Stifling The Truth

The government and media’s cover-up after the Gorakhpur tragedy

- Manoj Singh

At around 4 pm on 10 August, hours before the oxygen supply at a hospital affiliated to Gorakhpur’s Baba Raghav Das Medical College ran out, I received a WhatsApp message. The message showed a photo of a letter, written by the operators of the hospital’s oxygen-supply plant, warning the authorities that the supply was running dangerously low. “If oxygen is not arranged immediately,” the operators wrote, “it would threaten the lives of the patients admitted in all the wards.” After verifying this information with a couple of sources at the hospital, I published this story on the local-news website I run, Gorakhpur Newsline, at around 5 pm. The letter had also reached some print publications, but by the time the report appeared in newspapers the next day, 23 children and 8 adults had lost their lives.

The incident drew wide attention from both local and national media. However, within a few days of the tragedy, the coverage had lost its bearings. The details—what had caused the event and who was responsible for it—were obscured by many media outlets, perhaps deliberately. Since I have been reporting on the incident, I have talked to dozens of people associated with it and accessed several documents related to it. The information I have gathered can help construct a detailed chronology of what preceded the tragedy. This account makes it clear that the deaths happened because of negligence at several levels, including those of the hospital authorities, government officials and politicians. It also proves that not only have sections of the media helped the government in shielding those responsible, they have even aided it in making a scapegoat of a man who, in all likelihood, was innocent.