Remembering Dr Rajendra Midha, one of the first Indian doctors in Wales
Plaid Cymru’s ambition, as set out in its ‘First 100 days’ programme for Government, to place Wales’ health and care services on a new and more sustainable footing, in response to the challenges of the 21st century, is laudable. However, the question facing Plaid Cymru and indeed all of us in Wales, is whether in doing so, we continue to honour Aneurin Bevan’s outward-looking, internationalist ideals or move away from them.
When Aneurin Bevan established the National Health Service in 1948, arguing that society would be judged by the way it cared for its sick, he could hardly have imagined how international its reach would become. In many respects, it was a landmark of Welsh socialism; healthcare free at the point of need, delivered on the basis of necessity rather than means.
Building Bevan’s NHS
In the immediate post-war years, Britain faced a pressing challenge. The medical workforce had been depleted by war and many doctors were hesitant to embrace the social and organisational changes needed to make Bevan’s new universal health system work. As a result, attention turned beyond Britain’s own borders, particularly to the Commonwealth.
Among those who answered that call was my father, Dr Rajendra Midha, a young surgeon from Bombay. Trained at Grant Medical College, one of India’s oldest and most distinguished medical schools, he left behind family, friends and familiarity to help build Bevan’s great social experiment; part of a generation of overseas doctors who would quietly sustain the fledgling NHS.
A Welsh community, a shared service
In Wales, Raj not only found a community to serve but also a partner in life. He married a Welsh nurse, Olive, a union that in many ways symbolised Bevan’s ideal of international cooperation within the NHS, where service, not origin, defined belonging.
Despite his training and skill, my father, like many of his Indian colleagues, met resistance from parts of the British medical establishment. He was steered away from hospital surgery and encouraged instead to set up a General Practice in an area of significant deprivation: Blaen-y-Maes, on the outskirts of Swansea.
The front room of our home became the surgery; the hallway the waiting room. His days were long, his nights often interrupted by knocks on the door from patients needing urgent care. Doctors like him became the quiet backbone of Bevan’s creation. It was one of the striking contradictions of post-war Britain: a health service born of Welsh socialism, yet sustained by the labour and skill of post-colonial migrants. That history remains highly relevant to Plaid Cymru, seeking to rebuild the NHS in Wales today.
A changing climate
By the late 1960s, Raj’s General Practice was firmly established. However, the wider political climate had begun to harden. Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech marked a shift in the immigration debate and those who had helped keep the NHS functioning increasingly found themselves viewed with suspicion.
For my father, as for many Indian doctors, it was a painful period. There was still genuine warmth from most patients but also moments of quiet prejudice including blunt remarks such as:
“We don’t like brown and black people but not you, Doctor.”
Even so, he continued to treat every patient with the same dignity and compassion that first drew him to medicine.
My father went on to become a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners, a Police Surgeon and a Prison Doctor in Swansea. His love of cricket led to him becoming Honorary Medical Officer for Glamorgan County Cricket Club during the 1970s. He also had a deep passion for first aid and for teaching it, receiving the honour of Officer of the Order of St John in recognition of this work. My father later became a Justice of the Peace.
He believed deeply that belonging was defined not by ancestry but by service. When he died suddenly at the age of 57 in 1983, his loss was felt across the Swansea community. His legacy, however, lives on. His children and grandchildren have each, in their own ways, carried forward his sense of contribution to society, as doctors, teachers, engineers and professionals in tech. Their commitment to Wales reflects the same values that brought Raj here in the first place.
Our family has recently marked what would have been Raj’s 100th birthday and as Wales enters a new political era, it is impossible not to reflect on how far political debate has drifted from Bevan’s founding spirit. Once, Britain reached out to the world in search of partnership. Today, too often, politics turns inward in fear.
Wales and Bevan’s international vision
As in 1948, the NHS in Wales once again faces a staffing crisis that in the short and medium term cannot be addressed solely by training more doctors and other health professionals within Wales. We, like the rest of the UK, depend heavily on international recruitment to fill critical posts. Yet immigration policy increasingly moves in the opposite direction, making it harder for skilled professionals to come, stay and belong.
This less welcoming approach not only undermines the NHS but also weakens the very values Bevan championed: fairness, solidarity, and shared responsibility. The idea that we can sustain the health service while turning away the people who make it work is both morally questionable and practically inconsistent.
An opportunity to take a different path
Plaid Cymru’s emphasis on rebuilding Welsh public services and creating a more confident national future creates an opportunity for Wales to take a different path from the increasingly restrictive politics emerging elsewhere in the UK. By creating clearer recruitment and settlement routes and by actively recognising the contributions of doctors from India and other Commonwealth nations, Wales can reaffirm a core principle of Bevan’s vision: that compassion and inclusion are not optional extras but part of the foundation of a progressive society.
Bevan’s vision was never narrow or parochial. Though forged in the valleys of South Wales, it was universal in spirit. The NHS, as he conceived it, was an expression of our shared humanity. When he built it, he did not ask where its doctors came from; he asked only that they serve.
The story of my father, Dr Rajendra Midha and the thousands of Indian doctors who followed him reminds us what that vision looks like in practice. It is a story not of charity or dependence but of mutual enrichment. Their work strengthened the NHS, enriched Welsh communities and kept alive Bevan’s founding belief that a society’s greatness is measured by how it cares for all its people.
If Plaid Cymru’s vision of a confident and outward-looking Wales is to succeed, it must recognise that international healthcare professionals are not peripheral to the Welsh story but central to it, just as they were at the foundation of Bevan’s NHS.
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