Bihar’s health minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey, already under severe criticism for the declining standards of public-funded healthcare facilities, has angered the state’s medical fraternity for reportedly threatening to chop off junior doctors’ hands if they began their proposed strike demanding higher stipend.
Mr Choubey, a senior BJP minister considered to be among the hardliners in his party, created further controversies by speaking rudely to television journalists on camera on Sunday. Seeking out one particular news channel, Mahua News, at a press conference, he publicly told its reporter that the channel had been running a “campaign of conspiracy” against his department. In the other incident, he obliquely threatened a news channel journalist while stubbornly refusing to answer his question.
“You (junior doctors threatening to go on strike) ask for whatever you need, I will fulfil your demands. If I cannot, I will seek forgiveness with folded hands. But do not threaten. I may get ruined, but if you try to harm the system available for public welfare, toh hum haath kaatna bhi jaante hain (we know how to chop off hands),” Mr Choubey had said in his controversial warning to junior doctors while launching a statewide health awareness campaign on Saturday.
Even as Mr Choubey explained away the crude threat implied in his words, the Opposition parties and representatives of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) and the junior doctors’ association strongly condemned his utterances and demanded an apology from him. “I never meant it in the literal sense…I was only using a popular idiom of language,” explained Mr Choubey, but the controversy refused to die down.
“These (threats) are simply outrageous in a democracy. The junior doctors’ demands are not illogical. The minister must choose his words carefully and he must now apologise for what he said,” said Dr Ajay Kumar of the IMA.