Thanks to Ronan Kelly for sending the link to this Huffington Post report: My Daughter Was Not A Number, Cries A Father Of The Forgotten Gorakhpur Tragedy. Excerpt:
GORAKHPUR, Uttar Pradesh — Rihana Khatoon turned to her husband and said she loved the name Jasmine for their daughter. Mohammad Zahid preferred Khushi, the name he gave her when she was born.
"He's just being stubborn," his wife said, "I thought Jasmine would be a lovely name for school."
"I'm not being stubborn," Mohammad replied. "Khushi is the name that describes her best. It means joy."
In the few minutes they had bickered on a warm and humid morning last week, the young couple spoke of their five-year-old daughter as if she were still alive. But it wasn't long before their eyes were heavy once again with the horror and grief they have carried since losing her on 11 August.
It was the second day of the oxygen crisis that had erupted at the Baba Raghav Das Medical College in Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh.
There are two images stuck in Rihana's head from that day. The first is of her husband using an Ambu bag to manually pump oxygen into their daughter's lungs.
The second is of the unused diapers she had left on the hospital bed.
Staring at the floor, she said, "When I asked a nurse to change her diaper, she said, 'What's the point? Your daughter is going to die anyway.' I told her, 'Please don't say that.' My daughter died soaked in her own urine."
As her voice trailed off, Mohammad waited a few minutes before saying, "I expect her to come around the corner, look into my pocket and say, 'Papa, where is my Five Star chocolate.' I always had one for her. She was my doll. When I went to work, she would wave at me until I turned the corner."
The government hospital in Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's constituency allegedly ran out of liquid oxygen on 10 and 11 August because hospital officials had delayed paying the supplier dues amounting to ₹70 lakh for over five months. At least 30 children died in 48 hours.
Devastated parents narrated how they were given Ambu bags to manually pump oxygen into their ailing children for several hours. But even before any manner of investigation was under way, the CM had ruled out lack of oxygen as a possible cause of death in any single case, sealing the chances of an impartial future probe, at least by a state agency.
Mohammad and Rihana were told that their daughter had encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain caused by several viruses, bacteria and parasites, which is a deadly killer in the marginalised communities of eastern UP. But they believe that it was the oxygen shortage that killed her.
The first response of the state government was to cite death toll numbers from the previous years to prove that 30 deaths at the medical college were hardly unusual. While Health Minister Siddharth Nath Singh said it was normal for August to see a high number of fatalities in the encephalitis-prone region, Adityanath had blamed the deaths on the lack of cleanliness.
The insensitivity cuts deep.
"My daughter was not a number. If all they have to say is that it is normal for children to die in August, then what chance do the children of the poor have?" asked Mohammad. "Would they have dared say such a thing if the child of a minister or rich man had died? Would they want to hear something like that if it was their own children?"
