The inquest into the death of the 33-year-old Indian solicitor in Ruttonjee Hospital, following an epileptic attack, concluded that it came from natural causes. But the mother’s experiences during her 18-month stay in Hong Kong led her to believe that racism had placed her “at the bottom of the pile” when it came to medical attention.
Before that, she had shrugged off everyday irritations like being ignored by taxi drivers and sworn at in the street as something which, as a person of a darker skin, she had to learn to live with. Her experience was not unique. Nor is it confined to Hong Kong. But other jurisdictions have laws to protect ethnic groups from discrimination on racial grounds. The SAR has no such legislation. Nor does it have any intention of drafting it.
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Martin Jacques says the light in his life came on the day he met Harinder Veriah on a jungle trek in Asia and went out seven years later when she died within hours of celebrating her 33rd birthday and the New Year.
‘Hari was my life,’ said Mr Jacques. ‘She completely changed my life, and now that she is dead I don’t think things can ever return to what I would describe as normal.
‘I think of Hari every waking moment,’ said Mr Jacques. ‘My love and passion for her was as great on the day she died as when we first met – it never changed.’
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The hospital where Harinder Veriah died issued a statement last night denying claims made at her inquest that she was the victim of discrimination.
Ruttonjee Hospital said: ‘The hospital reiterates that all patients are treated equally by health care professionals with appropriate medical care, regardless of their races and background.’
It pointed out that although the coroner made no reference to the racism allegations in his verdict, he had described it as unsubstantiated earlier in the inquest.
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When Martin Jacques, a British journalist based in Hong Kong, approached a doctor at a Hong Kong public hospital to inquire about his wife, who had been admitted after an epileptic fit on January 1, the doctor was brusque. When he told his wife, Harinder Veriah, a Malaysian of Indian origin working for a London law firm, about the incident, she replied: “I am at the bottom of the pile here.”
The following day, Ms Veriah, 33 and until then in good health, died after suffering a respiratory arrest followed by a cardiac arrest. The boundaries that demarcate where rudeness ends and racism begins are difficult to draw, but Mr Jacques’ impassioned denunciation of the prejudice he believes his wife faced at the government hospital has cast into focus what critics charge is a pervasive strain of discrimination in Hong Kong.
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The Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong reported last week’s inquest on Harinder Veriah, wife of former editor of Marxism Today Martin Jacques, in bold characters.
‘Indian lawyer suspects colour discrimination, then loses life in local hospital.’ They headlined the tears shed in court by Jacques, described as a ‘famous English voice’, as he made the charge.
‘I am at the bottom of the pile,’ she had said to him in the Ruttonjee Hospital where she was under observation after suffering an epileptic fit. ‘I am the only Indian here, everyone else is Chinese.’
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An Indian solicitor allegedly discriminated against by doctors at a public hospital told her husband she felt ‘at the bottom of the pile’ hours before her death, an inquest heard yesterday.
Harinder Veriah, 33, a solicitor from England who came to practise in Hong Kong in 1998 for three years, suffered an epileptic fit on New Year’s Day while drinking champagne and celebrating the millennium in Causeway Bay.
She was admitted to Ruttonjee Hospital, where she died the next day.
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IT WAS supposed to be one of the happiest nights of their lives. Martin Jacques, the former editor of Marxism Today, and Eric Hobsbawm, the veteran left-wing historian, were spending the Millennium Eve in Hong Kong with their wives. Hobsbawm’s son Andy, an internet company executive, had just proposed to his girlfriend in a restaurant and she had accepted. Half an hour after the stroke of midnight heralded the new century, the six were hugging each other in the street in celebration.
But a few minutes later Hari, Jacques’s lawyer wife, who had also been celebrating her 33rd birthday that evening, collapsed with an epileptic fit as she and her husband waited for a taxi. She was still holding the Gucci bag her husband had given her as a birthday present.
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Harinder Veriah who died in a Hong Kong hospital within hours of celebrating the new millennium and her 33rd birthday had her roots in the legal and political worlds of Britain and Malaysia. The daughter of Karam Singh, the youngest (Socialist) MP in independent Malaysia’s first Parliament, she was married to Martin Jacques, the noted editor of Marxism Today and, more recently (1994-1996) Deputy Editor of the Independent.
Shortly after her birth, her father was imprisoned for four years for leading a march of rubber plantation workers. Her mother, Harbans Kaur, died when she was six.
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Harinder Veriah LLM, of the law firm Lovell’s died suddenly and tragically on Jan 2 2000, two days after her 33rd birthday. In life and death this Indian woman from a Sikh family in Kuala Lumpur working (as a rare South Asian) in a British law office in Hongkong, and married to an Englishman, linked the worlds of Asia and the West. Eastern and western politics framed her life. Her father Karam Singh (1936-1994), a campaigning barrister, in 1959 became the youngest MP in the first parliament of independent Malaysia, sitting on the extreme left for the Socialist Party. Shortly after Harinder’s birth he was held in detention for four years under the Security Act for organizing a militant march of rubber plantation workers. (Her mother, Harbans Kaur, left to bring up three children, died when she was six). Since 1994 her life in Britain, Malaysia and latterly Hongkong, had been linked in deep mutual love with a man of equally patent leftwing background, Marxism Today’s Martin Jacques, whom she married in 1996. She was the daughter of the generation that won freedom. But she remained non-political, straddling and combining her worlds: proudly Malaysian, and multilingual, except in the ancestral Punjabi: the family spoke English.
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