NEW DELHI: The findings of the Thorat Committee suggesting that there was caste-based discrimination at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) has left the faculty divided over the issue.

While the AIIMS Faculty Association has noticed with deep anguish and concern the charges "casting aspersions on the Hippocrates Oath by faculty and other doctors" and sought a judicial probe into the ethical and legal justification for setting up such an ad hoc committee, the Progressive Medicos and Scientists Forum has said the committee report had confirmed what the forum had been saying regarding caste discrimination and about the Institute Director's role in engineering the "anti-reservation" agitation.

AIIMS Faculty Association president B.K. Khaitan in a statement said these allegations were "absurd and baseless."

He said the Thorat Committee never interacted with the faculty and said the teachers did not practise any discrimination on the basis of caste or creed.

Questioning the credibility of the report of the committee, whose members comprised `known associates' of the Union Health and Family Welfare Minister, it has said that such matters were better entrusted to bodies such as the National Human Rights Commission. "The timing of the release of the committee report evokes further suspicion, coming as it does a day before the hearing of the Minister's case in the Supreme Court as well as on the eve of the AIIMS Governing Body meeting," it said.

The forum, on the other hand, said the Government had been forced to constitute the committee after it exposed several incidents of discrimination against the reserved category students and doctors in the hostel and in the academic campus. It has also sought the dismissal of Director P. Venugopal.

The forum also demanded that the governing body of AIIMS, which is meeting on May 7, look at this issue with full seriousness and mete out justice to those who have been discriminated against.

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