OF HUMAN BONDAGE

38 years on, KEM refuses to give up on Aruna

As soon as the morning staff assumed duty at the busy KEM hospital, they cut a cake and sang ‘Happy Birthday’. KEM hospital’s former staff nurse Aruna Shanbaug had turned 64. When she was made to taste a bit of cream from her birthday cake, her pursed lips broke out into a faint hint of smile. A huge colourful greeting card was later brought to Shanbaug’s bedside, on which there were scribbled good wishes.


Aruna is paralysed. She’s been this way ever since she was raped.

Thirty-eight years ago, Shanbaug who was then working as a staff nurse in the hospital, was brutally assaulted on the neck with a dog chain by a ward boy over a scuffle that had ensued between them the previous day. The entire night after the assault occurred she lay bleeding in the basement of the old hospital building. She had suffered a grievous brain injury.

Birthdays are meant to end on a happy note. Sadly enough, Shanbaug’s birthdays have always been clouded with controversy and heated debate.

Even as social activist Pinki Virani has been fervently arguing for getting Aruna Shanbaug passively euthanized, staff nurses at KEM hospital get agitated at any mention of ‘mercy-killing’ in Aruna Shanbaug’s case. International norms allow passive euthanasia where treatment and feed required for supporting the life of a patient who may be terminally ill is withheld. This would eventually lead to death of the patient. Last year in March, the Supreme Court of India passed this law detailing very minutely the conditions under which this may be carried out.

Though Shanbaug suffers from a condition that has debilitated her for life, the nurses say she is not ‘terminally ill’.

Contrary to popular opinion, Shanbaug even if bed ridden is not in a vegetative state.

“When spoken to, her attention moves towards the speaker. She reacts to old Lata Mangeshkar songs that we play near her bed on the tape recorder. It is inhumane to end some one’s life like that under the pretext of mercy killing,” said KEM hospital’s matron Swati Bhide.

Nurses further point out that in a PIL filed by Virani a few years ago, the Supreme court had rejected her appeal to be declared as Shanbaug’s ‘next best friend.’ Virani is still pressing for the KEM hospital staff to ‘change their mind’ by filing a mercy killing plea for Shanbaug in the Bombay High Court.

The KEM hospital staff, however, is dead against such a step. “The SC has reaffirmed the nurses stand that it is they who are shanbaug’s next best friends from the legal viewpoint, not Virani.

“Aruna is fed every four hours through a naso gastric tube. She is not suffering from any disease. She has not even developed a single bedsore since all these years. How can we let one of us die like this?” questions a staff nurse at KEM hospital.

The nurses however do not take