It is perhaps too much to expect the director of a top national medical institute and a minister in charge of the nation’s health to act like responsible adults. The court has intervened twice already and accused the parties of misusing the judiciary to carry out their ‘shadowboxing’. And yet the slugfest continues unabated, at the cost of patients’ welfare, the interests of medical science, and the even larger interests of society. Encouraged by a recent court order coaxing the health minister, A. Ramadoss, to sign pending degree certificates, the administration of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences seems intent on following up its success in scoring against the ministry. It has flatly denied all allegations of caste discrimination within the campus, which in June this year had troubled the prime minister sufficiently to order the setting up of the Thorat committee to investigate the matter. The AIIMS authorities have also backed up their offensive with counter-allegations of discrimination by the ministry. This is a perfect answer to the Centre’s renewed efforts to dislodge the director, P. Venugopal. It has recently introduced a bill that limits the director’s tenure to five years and makes the post more vulnerable to the health minister’s whims. The AIIMS’s move will provoke another round of confrontations with the Centre, and, by drawing out the latter’s fangs, will prove long-held suspicions about its aggrandizing tendencies or the villainy of individual ministers.

The palpable caste discrimination, which lies at the heart of the present crisis, is part of this larger scheme. All parties, and the sub-parties, have found in it a convenient tool to hit out at one another. If it is a weapon for upper caste students to get even with the “privileged” reserved categories, it is as much an instrument for the recalcitrant AIIMS administration to fight off centralization. For the health ministry, dismayed by the director’s gumption, it is once more a lever to control the functioning of a gigantic medical service. It is hardly anybody’s concern how pathetically skewed social and professional relations are becoming, both within the hospital premises and outside. For it is unlikely that malpractices inside the institution, caused by an ego tussle between contending supervisors, or by the overzealous social engineering of the State, will remain contained within it.