Aruna Shanbaug: Made To Live At All Costs

Can you be alive yet not be living? Aruna Shanbaug can’t say because she is dead. She couldn’t say when she was alive either.  

For 42 long years unnatural causes forced life on her. That’s what her medical history says. She is dead today owing to natural causes. That’s what her death certificate will now say.

And we all played God to give her life she couldn’t lead for over four decades for a crime she did not commit but suffered.

The facts of the case are well known. In November, 1973, Aruna a junior nurse at Mumbai’s KEM Hospital, was forcibly sodomised by a ward boy who first choked her with a dog chain to subdue her.

The choking cut off oxygen supply to her brain. Her brain stem was injured and so was her cervical cord. She developed blindness as well.

But the police registered a case only of robbery and attempted murder.  Why? The doctors at the hospital perhaps thought public knowledge of sodomy would stigmatise her life and did not disclose it to anyone. They played God.

The rapist was caught but tried only for assault and robbery. No policeman, no lawyer, no one thought it fit to check the case facts a second time. That fellow was out of jail after seven years in jail and we don’t know how many more Aruna’s were left in his wake. Neither the police, nor the courts, nor the hospital,have any photographic evidence of the rapist!

Aruna was better off dead than survive a vegetable. But she couldn’t even know that. She was kept in the hospital. The nurses cared for her. They were happy they were caring for her. They fought against the Bombay Municipal Corporation which was thinking of getting Aruna to vacate her hospital bed. They wanted her to live at all costs. They would care for her at all costs. Whether it mattered to her or not, whether she liked it or not, whether she had a say in it or not. They played God.

The days passed, turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months and months into years and years into decades. Her fellow nurses aged, neared retirement, or even retired, had children and grand children of their own. They continued to take care of Aruna. Her features became older, the skin rougher, the hair grey. She attained the age of retirement, but she didn’t know it. She turned 60 two years later, but she didn’t know it. In fact, she never knew how she lived all these 42 years.

And yet we wouldn’t relent.

Journalist Pinki Virani wanted euthanasia for Aruna. India has no euthanasia law. The Supreme Court took up the case. It ruled in favour of passive euthanasia. But with a rider. It is not applicable in Aruna’s case. Why?

This is what the 2011 judgment says: “From the above examination by the team of doctors, it cannot be said that Aruna Shanbaug is dead. Whatever the condition of her cortex, her brain stem is certainly alive. She does not need a heart--lung machine. She breathes on her own without the help of a respirator. She digests food, and her body performs other involuntary function without any help. From the CD (which we had screened in the courtroom on 2.3.2011 in the presence of counsels and others) it appears that she can certainly not be called dead. She was making some sounds, blinking, eating food put in her mouth, and even licking with her tongue morsels on her mouth.”

The court hardly saw any possibility of remission but the question was “whether her life support system (which is done by feeding her) should be withdrawn, and at whose instance?” Such a decision is taken by the immediate family or close relatives or in the absence of any of them – as in Aruna’s case – “a person or a body of persons acting as a next friend”.

The court went on to state that “it is the KEM hospital staff, who have been amazingly caring for her day and night for so many long years, who really are her next friends, and not Ms. Pinky
Virani who has only visited her on few occasions and written a book on her”.

And so, came the order: “Hence it is for the KEM hospital staff to take that decision. The KEM hospital staff have clearly expressed their wish that Aruna Shanbaug should be allowed to live.”

Finally everything boiled down to who was her friend -- the nurses who wanted her to live or Virani who wanted her to die.

The critical, larger, unemotional, pragmatic, path-breaking, scientific, fundamental, constitutional question of whether Aruna’s case on the basis of medical assessment and prognosis of her condition merited passive euthanasia was decided on the basis of who could legally decide her fate and who had already decided that her life had to be prolonged. Who played God?

Post-Script:

Today, Pragna Pai, former Dean of KEM Hospital was asked why they were against passive euthanasia for Aruna. She said: “Our belief system doesn't allow us to play God and decide death and birth. It was that reason. Personally I felt she needed routine comfort. The nurses felt they could take care. She was after all an ex colleague. And since her family abandoned her it was even a reason to take care of her.”  In any case, they did not have her consent for euthanasia, she added.