On 20 September 2015, Hindustan Times published a news report titled, Lahore-Delhi bus delayed due to protest at Samalkha. According to the report, the Sada-e-Sarhad bus, which runs between Delhi and Lahore, had been delayed for around half an hour on 19 September due to a protest at Samalkha, near Panipat. The police, the story went on to say, “had to resort to a mild lathi charge to clear the highway.” The report noted that this protest had been prompted by the death of Dr Sunita Arora “under suspicious circumstances at her maternity home” following a raid that had been conducted at her clinic by a team of health officials on 18 September, the previous day. The story was a standard dispatch, and ordinarily, I would not have paid close attention to it. But I had not chanced upon this story; I had searched for it, because I had come to know about Sunita Arora’s death through her daughter, Ishita. Both Ishita and I had—at separate points of time—been a part of the Young India Fellowship, a post-graduate programme that I had undertaken two years ago.
A day before the Hindustan Times report was published, Ishita had put up a post on Facebook that alleged that the five government officials who conducted the raid had killed her mother. The contents of the note, as well as the nature of the tragedy, were both equally alarming.
On Sunday, 20 September, I went to visit Ishita and her family at their house. Samalkha, a nondescript town in Panipat, is known primarily for its manufacturing industries. As I made my way there, I could not help but notice the narrow lanes that made it nearly impossible for more than one car to traverse the street without causing a traffic jam. Nestled among several shops, the Aroras’ house is located on one such road, above “Sunita’s Maternity Centre.”
When I went in, the clinic was overflowing with people who had come there to pay their condolences. There were just as many people upstairs. The snatches of the conversations that I overheard were all centered on the events that had led to this untimely death. As is often the case in such situations, everyone seemed to have a firm opinion on how the Aroras should proceed. Their suggestions ranged from putting up the CCTV footage from the clinic on Facebook so that Sunita’s death could get “more attention,” to suggesting that Ishita and her brother, Ishan, conduct another rally. It was against the backdrop of this charged atmosphere that Ishita had written the Facebook post.
In fact, at 6 am that morning, Ishita and her family had also gone to meet Manohar Lal Khattar, the chief minister of Haryana, after they heard that he would be passing by Karnal. The chief minister had assured them that justice would take its due course.
On the night of 18 September, a team of five officials from the health department at Panipat had gone to Sunita Arora’s maternity centre to conduct a raid. The subsequent first investigation report (FIR) that was filed with reference to this case listed the officials as Dr Sudhir Batra, the deputy chief medical officer, Rajbir Nayab Tehsildar—presumably, the tehsildar or revenue officer of the area—“one unknown lady” and “two unknown person [sic]”. These officials, the deputy superintendent of police in Panipat, Gorakhpal Rana, later told me, were acting on a tip-off that an abortion was being conducted in the clinic. Rana said, “Someone from the team had been told that a lady from Samalkha had gone there [to the clinic] to get an abortion for Rs 8000. The middleman did not get his commission and so, he complained to the authorities.” I then asked him whether the lady he spoke of had been identified; Rana told me that the police was “looking for her.” When I attempted to find out which member of the team had received the tip-off and whether the officials had found any evidence of the alleged abortion during the raid, Rana was unable to give me a satisfactory response. Sunita Arora’s family has refuted the allegations made by the investigation team.
Enacted in 1994, the pre-conception and pre-natal diagnostic techniques (PCPNDT) act banned prenatal sex determination in India with the objective of stopping female foeticides and arresting the declining sex ratio in the country. According to the act, after receiving a complaint, an “appropriate authority”—who in Haryana is the chief medical officer—can authorise an investigation on a clinic by constituting an investigation committee. The general consensus amongst the doctors that I spoke to in Samalkha seemed to be that these investigations had increased in both frequency and volume since Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched his Beti Bachao-Beti Padhao campaign at Panipat in January this year. At the event, Modi had administered an oath to fight female foeticide, celebrate the birth of girls and to educate them.
Sabu George, a prominent activist who has been campaigning against sex selection (female foeticide) in India for several years now, told me over the phone that inspections, which are not supplemented by regular audits of the ultrasound clinics in a community, tend to be ineffective. In the absence of comprehensive audits, he explained, it becomes difficult to protect honest doctors or abortion rights. George’s view does not seem to be isolated. In 2010, a study by the Public Health Foundation of India noted that, “many investigation officers [in Delhi] are not aware of legal requirements of investigation reports to be prepared while conducting inspections or raids at clinics.”
Sunita’s clinic has five closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras that are positioned in various rooms of the maternity center. These cameras had also recorded the events of the night on which Sunita passed away. The footage showed the health officials walking into the building at around 8.40pm while Sunita was in her office. The officials proceeded towards the back of the clinic—the only area of the maternity centre that does not have a camera. Sunita, who could be seen sitting at her desk through the CCTV camera in her room, saw the officials as they passed, and got up to join them. Their interaction seems to have continued for close to ten minutes, after which Sunita and one of the men conducting the raid—later identified for me by Sunita’s husband, Ved Parkash, as Batra—came back to her office. Both Sunita and Batra spent a few minutes talking and checking their phones, after which Batra took a phone call. She and Batra were the only ones in the room, and even as Sunita sat at her desk with her mobile phone in her hand, she kept touching her head repeatedly. Shortly after, Sunita slumped into her seat.
In the video, Batra, who had been sitting opposite Sunita on a patient’s bed, seemed not to notice her collapse and was instead attending to or making a phone call. When he did realise that she had lost consciousness, he showed no visible signs of attempting to find out what had suddenly happened to her, or to call for help from the others who had accompanied him on the raid. Instead, he got up and sauntered out of the room. A few seconds later, Sunita’s attendants rushed in. Batra continued to walk out of the clinic. Throughout these few minutes, he did not get off his phone.
Meanwhile, the footage showed the other members of the team scattered around various parts of the clinic. By this time, Ved Parkash—who told me that his wife had called him when the officials had turned up at the center—had reached the clinic. On seeing his wife’s condition, he rushed to her chair and tried to revive her by talking to her and shaking her. Although the video feed did not have any sound, his agitation was palpable. He was shouting at Batra, who had now returned with some of his colleagues, gesticulating at him and running in and out of Sunita’s office, presumably in order to get help. Recounting the events of that day, Ved Parkash told me, “I remember being shocked at how they had left my wife. All these people were doctors, how could they not attend to her and leave her like that?” He continued, “Kaisi raid hai yeh, jis mein log mar jaate hai?” —What kind of raid is this, in which people die?
In the chaos that ensued, the other members of the investigation team probably realised that matters had gone awry. Some had now collected at the front door of Sunita's office. After three of the health officials shifted Sunita to the floor, the sole female doctor from the investigation team made some attempts to check her pulse. While she tried to revive Sunita, Batra too checked her pulse. However, as a crowd began gathering at the office both the doctors left with the tehsildar. The female doctor’s exit wasn’t easy. She tried to navigate her way from the back of the room, only to find that the table, which had been pushed to make space for Sunita, was blocking the path to the door. She then came to the front of the room, unsure of her route as Sunita’s body was placed such that it was on the way to the exit. She solved this dilemma by stepping over Sunita’s arm and walked out of the office to join the rest of her colleagues, all of whom seemed to be walking away from the front door to their car.
During this time, Ved Parkash had called a nearby practitioner, Dr Garg. At around 8.55 pm, Garg reached the clinic along with an attendant. When I spoke to him over the phone on 21 September, Garg said, “When I got to the clinic, the patient’s [Sunita] eyes were bulging. It was clear that she had passed away.” At 9 pm, Garg declared Sunita dead. As this prognosis unfolded on video, I could see Ved Parkash frantically run towards the front door, perhaps to look for the investigation team. Visibly distraught, he appeared to be looking for someone and screaming, but to no avail. The team had already left in their car, and as a neighbour told me later, had narrowly avoided hitting the vehicles parked on the side of the road in their hurried getaway.
According to deputy superintendent Rana, the doctors who conducted the preliminary post mortem said that the cause of Sunita’s death was brain hemorrhage—a type of stroke caused by the bursting of an artery in the brain, resulting in localised bleeding in the surrounding tissues. While the most common reason for a hemorrhage is an injury to the head, it may also be triggered by high blood pressure or an aneurysm. The preliminary post mortem report states that no signs of physical injury were detected on Sunita’s body.
On 19 September, an FIR was filed against Batra, Rajbir “Nayab Tehsildar,” “one unknown lady” and “two unknown person [sic]” under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code for murder. I asked Rana if the identity of the remaining people in the team that conducted the raid had been ascertained, but all he told me was that the investigation was underway and that the police had obtained the CCTV footage from the Aroras the previous evening. When I last spoke to him yesterday, Rana added that the members of the investigation team had been contacted and would be coming to the police station in Panipat on 24 September. Rana also said that a first investigation report had been filed against Ishita, Ishan and 90 other people for “road-jamming” during their protest on 19 September. On Tuesday evening, I called Batra to get his response on the allegation. As soon as I mentioned that I was calling regarding the Sunita Arora case, he cut the call. He did not answer any subsequent calls.
A day before I was able to contact Batra, in an attempt to reach him, I had called Dr lnderjit Dhankhar, the chief medical officer for Panipat, whose number is listed on the Haryana health department’s website. When I told Dhankar about why I was looking to get in touch with Batra, he immediately dissuaded me from doing so and said, “He [Batra] would not pick up any calls right now.” Dhankhar went on to advise me to do my research “properly,” and asked me if I had seen a woman in a “red salwar” at the clinic who, according to him, was waiting for an abortion. Taken aback by the specific nature of his question, I told him that I had seen the footage from a little before the raid had begun but had not noticed any such woman. When he continued to insist that I was wrong, I asked him who the source of this information was and why he was so sure of it being true. “I can’t answer all your questions,” Dhankhar said, and cut the call.
Days after I first saw the footage from that night, the image that continues to haunt me is that of a doctor who sat opposite his colleague and watched her suffer through an attack that led to her death. The oft-recalled trope of the Hippocratic oath and a doctor’s duty is perhaps as old as the profession itself, but it bears repeating now. The Indian medical association’s website contains the text to a more “modern oath” that every doctor is required to take at the time of his or her registration. It states that, every doctor shall “maintain the utmost respect for human life from the time of conception,” and that no doctor shall “permit considerations of religion, nationality, race, party politics or social standing to intervene between my duty and my patient.”
The cause for the raid and its credibility remain questionable, as of now there is no proof of the validity of the claims made by the health officials. Equally unclear are the contents of an interrogation that appear to have been harsh enough to lead to a hemorrhage. Indeed, there is little about this case that can be stated with certainty save for one fact: Sunita Arora’s fate was not sealed by the investigation on 18 September; it was determined by her peers who, for reasons known only to them, neglected to help her. Revisiting the events from that night, Ved Parkash said, “Yeh log Beti-Bachao, Beti-Bachao, bolte toh hain, lekin shayad bhool gaye ki meri wife bhi kisi ki beti hi thi"—They keep harping on about saving daughters, but perhaps they forgot that my wife too, was someone’s daughter.
Correction: An earlier version of this story did not note that Dr Inderjit Dhankhar is the chief medical officer of Panipat. The Caravan regrets the error.