As the Indian Medical Association demands action from health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan against yoga guru Ramdev for making “vitriolic accusation” on modern medicine, doctors at the Siliguri branch of the IMA have said that the central government must immediately book Baba Ramdev under the Epidemic Diseases Act for spreading misleading and irresponsible information in Covid-19 times.

“The entire medical fraternity is giving life to and saving fellow citizens from this dreadful virus. The government must immediately take action against Ramdev for leveling such allegations,” senior Physician in Siliguri and a member of the IMA, Dr PD Bhutia, said. In a video clip that has been circulating on social media, Baba Ramdev has claimed that lakhs of Covid patients have died due to allopathic medicines than shortage of oxygen.

According to him, all the modern medicines that doctors have been administering on Covid patients have failed. “Allopathy ek aisi stupid and diwaliya science hai,” Ramdev says in the video.

According to the Vice-President of the IMA, Sushrutanagar Branch (Siliguri), Dr Kalyan Khan, people, including Baba Ramdev, should stay away from such statements that are meant to gain “futile popularity” and “weaken the fight of the medical community against Covid-19, and, in turn, weaken Mother India.”

“People like Ramdev and people who support him are weakening the country’s fight against Covid-19…We should stay away from such things beyond science, and in the future, stay with modern medicine in our fight against the pandemic,” he said. In a statement, the IMA has said that India has been facing an unprecedented health care crisis due to the SARS-COV-2 Pandemic and that the modern medical fraternity, along with the Government of India, is striving hard to save millions of lives from the death tentacles of the virus.

“In this incessant battle more than 1200 modern medicine allopathic doctors have sacrificed their life by facing the corona bullet in the chest as they are in the front line of the war…In this warlike setting, it has become a passion for people with malicious opportunistic attitude to hit from the back, the medical warriors with their selfish malevolent to boost up their unscrupulous, unprincipled, deceitful, and unpatriotic business fortunes. They pretend to throw mud on Modern Allopathic Medicine, but time and again benefitted through back door in Modern medicine hospitals when they get the disease,” the statement said.

“Taking people for ransom, selling them weird ideology, and winning business by defaming scientific medicine are unpardonable offenses. Such untutored and unlearned statements are a threat to the literate society of the country as well as to the poor people falling prey to him,” it hit back.

According to doctors, it is a wellknown fact Baba Ramdev and his associate Balkrishna have been taking modern medical allopathy treatment as and when they fall ill, but that they are now making false and baseless accusations to mislead the public and to sell their “illegal and unapproved drugs.”

The IMA has sought Suo moto action against the yoga guru and said that it we will be “forced to resort to democratic means of struggle to propagate the truth to the common man and knock the doors of the judiciary to get due justice.”

The Indian Medical Association (Dwarka) has issued a legal notice to Baba Ramdev for “having used highly derogatory and insinuating remarks against the whole community of practicing doctors of modern medical science and the trusted stream of practice of treatment through modern medical science…”

It has demanded that the yog guru withdraw his statements and tender an “unconditional public apology for having tarnished the image of the whole doctors’ community of modern medical science…” or face prosecution. It has also demanded that the apology be published in all reputed print and electronic media “in order to salvage the lost reputation of modern medical science and its practitioners.”