India speaks endlessly of numbers. We are now the world's fourth-largest economy, soon to be the third, we are told with chest-thumping regularity. But numbers matter only when they touch human lives.

One number that should shame us into silence is this: India still does not have enough doctors. The World Health Organisation prescribes one doctor for every 1,000 people. India, at present, manages roughly one for every 830 (including AYUSH). On paper, that sounds respectable. On the ground, it is a catastrophe.

The government's plan is to increase the number of medical colleges from around 360 to about 600 by 2030. For a country of India's size and resources, this is not an impossible dream. It is eminently achievable. Yet structural distortions persist.

Doctors cluster in cities; rural India is left to quacks, pharmacists, and fate. One visit to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is enough to reveal the cruelty of this imbalance.

Thousands of patients from the hinterlands of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan descend on AIIMS every day. Without contacts or influence, they move from pillar to post, clutching files thicker than hope. Relatives sleep on pavements. The only dignity available often comes from volunteers who provide free food. Without them, the scene would be unbearable.

It is against this grim reality that one must view the astonishing shutdown of a newly opened medical college in Jammu and Kashmir—not because students failed exams or doctors went missing, but because the "wrong" kind of students were admitted.

The National Medical Commission, on January 6, revoked the recognition of Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Medical Institute (SMVDMI) in Reasi, Jammu. Of the first batch of 50 MBBS students admitted in November, 42 were Muslims, most from Kashmir, with seven Hindus and one Sikh. Admissions were conducted through NEET, the same centralised, religion-neutral examination followed across India, in which over two million students compete annually for about 1.2 lakh seats.

The protests began almost immediately. Local right-wing Hindu groups declared that Muslim students had "no business" studying in a college funded by offerings at the Mata Vaishno Devi shrine. Never mind that the shrine's expansion into a national religious destination was enabled by massive public investment in roads, railways and security. Never mind that public money does not acquire a religious colour merely because it passes through a temple trust.

Legislators joined the agitation. Petitions were submitted. Demands escalated—from scrapping admissions to shutting down the college itself. And then, as if on cue, the regulator discovered "deficiencies": faculty shortages, inadequate bed occupancy, low patient flow, library gaps, substandard operating theatres. The next day, the permission letter was withdrawn. The college was effectively closed.

The justification was as convincing as the old fable of the lion accusing the lamb of muddying the stream. A lion drinking upstream accuses a lamb downstream of polluting the water. When logic fails, the lion invents new charges—insults from the past, imagined crimes—until reason collapses under power. The verdict is pre-decided; the excuse is merely procedural.

Logic dictates that infrastructure does not deteriorate within weeks of classes beginning. If anything, it improves. Admissions to medical colleges follow a transparent system: students rank preferences; algorithms allot seats. Blaming students for outcomes produced by a national process is both absurd and cruel. Yet no television debates erupted. No editorial thunder followed. Those who demanded closure were treated as heroes, not vandals of young lives.

The BJP insists it never said Muslims were unwelcome—only that Hindu "sentiments" attached to the shrine should be respected. This argument is not just ridiculous; it is blasphemous. Who authorised any political party to speak for Mata Vaishno Devi? The goddess does not ask for identity cards. When I visited the shrine, I felt no sense of exclusion. Many elderly Hindu pilgrims reach the shrine only because Muslim pony handlers patiently assist them up the treacherous climb.

It is worth recalling another forgotten truth from Kashmir's tragic history. A Kashmiri Muslim pony handler was killed along with Hindu tourists in a brutal militant attack, triggering Operation Sindoor. Terror made no religious distinctions. Blood flowed without asking names. Yet in peacetime, bigotry selectively rewrites memory, turning neighbours into intruders.

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah did what the regulator refused to do—protect students. He announced that all 50 would be accommodated in other medical colleges through supernumerary seats. "These children cleared NEET," he said. "Ruining their future cannot be a cause for celebration." His anguish was genuine. But the damage—to trust, to institutional credibility, to India's secular promise—was already done.

Some have suggested the college be permanently closed and repurposed for Ayurveda or Vedic education—subjects in which Muslims supposedly would not apply. This is not policy; it is segregation by stealth. Remember: there are over 360 medical colleges in India where an overwhelming majority of students are Hindu. No one has ever seen that as a problem. Only in Jammu was diversity treated as a threat.

The Prime Minister, who proudly addressed a function at a BAPS temple in Dubai—celebrating Hindu spirituality on foreign soil—found nothing amiss in the protests at home. There was no appeal for calm, no reminder of constitutional values, no defence of merit-based admissions.

It is ironic that a Prime Minister who speaks eloquently about India's civilisational inclusiveness abroad remains silent when that very idea is assaulted at home. If religious harmony is a source of pride in Dubai, it should not become expendable in Jammu. Silence, in such moments, is not neutrality; it is endorsement.

My own understanding of institutional ethics was shaped years ago at St. John's Medical College in Bengaluru. Some seats were reserved for Catholic nuns. I questioned the principal. He showed me a large map of India dotted not with cities, but with remote villages. "That," he said, "is where our graduates serve." For once, the reservation made moral sense.

The story of Christian Medical College, Vellore, is even more instructive. It was founded by Dr Ida Scudder, an American missionary doctor who arrived in India at the turn of the 20th century. One night, three men came to her house seeking help for their wives in obstructed labour. Each refused treatment by a male doctor. By morning, all three women were dead.

Shaken, Scudder resolved to train Indian women as doctors. She opened a small clinic in Vellore in 1900, followed by a medical school for women in 1918. It was never meant to serve Christians alone. Its mission was simple: save lives where none cared to go. Over the decades, CMC grew into one of India's finest medical institutions, trusted across faiths and regions. Even today, a remarkable number of its graduates serve in rural and underserved areas—not because they must, but because that is the culture they inherit. That is what institutions are meant to do: shape conscience, not merely issue degrees.

The same holds true for CMC Ludhiana, where students admitted under church quotas must serve in rural facilities for at least a year or repay substantial sums. Compare this ethic with today's NEET-driven system, which rewards coaching-centre endurance rather than service-mindedness.

Now consider the final absurdity. On one side, a medical college is shut down because "standards" are suddenly discovered to be lacking. On the other, postgraduate medical seats are opened to candidates who scored minus 40 marks after the qualifying percentile is reduced to zero. Private colleges rejoice. Standards collapse. Money speaks.

Medical education in India has become a farce—one that drives thousands of students to China, Russia, Ukraine and beyond. We destroy institutions at home in the name of faith and dilute standards in the name of convenience. In the end, it is not religion that suffers, but the patient—waiting, coughing, dying—somewhere outside AIIMS, hoping that numbers will one day translate into care.

What troubles me most in this entire episode is not merely the closure of one medical college, but the ease with which we have normalised cruelty in the name of regulation, sentiment and standards. Medical education, once considered a public good, is now treated like a negotiable commodity—open to political pressure, religious prejudice and market manipulation. The student has become collateral damage.

Consider the contrast. When thousands of doctors are desperately needed, when district hospitals cry out for specialists, when primary health centres remain understaffed, the system finds no urgency. But when a medical college admits "too many" students of one community—even through a national, religion-blind examination—the system suddenly wakes up, discovers deficiencies, and acts with surgical speed. If this is governance, it is governance with selective eyesight.

I have seen what the absence of doctors does to ordinary people. In small towns and villages, illness is negotiated like a financial crisis. A fever is ignored until it becomes pneumonia. A tumour is hidden until it becomes untreatable. Pregnant women travel for hours because the nearest facility has no anaesthetist. Families sell land to pay for treatment that should never have been so expensive in the first place. This is the India behind the GDP charts.

Medical colleges are not merely teaching shops; they are anchors of regional healthcare. A functioning medical college brings doctors, nurses, diagnostic facilities, blood banks, pharmacies and emergency care. To shut one down is not a technical act—it is a moral failure. In places like Reasi, where geography itself conspires against easy access, a medical college is not a privilege. It is a necessity.

There was a time when becoming a doctor was associated with service, sacrifice and social respect. Today, it is increasingly linked to return on investment. NEET has accelerated this shift. I have no romantic attachment to the past, but I do remember doctors who relied less on machines and more on judgment. A stethoscope, a torch, a hand on the pulse, a careful look at the eyes and tongue—these were diagnostic tools, not museum pieces. Today, even before a greeting, the patient is handed a list of tests whose cost can exceed a month's income.

The coaching culture feeding NEET has created its own hierarchy. Those who can afford repeated attempts, residential coaching and mock tests dominate the ranks. Service-minded students from modest backgrounds struggle, unless they sacrifice years of their lives. It is no surprise that many who finally make it aspire not to district hospitals but to corporate chains, where a single scan can cost more than what a rural family spends on food in a month.

And yet, when it suits the system, standards are negotiable. The decision to allow postgraduate admissions for candidates with zero or even negative marks reveals the hypocrisy. Standards are invoked to close institutions, but diluted to fill seats—provided fees are paid. Merit is sacred only when it excludes the inconvenient.

This is where the SMVDMI episode becomes symbolic. It exposes how quickly merit is discarded when religion enters the picture. Forty-two Muslim students did not "occupy" Hindu seats. They earned them. They did not bypass the system; they went through it. To punish them for succeeding is to announce that in today's India, even excellence has an identity.

The silence surrounding this injustice is equally damning. No prime-time outrage. No candlelight protests. No anguished panel discussions. Perhaps because the victims were Muslim. Perhaps because the college was in Kashmir. Or perhaps because medical education has ceased to excite moral imagination altogether.

India still claims to be a secular republic. Secularism does not mean the absence of faith; it means the presence of fairness. It means that public institutions do not discriminate. It means that a temple trust running a medical college serves society, not a sect. If that idea collapses, we will soon ask uncomfortable questions of every institution—schools, universities, hospitals—about who "belongs" and who does not.

The tragedy is not that we lack resources. It is that we lack direction. We can build highways, airports and temples at breathtaking speed. But we cannot protect a medical college from prejudice, or students from being sacrificed at the altar of politics. Until that changes, all our talk of becoming a global power will remain what it increasingly sounds like—noise without nourishment.