Shashi Tharoor has urged the central government to enact comprehensive legislation to protect doctors and other healthcare professionals from violence at the workplace.

Speaking to The Telegraph on the sidelines of an event at Starmark in New Town, the Thiruvananthapuram MP expressed concern at the rising violence inside medical establishments.

According to estimates by the Indian Medical Association, 75 per cent of India’s doctors have reported experiencing “some form of physical abuse in the course of their careers”, he said. “This is a shockingly unacceptable figure.”

Tharoor recalled having brought a private member’s bill in Parliament after a Kerala doctor was stabbed to death by a patient brought in for a check-up in May 2023. The bill was “spurned”, he said.

“That attack happened on a trainee doctor, Vandana Das, who was doing her compulsory service after her MBBS in a rural taluk hospital in Kottarakkara,” Tharoor said.

“I went to see her parents. They were absolutely anguished. And I had thought no parent should have to suffer like that.”

That bill, he said, was drafted in consultation with the IMA. “It is not difficult to have certain standards of security and safety in hospitals. We had asked for specific measures and stringent punishment for those who violate these standards.”

Tharoor said he had received “a strange reply” from the then Union health minister, Mansukh Mandaviya.

“He said, ‘If we do this for doctors, then we would have to do this for other professions too. Then the chartered accountants would also want a bill to protect them. Why can’t the existing laws be enough?’” Tharoor said, quoting the minister.

The Congress MP added: “But chartered accountants are not involved in life-and-death situations and have not been attacked in such numbers. This is trivialising the nature of the problems faced by doctors.”

The RG Kar rape and murder of a junior doctor, he said, had made him feel the need for such a law again. “To see another woman doctor, slightly older but in the act of service, trying to get some rest after a 36-hour shift and this horrible thing happens to her. This is not something society should tolerate.”

Tharoor said the government should consult the medical fraternity. “My bill is on the Lok Sabha website. If you don’t want it, come up with another,” he said.

The government had brought in a draft bill in 2019 that made violence against healthcare professionals a non-bailable offence, but it was withdrawn before it could be discussed in Parliament.

The laws passed in some states are “weak as they were passed in less urgent times”. Eleven states and Union Territories have no laws on the subject at all, Tharoor added.

He had several questions about security at RG Kar.

“Why was a latch in the seminar room not repaired in weeks? Why would a doctor after 36 hours of service have to lie down in a seminar room? How can non-hospital staff enter a hospital outside visiting hours? These are basic provisions that require simple administration, not a law,” he said.

Tharoor is aware of the spate of protests in Calcutta and elsewhere.

“The public grief is genuine. At the same time, political parties are also leaping into this and trying to take advantage. Some lawless elements will always infiltrate,” Tharoor said.

“But it really doesn’t reflect well on a place like Bengal where women are respected. You have a woman chief minister. Something like this happening here is very sad.”