Ahmedabad: After the news about Tabligh congregation in Delhi turning into a super spreader broke, the right wingers banked on the occasion to propagate Islamophobia.
Reports from a government-run Gujarat hospital, segregating COVID-19 patients on religious lines has just manifested the bigotry.
However, the nation is no stranger to racism or casteism. When the Spanish Flu pandemic ripped through India in 1918 killing almost 17 million people, caste played a crucial role in determining who received healthcare and who died. Lower caste people living in crowded slums were the most exposed to the virus, and the least able to find food and medicine as the flu spread, according to historian David Arnold, who has extensively researched and written about the Spanish Flu epidemic in India.
Historian Amit Kapoor, author of ‘Riding the Tiger’, said 61 lower caste people died for every 1,000 in the community. For upper caste Hindus it was 19 for every 1,000, and the figure was even lower for Europeans living in India.
Now, talking about the present-day bigotry in Prime Minister Modi’s state:
When asked on comment why Hindu and Muslim patients were being treated in separate wards; the hospital authorities claimed that it has been done on the orders of the state government.
Dr Gunvant H Rathod, medical superintendent of Ahmedabad Civil Hospital, told the media, “It is a decision of the government and you can ask them.”
When the issue was taken up with Jayanti Ravi, Gujarat Health department principal secretary, journalists were asked to contact Dr Sanjay Solanki, the resident medical officer at the hospital.
While Ravi said, “I have no idea,” Solanki, in turn, asked the journalists to speak to Rathod. “He is the right person to talk to,” he said.
In the meantime, Nitin Patel, Gujarat’s Health Minister and Deputy Chief Minister, told the media that nothing of that sort had happened.
“We are trying to give the people the best possible medical attention here,” Patel said before hanging up the phone.
Interestingly, the state health department has also put out an official statement terming the reports of separate wards for Muslims and Hindus ‘baseless’ and ‘fictitious’.
On the other hand, a report quoted a patient as saying, “On Sunday night, names of 28 men admitted in the first ward were called out. We were then shifted to another ward. Though we were not given any reason for the shifting, all the names that were called out belonged to one community.”
Agencies