Baba Ramdev, the brain behind the Patanjali brand, has courted another round of controversy with his diatribe against allopathy and its practitioners. In a recent video, he described himself as a ‘divine doctor’, a doctor without a formal degree. Notwithstanding the irony of the moment, its trademark crassness, and by now the too obvious design aimed at brand-building, the questions that Ramdev raised merit engagement.
Allopathy and its epistemology of medicine and healthcare rode on the chariot of modernity, with its totalising and universalising streaks. The phenomenal journey of modern medicine and science and their expansion coincided with and brought in their wake the shrinking significance of indigenous healthcare and systems of wellbeing and their contextual and ontological roots. Only a feeble mind will seek to question and undermine the transformations brought in by allopathic medicine and the enormous role it has played in adding to the quality of healthcare through its advances. But that is not the point. The larger concerns associated with the “practice” of this system point to a parallel narrative of its hijacking by mercantile interests. It is the story of its gradual disconnect from and inaccessibility to the teeming millions of the poor and the dis-privileged. This is where Ramdev entered the scene to tap on this resource of smouldering discontent to embellish his own brand with massive grassroots support. In doing so, Ramdev picked up concerns and questions cleverly. He may not be the right person and he may be crass, but his questions resonated with the masses.
Theoretically, all medical systems have and follow their own protocols. However, allopathy has been procedurally rather opaque and impersonal from its genesis. Its language and codes of communication have always had a ring of detachment and distance from the people. Modern medicine largely works on the ‘formal trust’ component that is conveyed to the people via the system’s overwhelming network of agencies depicting its indispensability and singular significance. On the contrary, with an Ayurveda practitioner or vaid, the associated ‘lay trust’ has been rooted in the community’s experiential history, both immediate and distant. It had an inherent aura of familiarity and personalised touch to it.
In the duel between the ‘formal’ and the ‘reflexive’ in the domain of knowledge production, the practitioners of allopathy displayed enormous arrogance, looking down upon all other existing systems as inferior, infantile and unscientific. It is this attitude that hurriedly designates a benevolent Ayurveda practitioner in a remote village, for instance, as a “quack”, “spurious” and “fake”, with total disregard for his contribution in maintaining and preserving an age-old ecosystem of healthcare and in being perhaps the only glimmer of hope for the people around him in moments of crisis when all else looked beyond reach.
The story has a further twist. There is a deadly combination of this arrogance of the formal with the consistent apathy of the institutional, given the colossal neglect of the health sector for decades. A cursory look at just one statistic – the number of doctors per thousand population in India compared to the global benchmark – is enough to expose the background of the duel between Ramdev and the Indian Medical Association. Health and education have received, especially in the rural areas, mere lip service throughout. As privatisation picked up in the 1990s, the healthcare sector too, like the education sector, fell prey to the avaricious business model of infrastructure augmentation and growth. The rural, already on the margins, got further marginalised. Medicine and doctors became hostage to corporates. Horrific stories of networks of doctors and medicine manufacturers collaborating to fleece people in distress, pushing people to swanky so-called hospitals and nursing homes that mushroomed in the smaller towns, got amplified during the pandemic. This illegitimate nexus and its greedy ways have always been in the realm of public knowledge, but no one had cared.
Ramdev’s empire emerged in this background, built on the insecurity and helplessness of the masses, long left to fend for themselves. Yoga predates Ramdev by thousands of years, but Ramdev inaugurated yoga to the household, and he did so on fertile ground, left behind by the State as it gradually withdrew from its welfare commitments. Between a distant, impersonalised AIIMS in a metropolis and a Patanjali product at a nearby grocery shop, with pompous, unverified claims of being capable of the same effect as the former, the choice was never difficult for the ordinary masses. The ever-present fatalistic streak combined surreptitiously with the dictates of deficits and became Ramdev’s marketing agent as his Patanjali juggernaut throughout the length and breadth of the country.
Sadly, the formal world of the knowledgeable community inexplicably shows scant proclivity to learning from others, even the ordinary. They talk amongst themselves, insulate themselves from questions and criticism, or get agitated when provoked. None of it has helped. Can this pandemic be the moment when they depart from this course with a journey undertaken by the doctors of AIIMS to Varanasi’s ghats to engage with the Ayurveda practitioners of the city, once known for its eminent vaids but who have since been progressively ignored and pushed to the margins along with their tradition? That would be the real response to Ramdev, rather than the agitated and angry rebuttal of the IMA officials, which appeared to the masses as elitist, arrogant and a case of them shouting down from their high pedestal. If the idea is to rescue people from the miasma of ignorance, medical illiteracy and to protect people from the deadly claws of unscrupulous elements, the practitioners of modern medicine will have to introspect and be ready to recognise and respect other systems of health and cure. More importantly, they will have to distance themselves from mammon and come closer to the masses.
As the philosopher of the sociology of knowledge Karl Mannheim would have cautioned, thinking that one’s own perspective is the absolute truth is unscientific and offers no path forward. Knowledge systems are co-travellers and should exhibit camaraderie rather than conflict and hierarchical attitudes toward each other. When the originals engage with each other and have a dialogue, the photocopy shops will automatically shut down. The answer to Ramdev is as simple as that.
(The writer is a Chandigarh-based Sociologist and commentator)