Peerzada Masarat Shah
July 1 is observed across India as National Doctors’ Day, marking the birth and death anniversary of Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy. Roy was a physician, a freedom fighter, and the architect of the Indian Medical Association and the Medical Council of India. He believed medicine was a form of service, not a business. In Jammu and Kashmir, this day carries particular weight. For three decades, doctors in the Valley and in Jammu did not just treat illness. They held the region’s social fabric together while militancy, propaganda and cross-border proxy war tried to pull it apart.
Doctors worked through curfews, stone-pelting and direct threats. Government hospitals such as SMHS in Srinagar, and district hospitals in Anantnag, Baramulla, Ganderbal and Kupwara, stayed open through years of unrest. Doctors there treated everyone who came through the door: civilians hurt in crossfire, security personnel wounded on duty, and young men injured after taking up arms. Treating any one group risked accusations of bias, from militants or from the state. Most doctors did the work anyway.
Dr Jagmeet Kour Bali, who has served in Baramulla through the most difficult years of militancy in north Kashmir, is one example. The Indian Army’s 19 Infantry Division recently honoured her with the Shaan-e-Varmul award, in recognition of medical work carried out in conditions few would choose to serve in.
Some doctors paid with their lives. In October 2024, militants attacked construction workers at Gagangeer in Ganderbal district. A doctor from Budgam, serving in the area, was among those killed. This was not an isolated case. Through the 1990s and 2010s, doctors who treated security forces, or who refused to observe separatist-called strikes, faced threats, intimidation and in some cases were killed or targeted for abduction. Most stayed at their posts. Hospitals ran on generators when the power failed. Operations continued through curfew. That doctors kept working, even under threat, was itself a form of resistance.
Militant groups backed from across the border, along with their local sympathizers, pushed a narrative that treated every Indian institution as an occupying force. Calls for strikes and shutdowns, framed as protest against the state, ended up denying ordinary people access to dialysis, chemotherapy and emergency care. Hospitals came under pressure to join these strikes, and doctors who refused were branded informers. What this campaign produced was not the freedom it promised, but a generation that lost years of schooling, a rise in drug addiction, and families left without their dead.
Since the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019, and the sustained pressure on terror networks that followed, conditions have changed. Stone-pelting has declined and tourism has picked up. Doctors now have more room to build health systems rather than simply keep them from collapsing. The scars of the earlier decades remain, but so does the record: doctors in Jammu and Kashmir refused to let violence dictate who they would treat, and in doing so helped preserve something larger than any one hospital.
That legacy is now under a different kind of pressure, this time from within the profession. Commercialisation has crept into private healthcare in Srinagar, Jammu and smaller towns. Some private clinics and nursing homes run on a model built around unnecessary tests, avoidable procedures and inflated bills. Referral commissions and revenue targets have displaced the older idea of medicine as service. Patients in places like Anantnag or Kupwara are often left with an unfair choice: long waits at overstretched government hospitals, or private care that drains their savings without always improving outcomes.
This has costs beyond the individual patient. When healthcare turns into a marketplace, trust in it breaks down. That same breakdown has, in some cases, fed anger and even violence against doctors when bills go unpaid or treatment fails to help. A profession once held in high regard now sometimes draws suspicion instead. Given how much Jammu and Kashmir’s public health system still needs to recover from decades of conflict and underinvestment, this shift toward private-sector excess does real damage. It pulls trained doctors away from government service and creates a system where the quality of care depends on the ability to pay.
The way back is not complicated, even if it is hard work. Government hospitals need better equipment, faster recruitment and real incentives for doctors willing to serve in remote and border areas. Private hospitals need firmer regulation: limits on margins for essential procedures, a ban on referral commissions, transparent billing and a working system for patient grievances. Medical colleges and professional bodies need to put ethics back at the centre of training, ahead of revenue targets.
On this Doctors’ Day, the doctors of Jammu and Kashmir who worked through the worst years of conflict deserve recognition, not as a formality but as a record of what the profession is meant to be. They treated the wounded regardless of who fired the shot. They delivered children and sat with the dying, and refused to let political division decide who received care. The peace now returning to the Valley is, in part, their doing.
The rest of the profession would do well to take the same lesson forward: medicine practised as service, not as a marketplace, is what earned that trust in the first place. It is also what will be needed to rebuild a health system still recovering from years of conflict.
