Author: Kanchan Gupta
Publication: Sunday Pioneer
Date: August 5, 2007
On Friday, The Pioneer published a heart-wrenching
story about a father strangling his five-year-old daughter to death in Hyderabad
because he couldn't pay for the polio-afflicted child's medical care. Since
the morning newspapers are flush with similarly tragic stories, it's unlikely
too many readers would have noticed it; of those who did, most are unlikely
to have read beyond the headline. The few who read the full story would have
forgotten the details before the day was over. After all, sob stories about
the unwashed masses aren't worth remembering; life's too short to be wasted
on agonising over a little girl in a slum who died for no fault of hers.
But it's in the details of that story that
we can get a glimpse of a gigantic problem that has become a stumbling block
in eradicating polio from our country. So, at the risk of boring some of you,
let me recall the story. Irshad Ahmad, a labourer who lives at Hyderabad's
Zaheernagar slum, strangled Qurana, his five-year-old daughter crippled by
polio, on Tuesday night. The news report said Ahmad was "frustrated over
his inability to provide for Qurana's medical treatment and the family's inability
to look after her". The next morning he pretended the child had died
of her illness, but his neighbours sensed something was wrong and alerted
the police "who reached Ahmad's house while he was making arrangements
for her funeral".
The report quoted police inspector E Shankar
Reddy as saying that "Qurana was afflicted with polio from her birth
and over the years her condition deteriorated with her hands also paralysed
and she was not able to attend even nature's call on her own". The second
part of the statement is possibly true, but the first part is entirely wrong.
No child is born afflicted with polio; children pick up the crippling disease
if their parents fail or refuse to have them vaccinated. And, as everybody
knows, the polio vaccine is administered orally, free of charge, by health
workers who go from door to door every few months, or at the nearest Government
dispensary.
So, why wasn't Qurana vaccinated? Since the
vaccine is free, Ahmad can't claim he couldn't afford it. Nor can he claim
that he didn't have access to health workers. Or that he was unaware of the
deadly impact polio has on children: We may have a lot to crib about Government's
propaganda, but the publicity given to the pulse polio campaign can't be faulted.
The message is simple enough for everybody to understand; hence, illiteracy
can't be cited as a reason for parents like Ahmad not vaccinating their children.
The reason why Qurana wasn't vaccinated lies in an insidious counter-campaign
launched by mullahs in Muslim majority mohallahs.
Muslims, especially those who live in ghettoes,
are told that they shouldn't allow their children to be administered the polio
vaccine as it's "part of a conspiracy to make them sterile". The
'conspirators' are variously described as "Islam's enemies in the West",
"scheming Jews of Israel" and the "anti-Muslim Government of
India". For all his emphasis on "Muslims first" and despite
spending sleepless nights, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hasn't been able
to get the third category removed from the list of suspects. In vast swathes
of western Uttar Pradesh, every time the Government announces a pulse polio
campaign, banners and posters are put up at the behest of the local mullahs,
telling health workers they aren't welcome and warning Muslims that the vaccine
is "a potion invented to limit their population".
It's, therefore, not coincidental that Uttar
Pradesh witnesses the highest incidence of polio, accounting for 474 of the
666 new cases reported in India in 2006, registering a four-fold increase
over those of 2005. Ninety per cent of the new cases were reported from western
Uttar Pradesh. Last year's polio survey shows eight States that hadn't reported
any cases in 2005 saw fresh cases in 2006. These include Assam, Himachal Pradesh,
Jammu & Kashmir, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and West Bengal. In Maharashtra,
incidence of polio was reported from slums inhabited by migrants from western
Uttar Pradesh.
Parents who refuse to have their children
vaccinated know that it's wrong to believe the mullahs; the mullahs know that
they are lying when they allege the anti-polio drive is a plot to make Muslims
infertile; and, the Muslim intelligentsia, whose children are duly vaccinated
against polio, knows that it should speak out but chooses to lay the blame
elsewhere. The New York Times carried a full-page report, headlined 'Distrust
Reopens the Door for Polio in India', by Amy Waldman, on January 19, 2003.
The report begins with the tear-jerking tale of Uzma, a four-year-old child
whose parents didn't vaccinate her and who "came down with a fever. Then
the paralysis, polio's calling card, set in".
Waldman writes, "Mrs Jahan had heard
the story circulating through her Muslim neighbourhood that the polio vaccine
would make her child sterile. She believed it. So even though her daughter,
Uzma, still needed two doses of the vaccine, Mrs Jahan would not take her
to the immunisation booth. When the vaccinators came to her house, she demurred."
Waldman then adds a twist, no doubt prompted by what she heard from the Muslims
she spoke to, to her story: "That has been especially true among Muslims,
not least because most Government health workers are Hindu... Naseem Ahmad,
vice-chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh, said the
divide between Muslims and Hindus widened when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party rose to power in the State five years ago." So, the parents
who believe the drivel put out by the mullahs, the mullahs who concoct brazen
lies, and the cunningly silent Muslim intelligentsia aren't to blame for the
plight of hundreds of Quranas and Uzmas. The fault lies with Hindu health
workers and the BJP.
But if that's the case, how do we explain
the fact that polio is rampant in Muslim-majority Nigeria (it topped the list
in 2006, reporting 1,090 new cases) where there are no Hindu health workers
and there is no BJP? On January 4, 2004, the Baltimore Sun carried an article
by John Murphy, saying the Muslims of northern Nigeria suspect that the polio
vaccine being offered them gratis is in fact "contaminated with an anti-fertility
agent that would sterilise their children or perhaps infect them with the
AIDS virus, all part of an American plot". They "chased, threatened
and assaulted vaccinators". Aha! If it's not Hindus and the BJP, it is
the Americans. Why blame the mullahs for Qurana's death?
