Night duty

THE incident occurred on Aug 9, 2024, hours after crowds in India and Pakistan cheered on their respective contenders for the javelin gold in Paris. Just like in most places in the subcontinent, on the night of Aug 8, on-duty doctors at the R.G. Kar Hospital in Kolkata in India were also watching Arshad Nadeem and Niraj Chopra compete against each other. A lot was at stake and India was the favourite. We all know what happened in the competition, as Pakistan won its first individual Olympic gold medal.
However, nobody, it seems, knows what happened at the R.G. Kar Hospital. It has been two weeks since the news broke that a trainee doctor who was on duty that night was brutally raped and killed in the early hours of Aug 9. Ever since then, Kolkata and many other Indian cities have been in a state of turmoil. OPD services have been suspended in several hospitals in the country and questions are being raised about how such a brutal crime could have taken place in a fully staffed hospital.
According to news reports, the second-year resident was completing a 36-hour shift at the hospital and was attacked while she was apparently resting in a seminar room. The doctor’s parents were not called until much later. They were first informed in a telephone call that their daughter was very sick. They were later told that their daughter had died by suicide. When the shocked and panicked parents arrived at the hospital, they were prevented from seeing their daughter’s body for four hours.
When finally they were allowed to see their child’s body, they saw that she had been beaten and badly bruised. The glass from her spectacles had been smashed on her face and even her eyes were bleeding from the shards. The postmortem report, that hinted at gang-rape, was horrifying, and said that the victim had been strangled to death. Suspecting a move to destroy evidence, the father of the rape victim questioned the haste with which the body of his child was cremated.
The incident is brutal and horrifying and it brings to the fore a safety problem that has also been faced by working women in Pakistan. Doctors, including women doctors, work long hours in very difficult circumstances — whether they are at the understaffed wards at government hospitals in the cities or in far-flung areas where amenities are few and living conditions difficult.
Doctors, including those with labour-room responsibilities, have to work at all hours of the day and night and may be singlehandedly responsible for dozens of patients at the same time. The situation is made more complicated by the fact that patients are often accompanied by entire crews of family members. If something goes awry or the patient passes away, one doctor is left to face a crowd of angry family members. While such a situation can be faced by both male and female doctors, the latter category is more vulnerable in a patriarchal society, where misogyny and gender discrimination are par for the course.
Medical premises in Pakistan are often not equipped with safe and adequate facilities for female doctors whether these are bathrooms or rooms where female medical staff working long hours can rest safely. This means that women doctors, who are already a target of aggression in the wards, are unable to feel safe even outside them.
In the Kolkata case, the person who has been arrested was a civilian police volunteer, who appears to have had easy access to all parts of the hospital. The same conditions apply to many hospitals in Pakistan where people have easy access to all parts of medical premises, thus posing a potential threat to women doctors and nurses.
It is understandable why the medical community in India is on the streets protesting against the rape and the conditions that led to it. Unsurprisingly, as time passes, the matter is being given a political colour because the ruling Modi administration — which has done nothing to make working conditions safe for women in the country — wants to undermine the state government in West Bengal whose capital Kolkata is. However, the issue is not one of politics or the government’s ineptitude but rather a wider culture of patriarchal violence in the entire subcontinent. The fact is that women are routinely targeted, raped and forgotten in all of South Asia. Men commit these crimes because they know that most of the time they will get away with it; in fact, there will be no consequences whatsoever.
One ridiculous solution that someone offered in the Kolkata case is that women doctors should not be permitted to do night duty at all. This solution seeks to further punish women who have already been held back for centuries for a variety of flawed reasons, including the belief that allowing them independence would compromise their safety vis-à-vis men with uncontrollable bestial instincts.
If women anywhere in South Asia are to be safe, this kind of thinking needs to go. The root of the problem — men with depraved thoughts and capable of expressing these in the most horrific way — has to be addressed. The young doctor in Kolkata was saving lives in an under-resourced environment and at an hour where only medics can save you. For this, she suffered in the most despicable way.
The brutality and the horror reveal just how inhuman South Asia has become, with men who commit such crimes and men who ignore their occurrence in the workplace and their homes. If there is any hope, it is in the women who are marching to demand their very basic right of being able to do their job without facing threats of rape, violence and death.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
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Published in Dawn, August 21st, 2024