DATELINE: Studying Medicine Needs Minds, Not Agendas

A nation that divides its healers today will have no one left to heal its wounds tomorrow.

Peerzada Masarat Shah

In an age when artificial intelligence is diagnosing cancers earlier than any human eye, when gene-editing is curing children born with “incurable” diseases, and when robotic hands are sewing arteries thinner than thread, India is busy counting religions in its medical classrooms.

That is not hyperbole. It is the grim reality of the ongoing row at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, where seats meant for the brightest minds—earned through the brutal crucible of NEET—are being reframed as trophies in a communal numbers game.

As someone rightly said on X:
“NEET rank 1 to 10,000 used to mean ‘doctor’. Now it apparently means ‘wrong religion’ in some vice-chancellor’s ledger.”

Another voice put it even more starkly:
“We are turning medical colleges into caste and community counting houses while the rest of the world turns them into CRISPR labs.”

These are not random social-media rants; they are the anguished cries of a generation that studied 18 hours a day only to be told their biggest disqualification is the faith they were born into.

Remember what medicine actually demands. It demands the boy in a Rajasthan village who taught himself biochemistry from YouTube at 2G speed. It demands the girl in a one-room tenement in Kolkata who solved 300 physics problems a day under a flickering bulb. These are the minds that gave us:

• Dr Devi Shetty, son of a schoolteacher, who made heart surgery affordable for the masses.
• Dr Soumya Swaminathan, daughter of an agricultural scientist, who led the world’s fight against tuberculosis and later became WHO’s Chief Scientist.
• Dr Gagandeep Kang, the first Indian woman to be elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 360 years, who developed India’s own rotavirus vaccine and saved countless infant lives.

None of them got there because a reservation formula ticked their community box. They got there because they outworked, out-thought, and out-dreamed everyone else.

Yet today we are willing to gamble that excellence because a few politicians want louder applause at the next rally.

As a former AIIMS student wrote this week:
“I lost my father to cancer because no doctor reached our village in time. Now we are ensuring the next doctor who could have reached there loses his seat because his surname is wrong. Congratulations, we just killed hope twice.”

Medicine cannot be run on slogans. A surgeon’s hand does not steady because of his caste certificate; it steadies after ten thousand practice stitches. A researcher does not discover a new drug because his community is 11.7 % of the population; she discovers it after ten thousand failed experiments at 3 a.m.

When we inject communal arithmetic into medical admissions, we are not correcting historical injustice—we are creating fresh, lethal injustice. We are telling the child who scored 685/720 in NEET that 650/720 is “good enough” if it comes with the right religion or caste. That is not social justice. That is sanctioned mediocrity.

And mediocrity in medicine is measured in body bags.

The world is not waiting. Singapore is building Asia’s largest biomedical research hub. Saudi Arabia is poaching our best talent with salaries we cannot match. Even Rwanda has better neonatal mortality outcomes than several Indian states.

We can either compete with science, or continue competing with spreadsheets of surnames.

As a young doctor tweeted yesterday:
“Give me a scalpel, not a sermon. My patient doesn’t care about my caste—he cares whether I can stop his bleeding.”

Let that be our guiding line.

Let us choose laboratories over loudspeakers.
Let us choose stethoscopes over score-settling.
Let us choose the future over the feud.

Because a nation that divides its healers today will have no one left to heal its wounds tomorrow.

Let us choose minds.
Let us choose medicine.
Let us choose life.
(STRAIGHT TALK COMMUNICATIONS EXCLUSIVE)