PATNA: A government hospital in Ahmedabad in the western state of Gujarat is reported to have segregated coronavirus patients on the basis of their religion.
“We Muslims are kept separated from Hindus in the hospital,” said Azad, who was admitted to the hospital’s coronavirus ward.
“It’s a huge ward where we are living and all of us are Muslims and there is a separate wing for Hindus. This kind of religious segregation in the hospital is unheard of anywhere in the world. Muslims in the hospital are not only kept separately but discriminated against too. We don’t have doctors visiting us regularly,” he told Arab News, requesting that his full name not be cited for publication.
According to Azad, Muslim patients are unaware of their condition. He said, “Muslims have been picked up randomly from their localities without ascertaining whether one is having any kind of symptoms or not. I never had any symptoms related to coronavirus, still on the evening of April 7 they picked me up from my area in Ahmadabad along with many others and put us in the hospital. We are not fed well, we are not treated well and we are looked upon as animals.”
The hospital’s medical superintendent, Dr. Gunvant H. Rathod, said that the claims of discrimination and mistreat were “baseless.”
“There is no discrimination on the basis of religion. It is not true that Muslim and Hindu patients are kept separately. We have segregated the patients according to the seriousness of the disease,” he told Arab News on Thursday.
However, a day earlier, Delhi-based newspaper The Indian Express quoted him as saying that separate wards for Hindu and Muslim patients had been created “as per a state government’s decision.”
“Generally, there are separate wards for male and female patients. But here, we have made separate wards for Hindu and Muslim patients,” Rathod told the newspaper.
Faizan, who is in the same ward as Azad, told Arab News that Muslims have been treated as if they were “the spreaders of coronavirus.” He said, “There are people who have been staying in the hospital more than two weeks and are still not sure whether they are negative or positive.”
On Wednesday, Gujarat’s Health Ministry in a statement denied any kind of discrimination.
“No segregation is being done in the civil hospital on the basis of religion. Coronavirus patients are being treated based on symptoms, severity, etc, and according to treating doctors’ recommendations,” the statement read.
The news of religious segregation comes on the heels of a recent surge in anti-Muslim sentiment across India, after Islamic missionary organization Tablighi Jamaat was accused by India’s ruling party of spreading the disease.
More than 1,000 coronavirus cases are said to have been linked to the organization, including 30 persons who succumbed to
the disease.
“The ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has an anti-Muslim mindset and they use Muslims as a scapegoat for their own failure to handle the crisis in a better way,” said Shahid Alvi, Tablighi Jamaat advocate and spokesman.
A non-government Indian body of doctors, Progressive Medicos and Scientists Forum (PMSF), has condemned “differentiating between patients on the basis of religion.”
“It fills us with sheer disgust and a sense of insoluble hurt to our humanity to note that the ruling classes of India have stooped down to the level of differentiating between patients on the basis of religion,” PMSF said in a statement on Wednesday.
According to Ahmadabad-based lawyer and civil rights activist, Shamshad Pathan, what is happening in Gujarat is not new.
He said, “Muslims in the state have been relegated to second-class of citizenship. There has been a systematic attempt for the past two decades to deepen the religious divide in the state. Religious discrimination has seeped into the body polity of the state.”
Gujarat is the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who served as its chief minister from 2001 to 2014.
