Two years after fatal surgery, Kashmir family still seeks answers

Gulzar Ahmad died during bypass surgery in Srinagar two years ago. His family says an inquiry into his death was never completed, while fresh allegations of medical negligence continue to surface across Kashmir.

Gulzar Ahmad rose early that morning with a simple plan: walk down to Dal Lake and bring home a fish for his family.

He was forty-seven, the sole earner for his household, and the type of man whose days followed a familiar order.

But that order broke apart within minutes.

Struggling suddenly to breathe, he called out for his daughter to fetch her mother. When his wife, identified here as Rubeena to protect her privacy, found him drenched in sweat, she understood something was badly wrong. She called his cousins to get him to a hospital.

There was no ambulance in those first minutes, only a scooter and a mother’s hands wiping her husband’s face as he struggled to speak.

“We took Gulzar on a scooter and reached Chest Disease Hospital as it is within walking distance from our house,” Rubeena recalled.

Doctors there delivered the diagnosis fast: a major heart attack.

He was rushed by ambulance to Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital, then moved again, this time to its Super Speciality wing for emergency angioplasty.

Even that procedure left doctors uneasy about his condition, and they told the family he needed a bypass, either at the government-run SKIMS institute or somewhere outside Kashmir altogether.

What followed was a scramble known to families across the valley: documents gathered, opinions sought, and savings weighed against survival.

A cardiologist at Paras Hospital in Srinagar reviewed the file and assured relatives that Gulzar would recover once the surgery was done.

The price tag came to three and a half lakh rupees.

Rubeena, thirty-nine, sold her gold to raise it.

“All I could think of at that time was to save my husband no matter what it cost,” she said, wiping tears as she spoke, “but had the doctor informed us about the risk factor, we could have explored other options. I could have sold my house and taken him to Delhi. He meant everything to us.”

The surgery was scheduled to take ten hours. Before he was wheeled into the operating theatre, Gulzar looked at his wife and said the words she has repeated to herself since: “Take care of our daughters.”

His 77-year-old father, Muhammad Rajjab, remembers the next day in fragments: a doctor said his son was doing fine, then everything suddenly changed.

“Within no time, I was called in a separate room, guards took my phone and surrounded me in the room,” Rajjab said.

“There they broke the backbreaking news to me: ‘Everyone knows that we tried to save his life, but he could not make it, and he passed away. Gulzar is no more!’ The doctor said this and left the room. My whole world came to an end all of a sudden.”

Grief curdled into outrage almost immediately. Relatives gathered outside the hospital, accusing the staff of negligence and demanding answers.

Srinagar’s Chief Medical Officer ordered an inquiry and asked the Government Medical College to send a cardiologist to review the case.

Two years on, that inquiry appears to have gone silent.

Rajjab says nobody has called the family for a hearing, and the report, if one exists, remains unpublished.

Instead, the hospital filed a police case against the family for property damage during the protest, and the two sides have been meeting in court ever since.

“My son died, but who cared?” Rajjab said.

A medical official who spoke on condition of anonymity gave a partial explanation: after the CMO opened the inquiry, the hospital argued the office lacked jurisdiction over a super-speciality facility and pushed the matter up to a higher authority.

A government committee eventually took over, and its findings, the official said, sit somewhere inside the office of the Director of Health Services.

Repeated calls and messages to that director, Dr Jahangir Bakhshi, went unanswered.

Dr Syed Asra Qadri, the surgeon who led the operation, provided little information when reached for comment.

“I have to say nothing on this,” he said. “He was a high-risk patient, and the government has already done the inquiry.”

Told that the family disputes ever being warned about that risk, he laughed off the claim.

“This is the usual story that every patient tells,” he said.

“The patient had a serious cardiovascular condition, and there was no question of medical negligence.”

Gulzar’s case lies inside a pattern rather than beside it.

Kashmir has recorded a string of similar allegations in recent years, though no government office maintains a public count of deaths tied to alleged negligence, leaving families and reporters to piece the picture together case by case.

A year after Gulzar died, thirty-four-year-old Waseem Ahmad Pathan of Pampore died under similar circumstances at the same hospital.

That inquiry moved further than his: investigators found the hospital at fault, and the physician and staff involved were barred from practising at any government or private institution for six to eight months, according to Dr Tahir Sajad.

In February this year, a case in Sopore drew wider alarm when a woman admitted for ear surgery allegedly had her uterus removed instead.

Two doctors were suspended from private practice across the region, though Dr AG Raina, the Chief Medical Officer for Baramulla, said he believed both had since been reinstated.

“I cannot confirm this because I was not associated with Sopore at that time,” he said.

“The decision was taken by the government.”

Two more cases have surfaced since July: a thirty-five-year-old woman from Baramulla died at a hospital in Hyderpora, which was sealed as police opened a case, and in August a woman in Natipora died after complications during a hysteroscopy, a routine procedure to examine the uterus, and was transferred to SMHS Hospital, where she died.

Dr Sajad confirmed his office is now gathering records from both facilities and plans to interview the family.

Kashmir’s experience points to a growing global concern over patient harm.

The World Health Organisation estimates that one in ten patients worldwide is harmed during treatment, contributing to more than three million deaths a year, and that more than half of that harm could have been prevented.

Medication errors alone affect roughly one in thirty patients, a quarter of them severely, and account for half of all preventable harm.

Surgery carries its own toll: of the roughly 300 million operations performed each year globally, WHO estimates ten percent of preventable harm occurs in surgical settings, much of it in the hours before or after the procedure itself, when attention tends to fade.

India’s legal system draws a careful line around these deaths.

Under Section 106(1) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, causing death through a reckless or negligent act can bring up to five years in prison and a fine, but the law carves out a lighter standard for registered doctors, capping their exposure at two years plus a fine when a death occurs during a medical procedure.

Advocate Zahid Khan, who practices at the Jammu and Kashmir High Court, said families can also pursue compensation through civil courts when negligence is established.

“In case of proven death due to medical negligence, the legal heirs or the dependents of the deceased, who was the lone bread earner of the family, may seek compensation for the loss suffered by them under the law of torts,” he said, adding that any award depends on the victim’s age, income, occupation, and the dependents left behind.

The advocate was careful to note that a death following treatment, on its own, proves little.

Investigators, the law says, must weigh the doctor’s actions against the accepted standard of care, consult independent medical opinion, and determine whether any lapse directly caused the death.

“The law therefore seeks to protect patients from genuinely negligent treatment while also ensuring that doctors are not criminally prosecuted for genuine errors of judgment or unsuccessful treatment,” Khan said.

But none of that legal architecture has reached Rubeena.

She has spent two years raising her daughters alone, stretching a household budget that once depended entirely on her husband’s income, holding onto his final instruction as both comfort and burden.

No suspension, fine, or inquiry can undo what happened inside that operating theatre.

What Rubeena wants is smaller and, so far, has proven harder to secure: a finished investigation, a public answer, someone willing to say plainly what went wrong and who bears responsibility for it.

Until that happens, Gulzar Ahmad’s last words remain the only accounting his family has received.