How campus fire makes TMC uneasy, again
Three hundred and ten hours of hunger strike in a 27-day agitation.
Twenty one medical students, mostly in their teens, of Calcutta Medical College were battling it out for 14 days in demand of habitable hostel rooms.
For 10-odd days or so, neither the health minister, who is chief minister Mamata Banerjee, nor her deputy and the bureaucrats had time amid their pressing schedule to spare for the students.
Obviously, there were serious business at hand — observing the 25th year of the Martyrs’ Day rally, giving a future direction to party cadre for the days to come and, of course, taking turns to rebut the claims and allegations of Prime Minister Narendra Modi from a political rally dais in Midnapore.
The official reason dished out for delayed reaction: “She was not aware.”
True, the media also gave a late knee-jerk reaction, only after the police went on a late-night swoop and the health of the students started deteriorating.
The civil society came out.
Big names and intellectuals, such as poet Shankha Ghosh, Soumitra Chatterjee, singer Kabir Suman, filmmaker Anik Dutta and Kamaleswar Mukherjee expressed solidarity.
There were protests, mass conventions and procession on the streets.
A mother, whose fasting son fell unconscious on the 12th night, appealed to the chief minister to intervene. The appeal came out in a leading Bengali daily with the highest circulation.
The ball started rolling.
Axe came on the principal secretary of health, Anil Verma, and the director of medical education, Debasish Bhattacharjee.
The students on strike were assured that they would be accommodated in the newly constructed 11-storey hostel building along with the freshers, till their existing hostel was renovated.
Incidentally, last year, the Calcutta Medical College authorities had spent over Rs 40 lakh for renovation.
Within a year, plasters started peeling off and portions of the ceiling started caving in. The garbage bins were spilling and toilets stinking. The students demanded transparency in allotment of hostel rooms and a habitable atmosphere, which apparently is a trivial demand that the administration even tended to overlook, but what the ruling party and its doctors’ wing could not ignore was the support the Left-backed unions extended to the students.
The West Bengal Medical Council election is on. The voting and counting will be completed by August 27. Obviously, the president of the state medical council and chairman of the governing body of the Medical College Calcutta, Nirmal Majhi, felt that acceding to the demands of the students would amount to surrendering to the pressure of the Left-backed unions.
At the peak of the hunger strike, Majhi even had the guts to dub the students as Maoists, a favourite branding the leaders of the ruling party often resort to.
An innocent protest for a genuine cause took on political colours, as the students unwittingly got entangled in a political tug-of-war between the ruling Trinamool Congress-backed Progressive Doctors Association and the Left-affiliated West Bengal Association of Health Service Doctors.
“Giving into the demands of the students would mean a face loss for the Trinamool Congress-backed doctors’ association and Majhi could ill afford that. He must have played a role in convincing the party bosses till a time the election process got over,” said a doctor of Medical College Calcutta on conditions of anonymity.
Majhi, known for being close to chief minister Mamata Banerjee, holds plum posts in government medical colleges and hospitals. The strike could have ended in a whimper, with just a small piece of news, no face-loss, if the decision had been taken early.
But as fate would have it, it ended with a bang, smearing of red gulal, the colour speaking for the political victory on the ground. Students, irrespective of their political entity and identity, are waking up as a class, a unified strength to question, to reason out, to “give not till the goal is reached”.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)