A few years ago, I landed in London’s West Middlesex hospital with a broken arm, the result of a freak accident. An Egyptian surgeon fixed my arm, but did so under the supervision of Dr Nathan, a Tamil. Dr Ramgopal, an Andhra doctor headed the hospital ward and the doctor who did the follow-up was Dr Hilal Fareed from Aligarh. The only Englishmen I saw around were my fellow patients.

Welcome to Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), which is as multiracial and multiethnic as Britain itself. And just as the colour of Britain’s multiracialism gets increasingly brown, so does that of the NHS—approximately 30,000 of the 80,000 NHS doctors are of Indian origin.
For the last 50 years, Indian doctors have made the NHS what it is today—an exemplary healthcare system unlike any in the world. So nothing can be more ironic than the NHS getting mired in jehadi terrorism. And even more ironic is the association of two Indian doctors, Dr Mohamed Haneef and Dr Sabeel Ahmed, and Sabeel’s brother Kafeel Ahmed in alleged plots to bomb a London nightclub and the Glasgow airport.

As details of Sabeel and Kafeel’s alleged al-Qaeda links and their botched bombing campaign in London and Glasgow trickle out, the Indian medical community is in a state of ‘‘shock and disbelief’’, as Dr Ramesh Mehta, president of the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO), puts it. ‘‘We feel terrible and worried about a possible backlash.’’ Luckily, so far there have been none, he admits.
The BAPIO, says Dr Mehta, will support the sterner background checks on foreign doctors as proposed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who worked hard to rubbish racist allusions in the tabloid press. Others of his professional community are with Dr Mehta on the need for more stringent checks.
‘‘These events will result in closer scrutiny of doctors from the Asian subcontinent. But such a thing is necessary to avoid similar calamities in the future,’’ says Dr G. Raghuraman, organising secretary for the British Association of Indian Anaesthetists, Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham.
But even with the recent racist slurs, it is widely acknowledged that Indian doctors are intelligent, honest and hard-working. In some of London’s largest hospitals, the Indian presence is simply overwhelming. A look at the duty roster in the oncology department of the West Middlesex hospital I went to revealed a vast majority of Indian names.

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