. She died a few days after she was admitted to hospital. There wereother instances of Om engraved with a knife on the back and other parts of women’sbodies, as well as of some men. According to the doctors, the deaths of the few Hindus,both men and women, who were admitted to hospital, were of people who had dis-obeyed prohibitory orders and fell victim to violent circumstances.

1.20. Dr. Ali Shaikh, Vadodara, a witness who appeared before the Tribunal, rana 15-bed nursing home in a building near the Panigate police station in Vadodara.The building is just five minutes away from the police station, and all the vehicles,mobile vans etc. belonging to the police station were usually parked outside it.Despite this, his clinic and everything inside it, including the ICU and expensivemedical equipment, was looted or destroyed on March 1. Two days later, the nurs-ing home was burnt. As of May, the police had not taken any action in the matter.The witness tried to return to the premises about three weeks later and to resume hispractice, when he was assaulted by a group of people. He and his son had a narrowescape. The Tribunal records with shock and horror that, two-and-a-half months afterthe crimes, even when insurance officials visited the building for a survey, the crowd,comprising of local people who lived around the clinic, did not allow them to enter thepremises. That these incidents could occur in such close proximity to the Panigate po-lice station makes the whole situation almost farcical. Another community health cen-tre – the Muslim medical centre in Bhoiwada was also destroyed and burnt.

1.21. The Gujarat government is culpable of failure to protect the lives of at least2,000 victims. It is also guilty of failure to provide medical aid and relief to victim-survivors in life-threatening situations.

1.22. To allow the spaces occupied by doctors and hospitals, which are sacred bysheer nature of the job they do, to be vitiated by hate speech and propaganda soundsa serious warning to the extent of percolation of communal ideology in Gujarat.

1.23. The fact that many leaders and perpetrators of the crimes are doctors surelybehoves upon the Indian Medical Association to initiate disciplinary action againstthem for never can the mandate of a doctor, who’s first job is to save and preservelife, become exactly the opposite — of being the one to snatch life away.