How cross-border tensions are taking a toll on Bangladeshi patients and Indian hospitals

On November 28, Kolkata-based gynaecologist Indranil Saha declared on social media that he would stop seeing Bangladeshi patients at his clinic. “Nation comes before livelihood,” he wrote on Facebook with a purported photo that showed students walking over an Indian flag kept at the gates of a Bangladeshi college.

Saha is not the only doctor to have taken such a stand following tensions between India and Bangladesh.

JN Ray Hospital, a private facility in central Kolkata, made a similar announcement on November 30. “Until the situation improves in Bangladesh, we will not treat any patient from Bangladesh,” a senior manager of the hospital said.

A private hospital in Agartala too has decided not to treat Bangladeshi patients, while a doctor in Bengal’s Siiguri has demanded that everyone, “especially Bangladeshi patients”, should bow down to the Indian flag before entering his chambers.

Such instances of doctors refusing to treat patients on the basis of their identity raise a question of violating medical ethics, senior members of the medical fraternity told Scroll. They said that while there was anger among some doctors over the alleged desecration of the Indian flag in Bangladesh, only a few of them have refused to treat patients from the country.

Bangladesh has been in turmoil since early August after...

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