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The straw in the wind

It is to be hoped that the eyes of those who govern this country or aspire to that position have been opened even now by the unhappy situation that has arisen as a result of government doctors insisting that their service continue to be administered by a central health authority rather than by provincial councils. The present doctors’ strike is more than a single straw in the wind. It is a good indicator of the kind of problems the country will have to face if the so-called devolution package is enacted in the statute and the sooner this realisation dawns on those concerned, the better for the country.

Nobody can be happy about the effect of this strike. The conflict has now escalated to near unmanageable proportions with doctors subject to physical attack and a judicial order that the leaders of the GMOA be arrested. If a father who had brought his sick child for treatment to a hospital swings a punch at a doctor who refuses to examine the child, it is reasonable to presume that to have been a blow dealt under acute provocation. But if an intruder enters a surgeon’s home and sets fire to his garaged car, the presumption is fair that the mysterious hand had been set up by one kind of vested interest or another.

The torched car is only one instance of the thuggery that appears to have been unleashed — and not by angry patients infuriated by being denied medical services that are their right in this so-called democratic socialist republic of ours. There have been other reports of vehicles without registration plates trailing doctors and of their homes being attacked by stone throwers. The people of this country are knowledgeable enough to make up their own minds whether such acts are the spontaneous manifestation of public anger or whether there is a hidden hand behind them.

Saying all this does not detract from the widely held perception that the doctors have once again been callously unfair by the taxpayer on whose money they have been educated. Why should the sick be the victims of a dispute between government doctors and the administration? But that, sadly, has always been the case when the doctors have at different times decided to flex their collective trade union muscle. Older readers will remember a doctors’ strike during the tenure of Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike in the early sixties when Mr. Felix Dias Bandaranaike was the strong man in the government. On that occasion too emergency laws were brought into force and regulations promulgated threatening the strikers with the confiscation of their property.

The doctors scuttled back to work. But times now are different and there would be many who will believe that those tactics will not work today. The continuing defiance in the face of an essential services order is in itself a signal that the striking medicos are not going to be intimidated into returning to work. What the consequences of defying the essential services order will be have not been made public by the state up to this point of time. The chances are that nothing is going to happen and the doctors, who have in the past not even been deprived of their salaries for the days they struck work, will get off scott free. That is the precedent that has already been set in this country.

Although the vast majority of the people are firmly of the view that the strikers are being most unfair by the people of this country — particularly the poor who cannot afford private medical care — they will not deny the justice of the basic issue that sparked this dispute. That is why the LSSP, the country’s oldest political party, has gone on record saying that while not condoning the strike, they will not place the responsibility either on the GMOA or the health administration. The reality is that this dispute is centered on the thorny issue of implementing national policy through the provincial councils system.

We would sympathise not only with doctors but with all public servants, who joined a service that was centrally administered and where norms and practices have been established over a very long period of time, not willing to be victims of a clutch of chief ministers in the provinces wielding entirely new powers. In fact, although the thirteenth amendment containing the provisions for the devolution of power had been adopted as an amendment to the constitution, the reality was that the central government continued to exercise national policy on several subjects and functions devolved on the provincial councils. The muck hit the fan only when the North Western Provincial Council sought to assert its rights in exercising these powers. That issue is now before the courts with the taxpayer footing the bill as usual.

Given the fact that the doctors do have a real grievance and the work stoppage for which a heavy price is being paid by people who are ill and their families, it is essential that all concerned should step off their high horses and explore a solution. All the provincial councils, after all, are in the hands of the PA that is ruling at the centre. Whatever the legal rights and wrongs of the principal problem, surely it is not beyond the ability of all concerned to sort it out at least for the time being until the major issues are resolved. If the government at the highest levels indicates a willingness to do that, we are sure the doctors will respond positively. If not, nobody will fault the administration for doing what must be done.

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