Wednesday, 18 September 2024
Wednesday, 18 September 2024
A top official in Bengal’s health department had recently admonished a group of medical college principals demanding transparency in the examination process and reportedly told them that the department does not run from Swasthya Bhawan.
“If you dare, go to the place where it is run from and ask these questions,” the official was quoted as having told a medical college principal.
Problem is, no one really knows where it runs from. Only recently, the name of a man, who is believed to be deciding everything from policies to transfer and purchases, has surfaced.
Yet, no one is still ready to go on record and take his name. He is someone who must not be named.
The statement from the top health official is possibly the first indication of the presence of a Lord Voldemort in Bengal’s health system.
Much like the villain in the Harry Potter series, the man being tagged as the “de facto health minister” or the “super health minister” has for the last four to five years been spoken about in hushed tones, mostly in the form of questions about who he was and how he came to wield such power.
The answers were not there.
It is only in the last month since the rape and murder of the 31-year-old postgraduate trainee doctor at the state-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital that the “Dark Lord’s” name has come out in the open, even making its way to memes on the internet with his team of “Death-Eaters”.
One of them, doctors in the know insist, is in the Central Bureau of Investigation’s net. Two others have been transferred and a fourth suspended from the ruling party’s students’ wing and the state medical council.
This gang of Death-Eaters is part of the “syndicate” that runs the health administration, senior doctors and those in the system say.
Till four or five years ago, nobody knew much about the ring leader, the Dark Lord who still operates from behind a screen and was an unknown entity. So much so that when the Bengal government created a WhatsApp group during Covid-19, “you-know-who” was not a part of the group.
Yet, those privy to the goings-on in the health department and state run hospitals assert no decision in over 10 years has been taken without the nod from “he who must not be named”.
“There were some decisions related to transfers, which made us curious about what was actually going on at Swasthya Bhawan,” said a senior doctor associated with the Indian Medical Association who requested anonymity. “We made some enquiries and then came across this name. Before that, we had never heard his name.
“Though he is known to be an orthopaedic surgeon, I still don’t know in which hospital he has worked or where he runs his practice from,” the senior doctor added.
“You-know-who” is believed to have come close to a very very famous Bengali around the year 2012 and replaced another powerful physician who made his debut in the state Assembly the year before that.
“If every person today is saying that Bengal has a ‘super health minister’ then this matter needs to be investigated. We have handed over the documents related to this matter to the CBI and our legal team,” Subarno Goswami, additional general secretary of the All India Federation of Government Doctors’ Association and joint secretary of the Association of Health Services Doctors, told The Telegraph Online.
“During Covid he and his daughter had floated companies which supplied PPE kits to the state hospitals without any tenders. We had complained on each of these issues,” he added.
Such is the terror of Bengal’s Lord Voldemort that even a former Rajya Sabha MP from the ruling Trinamul who had spoken out against one of the followers of the Dark Lord did not take his name.
The fallout of the rape and murder at RG Kar Medical College & Hospital has seen some of the Dark Lord’s men facing the music, senior doctors say, including suspensions from the Trinamul Chhatra Parishad and the West Bengal Medical Council.
Some of these people were seen at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital on August 9, when the mutilated corpse of the postgraduate trainee was found. Questions were raised about their presence at the scene of crime, which the agitating junior doctors’ allege was “compromised” and evidence related to the crime “tampered with”, a charge that both chief minister Mamata Banerjee and the Kolkata Police have denied vehemently.
One of these doctors, Goswami said, “got a job at the Burdwan Medical College’s Radiology department without completing his MD. In 2023 he joined SSKM with a certificate that he worked for three years in a rural area during Covid. The state government itself had declared the state was free from Covid in 2022. How can a doctor work in a rural area when there was no Covid? The rules were manipulated to please someone.”
Left legacy and after
Those in the know agree that it was the Left that centralised the running of the education and health sectors. But they insist that the strict structure of the Left acted as some sort of bulwark against the rule of individuals.
"Earlier whatever was happening in the health department was done behind closed doors. Now these people think they have become so powerful they are working in the open," said a Trinamul leader who is not on the best books of the party brass. "The people running the show think they can get away with anything. They are misleading Mamata di. Otherwise, how could Sandip Ghosh be transferred to National Medical College within four hours of submitting his resignation?"
Two key associates of “you-know-who” in the health department owe their roots to the CPM, say those in the know.
One of them, from Jalpaiguri, was a key leader of the CPM-backed Association of Health Services Doctors till he moved to the other side. He is related to a two-term Lok Sabha ex-MP of the CPM.
Another key member held prominent positions in the IMA’s Bengal chapter – which was Left-leaning but not directly associated with the CPM – but is now close to “you-know-who”.
