Mainstream WeeklyAbstract: This essay examines violence against doctors in contemporary India through the Marxist concepts of alienation and reification. While conventional explanations focus on infrastructural failures and emotional distress among patients’ relatives, the essay argues that these alone cannot explain why physicians become targets of violence. It proposes the idea of ‘hyperidentity’, where doctors become so reduced to their professional role that their humanity fades from social perception. To reduce violence against doctors, change in social perception is required-from a mechanical tool for the recovery of a patient to a human being working in an environment of uncertainty.
A doctor’s nightmare
On 20th May 2026, at Government Medical College Jalaun, Uttar Pradesh, what could have been a peaceful physician-patient interaction quickly turned violent when a patient’s attender assaulted the doctor at emergency duty [1]. He screamed of his political connections and showcased his physical prowess while the trigger seemed to have been a technical issue at the registration counter. Like every other incident of attack against healthcare professionals, this too was followed by a protest ritual, legal documentation and collective amnesia.
In 2015 a study found that over 75% of doctors have faced violence at work [2]. It may seem paradoxical that the people whose lives revolve around healing face astonishingly high levels of brutality. As I write this, the news of an assaulted doctor at Bidar Institute of Medical Sciences is making its rounds [3]. A rationalisation process may also involve that as the question is of the life of loved ones, the emotional impulse of unfortunate relatives is to take the course of violence. As we will see further, this argument doesn’t hold together when subjected to a second thought. Few authors pointed to systemic problems like rising cost of healthcare, staff shortage, communication gaps, misinformation and infrastructure issues as contributing factors to cause the unnecessary friction among the populace. The solutions suggested were also about filling up these structural cracks [4]. However, they fail to explain the reasons why acts of violence are taken up by the people instead of other means of expressing themselves. These analyses convert a single belief into an assumption and conclusion at the same time: the faults of the medical system give way to conditions which make assailants feel justified in lashing out their weapons. So the question remains, what is it about doctors that they are prone to the sheer magnitude of brutality?
Cultural contradictions
Let’s do a thought experiment. Say some 500 years from now a group of historians start studying the state of doctors in 21st century India. They will end up facing this blatant contradiction between the culturally embedded saying ‘Vaidyo Narayano Harih’ (the doctor is an embodiment of God) and the statistics of physician violence and burnout of this time period. How can a society that has such a collective perception of doctors at the same time engage in destruction? They may fall into different camps arguing to make sense of this, some aligning with different schools of interpretation and if we are unlucky enough - denying either of these facts. The factor that is missing here is that the very identification of a contradiction is anachronistic. The saying and the mentality reflected by it is just a relic of a bygone era when cultural forces really kept doctors on a pedestal of religious respect. But what is it today? A signifier whose signified isn’t the present condition of doctors but a lip service to history.
The path of a society from its position of deification of healers to cruelty against them can be seen as an inevitable consequence of capitalism in all its flaws and the theories of the German philosopher Karl Marx capture the process by which we have descended to this condition.
Alienation and Reification
Alienation is a concept that one can intuitively grasp what it is about. Let me explain briefly.
Suppose you are a potter. You make immaculate pots out of your skills and sell them by yourself. The village sees you as a part of it, buys and appreciates you and your skills. After a few years various economic changes occur in your environment over which you had no control and finally an industrialist starts a mechanised pot factory near your village. Needless to say, you go out of business and end up working in the factory to make pots. You are employed in a Fordist assembly line of pots. What does this do to you? You no longer own the way you used to make pots. The profits are for the industrialist who pays you a salary. You have lost the connection that you had to your pots before the industrialization, you no longer are fond of the process of making pots which is now a boring routine activity, your identity as a potter has dissolved and now you are just a pot factory employee and your village doesn’t see you as a skilled workman anymore. This estrangement of a person from the person’s very nature as a result of capitalism is called alienation. But how did just the act of being employed in a factory instead of making pots yourself lead to such drastic changes?
That occurs through the mechanism of reification or ‘thingification’. We are all familiar with the idea of personification where an idea is given the form of a person- for example -“Hitler is the personification of evil”. Thingification is the exact opposite of it. An abstract idea is falsely given the status of a person. When you say “oh the medical system is broken” you have already committed thingification. ‘The System’ is not an object to mend or break or do anything.The system is a set of social relations among people, machines etc. It’s an idea which has come to general usage because it eases our perceptions of reality. In Marxist thought, reification is when you treat social relations as physical objects and the object that has been produced is perceived to have a life of its own. The potter has made pots with humungous effort but the market value does not rest on that effort. The factors determining market value are seen as a real thing while the struggle behind it is not. This is reification.
Curious case of medical profession
Reification and alienation force you to deny humanness in endeavors and makes you feel that everything is mechanised and ought to be so. This problem in the medical profession is relatively well understood. Professionals have lamented how the treatment of a patient has been commodified, i.e. cure to a disease is coming to be thought of as a product that physicians sell, continuous feeling of disconnect that doctors feel leading to burnout. Burnout itself is seen as alienation [5]. When the big corporate hospitals have continuously changed the language a hospital speaks,with profit margins meddling in patient care, it’s of no wonder that similar to the potter, a doctor may end up feeling disconnected in a mechanised hospital. Physicians have already displayed leftist sympathies to combat the increasingly hostile environment the hospital is turning into [6]. In this premise, is the alienated doctor an open target for hostility, or is there something even deeper lurking about?
Fragments of humanity
The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin wrote ‘Hyperion’ in the end of the 18th century which had the seeds of the theory of alienation which was developed in the next centuries to come:
….you see craft-workers but no genuine people; thinkers but no people; priests, but no people; lords and servants, youths and persons of property but no people… [7]
One can visualise Hölderlin’s poetry materialising in real life in the routine hospital scenario that I present now:
A patient is brought to the hospital with a doctor responsible to attend. A sick person is sublimely more human than a healthy one. She is fragile, needs to be cared for, evokes sympathy and all emotions valued as virtuously human. The person in the white coat whose social role is now a physician dutifully attempts to fulfill the role. But the patient nevertheless dies. Classical narrative now may go that in the capitalist world, as the doctor has failed to deliver the commodity of recovery of the patient, the relatives of the patient may feel justified in harming the manufacturing process (in this case the doctor) as it has failed to deliver the product (the cure). Even though this may appear convincing this cannot be the full picture. This is just another form of the rationalisation process which I mentioned in the beginning of the essay. If a firefighter fails to rescue a baby from a burning day care center, no thought will appear among the public to lynch the firefighter. If a lifeguard fails to bring a drowning woman back to the shore, her father won’t slap the lifeguard. What is it in a doctor who takes the hit? Or rather broadly, why do some professions face more violence than others when stakes are similar?
Hyperidentity: An expanded curse of capitalist worldview
The situation of a doctor here is a uniquely and militantly capitalist phenomenon. She is reified to such an extent that the assailant fails to recognise the human in her. Her existence is defined by her profession, and an event where the identity fails to solve the problem, her existence itself becomes a matter of question. The answer to the question is now violence. Here, the issue as to whether she performed her duties takes a secondary role and her essence of being a doctor has contaminated her existence as a human being. She has been reified to such an extent that the human before the doctor is negated, the social relations she carries have been personified and the person forgotten. This is reflected in the hyper-identification of her with the profession, by which I mean that she has become her profession. By hyperidentity, I mean the condition in which a person becomes so completely identified with their economic or professional role that all other dimensions of their humanity recede from social perception. It may seem as the direct contradiction to what Marx called alienation when the worker is deliberately distanced from the activity. It is not. Alienation dissolves the worker of humanity while hyperidentity gives it a substitution. Hyperidentity is a consequence of capitalism at its extreme form when any identity apart from work is negated, denied or forgotten. The healthcare profession already appears way into this stage. The patient is a hyperhumanised subject while the doctor is an object, a tool whose existence is merely to bring the patient back to normalcy. Violence becomes psychologically permissible because the physician is no longer encountered primarily as a person. The firefighters and lifeguards have not been inflicted with this state exactly because the nature of their work resists capitalist ventures and absorption into capitalist worldview and language. Privatisation of these professions is a fact but the results of what they do have not yet been seen as a commodity. The humanness and unpredictability that exists in the professions have remained as an acknowledged reality while the cure a doctor is expected to provide is a mechanised product akin to a pot from a factory.
The framing which has been provided now should not succumb to the simplistic narrative of blaming corporate hospitals for the rise of this social contagion. Corporate hospitals are just institutions. The problem is with the worldview that has been shaped by decades of conditioning. Viewing private hospitals as the cause of the problems succumbs to the very problem which is trying to be formulated here-reification of corporate hospitals and the belief that they have agency of their own to shape people’s mentalities.
What lies ahead?
Violence against doctors cannot be understood merely as a problem of inadequate security, emotional relatives, or administrative inefficiency, though all of them may contribute to it. What reveals itself through these assaults is a deeper pathology in the modern social imagination itself. The doctor today occupies a paradoxical position: culturally romanticised as a healer while simultaneously being reduced to an instrument within a mechanised economy of care. In such a world, the physician is no longer encountered as a vulnerable human being participating in the uncertainty of healing, but as a functional entity expected to produce recovery on demand. When this expectation collapses, frustration no longer remains directed at circumstance, mortality, or the limits of medicine, but converges violently upon the person who embodies the failed function.
Even if structural issues of the healthcare system are solved, more CCTV cameras are installed, security is upgraded, violence against doctors will not come down to zero because the recognition of humanness is primary to stop violence. The dehumanised doctor will be susceptible to violence as long as she exists in the hyperidentified state of being. The concept of hyperidentity should be explored in other professions too even though the forms and consequences of it may be different from the medical profession.
(Author: Alok Ajakkala is a medical student and writer currently studying at Chamarajanagara Institute of Medical Sciences. He has written for Indiabioscience, Science Reporter, youth ki awaaz and also fiction for small literary magazines)
References
- GMC Jalaun on-duty doctor abused, assaulted by patient’s attendants.” Medical Dialogues, 20 May 2026. https://medicaldialogues.in/news/health/doctors/gmc-jalaun-on-duty-doctor-abused-assaulted-by-patients-attendants-171010
(2) Debnath, A., Alam, M., Goyal, M., Khokhar, A., & Lukhmana, S. (2023). The Prevalence of Violence Against Resident Doctors and Its Subsequent Effects on Patient Management in a Tertiary Care Hospital in Delhi, India. Cureus, 15(5), e39116. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.39116
(3) Express News Service, “‘An Attempt to Murder’: Doctor Assaulted Inside Karnataka Hospital; 5 Arrested,” The Indian Express, May 22, 2026, https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/bangalore/bidar-doctor-assaulted-brims-hospital-patient-relatives-10703044/
(4) Joseph, B., and M. Joseph, “Why Violence Against Doctors? What to Do?”, Indian Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, vol. 27, no. 2, 2023, pp. 109–111. https://doi.org/10.4103/ijoem.ijoem_159_23
(5) Bresnick, Jennifer. “A Marxist Analysis of Physician Burnout.” Digital Health Insights, December 5, 2024. https://dhinsights.org/news/a-marxist-analysis-of-physician-burnout
(6) Cabbabe, Edmond. “How Corporate Health Care Ruined the Medical Profession.” KevinMD, April 2026, https://kevinmd.com/2026/04/how-corporate-health-care-ruined-the-medical-profession.html
(7) Crucefix, Martyn. “Being In and Above: On Friedrich Hölderlin’s ‘Hyperion.’” Martyn Crucefix, February 13, 2018. https://martyncrucefix.com/2018/02/13/being-in-and-above-on-friedrich-holderlins-hyperion/