Mamata offers talks with medics, irks protesters with 'return to festivities' call

New Delhi: Nearly seven lakh outdoor patients and seventy thousand indoor patients have been denied medical care over the past few weeks in the public hospitals in West Bengal, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s government said on Monday even as she offered talks with the protesting junior doctors seeking justice for their colleague who was recently raped and murdered.

Banerjee urged the junior doctors to end their ‘cease work’ stir, which was first launched at the R G Kar Medical College Hospital in Kolkata after a postgraduate trainee doctor was found raped and murdered in the seminar room of the Department of Chest Medicine on the third floor of the healthcare facility and later spread across the state.

With Durga Puja, the greatest annual festival of the state, just a few weeks away, the chief minister urged people to return to festivities. Her comment, however, did not go down well not only with the protesting medics and civil society activists but also with the bereaved parents of the victim.

Soon after the Supreme Court asked the junior doctors to return to work by 5 p.m. on Tuesday, the chief minister reiterated her appeal to the protesting medics. “If you have anything to say, you are always welcome. You can send a delegation of five or ten members to meet me,” she urged the agitating doctors while addressing journalists after a meeting with the officials on Monday.

“If you stay on the roads every night, elderly people suffer from sleep deprivation because of noise pollution,” the chief minister said, apparently urging civil society activists holding nocturnal protests to relent. “One month has passed. I request you to return to festivities and demand that the CBI completes investigations at the earliest.”

The netizens, who have been organising or participating in protests against the rape and murder of the young doctor, strongly reacted to the chief minister’s call to return to festivities. “People of West Bengal are already in festive mode. The widespread protests against the rape and murder of the doctor and the continuing movement for justice have become a festival for them,” said Rimjhim Singha, who had first called upon the women for the “Reclaim the Night” protest, which received overwhelming responses across the state.

“What I know is that my daughter is gone, and Durga Puja will never be the same festival for us as it was earlier,” said the mother of the victim.

West Bengal BJP chief and union minister Sukanta Majumdar said that the state’s chief minister and the Trinamool Congress supremo had asked people to return to festivities because the widespread protests had frightened her.

Narayan Swaroop Nigam, the health secretary of the state government, said that seven lakh outdoor patients and seventy thousand indoor patients had been denied medical care due to the cease work stir by the junior doctors. He also said that over 7,000 surgeries had been deferred in the state government’s hospitals and 1,500 patients in catheterization laboratories had been left untreated.

The state government earlier in the day informed the Supreme Court that 23 patients had died due to the lack of timely and adequate medical care during the cease-work agitation by the junior doctors.

With nearly 6000 junior doctors in over 20 government hospitals across the state not working, healthcare services across the state have been severely affected. The senior doctors, who had briefly joined the protest, returned to work later, but could hardly fill the void created by the continuing cease work stir by thousands of junior doctors. The protesting junior doctors, however, launched telemedicine services and free medical camps for patients.

Even as the protests – not only by the doctors but also by civil society activists and common people from all walks of life – continued with the growing clamour for justice for the young medic, the families of at least three patients, who allegedly died due to lack of medical care in the government hospitals, also came out, questioning the rationale of the agitation by the medics.