Rather than reflect upon the social pathologies which the earthquake's aftermath unfolded, the Indian middle class peddled perversely elitist agendas as 'solutions'. It has failed to learn any lessons from one of the country's worst 'natural' ca tastrophes.
BY all criteria of efficiency and democratic accountability to the electorate, the Keshubhai Patel Ministry should have been sent packing for its appalling performance after the Gujarat earthquake and its complicity in one of India's worst-ever cases of profiteering on the backs of the victims of a natural calamity. In spite of generous support from a partisan Central government, a $1.5 billion commitment from the World Bank and its associates, as well as timely aid from Indian citizens and foreign gove rnments, it failed to reach even a modicum of life-sustaining aid to the bulk of the victims.
Put simply, the Gujarat relief operation was far, far worse than in Latur in 1993. Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel was largely invisible. The collapse of political and moral leadership was complete. Even more reprehensible was the way relief delivery was politicised - in the dirty, sectarian sense of the term - through denial of food to Dalits and Muslims.
With a considerably better infrastructure and hugely greater resources, Gujarat was far better placed than Orissa to handle a calamity. But its official ineptitude and callousness was much graver. During the October 1999 cyclone, Giridhar Gamang's regime proved horrifically ineffective and indifferent to Orissa's underprivileged people. Then, a loud chorus demanded that he should go. Today, by contrast, the Gujarat government - the only State fully controlled by the BJP - is being mollycoddled by the Ce ntre. Indeed, the Centre took Gujarat under its wing. The Prime Minister went out of his way to help Gujarat. He cancelled his Japan-Malaysia tour and promptly declared the earthquake a "national calamity". The Home Minister visited Gujarat five times, t he Defence Minister twice, and so on.
By contrast, Atal Behari Vajpayee had only made a token night landing in Bhubaneswar in 1999 and he prevaricated over declaring India's worst-ever cyclone a national "calamity". (Advani's aircraft returned from Orissa without touching base.)
The Centre says it is now raising some Rs.15,000 crores for Gujarat, although Keshubhai Patel's rehabilitation budget is only Rs.4,500 crores. In shameful parsimony, it gave only Rs.828 crores to Orissa. That State is yet to receive even its Rs.380 crore s dues under centrally sponsored schemes such as the Indira Awas Yojana and food-for-work. Instead, bankrupt Orissa - which runs a debt of Rs.22,000 crores, or over half its gross domestic product - was forced to borrow Rs.140 crores from the mark et for cyclone relief. The Centre allowed Members of Parliament to allot to Orissa Rs.10 lakhs each from their individual Rs.2-crore "local area development scheme" funds. (Only 38 of the 790 MPs did so.) Now Vajpayee has removed that ceiling altogether. After Gujarat, he has established an unprecedented 37-member all-party National Committee on Disaster Management. He would not countenance this after Orissa.
IT is not only the Centre that has been partisan towards Gujarat. The media and the upper middle class have been equally so. The mainstream media coverage of Gujarat spanned from plate tectonics to lessons from Latur and Uttarkashi, and from the flatteni ng of Bhachau and Anjar to the victims' emotional distress. In sheer column-centimetres, this was one order of magnitude higher than Orissa. This was welcome. Regrettably, it was prejudiced. Sections of the media privileged Gujarat as one of "mainstream" India's most urbanised and industrialised States, and a major foreign investment destination, as well as home to certain industrial houses.
Thus, odious comparisons were made about the "pride", "grit" and "entrepreneurial spirit" of the Gujarati, and the Orissa cyclone was depicted as "the stereotype calamity; an already backward State ravaged further by a lethal cyclone;... the picture was such as to evoke compassion but not empathy." The suggestion was loud and clear: Gujarat deserved generous assistance because it is "a wellspring" of private enterprise: "Worldwide, the Gujarati entrepreneur is a symbol of hard work and initiative . Orissa, on the other hand, depends on government hand-outs which by definition is not conducive to rapid reconstruction."
In other words, the majority of Indians - who lack non-resident Indian (NRI) connections, do not live in industrialised areas, or do not have the gung-ho "entrepreneurial" or commercial instincts that Gujarat is (wrongly) credited with - do not deserve s ubstantive assistance, only sympathy.
The truth of this "entrepreneurship" was soon revealed - in high-rise apartments in Ahmedabad. More than 50 of these collapsed, killing some 700 people, owing to substandard building material and construction methods. The "enterprising" builders, who had their patently unsafe constructions approved by paying dubious "impact" fees, are amongst Ahmedabad's best-connected businessmen with top political ties. Also implicated in rackets involving construction or relief provision are Ministers, bureaucrats an d influence-peddlers. They reportedly include a number of officials of saffron brigade organisations or their relatives. Little surprise, then, that only a handful of (at last count six) builders have been arrested. The biggest culprits have not only dod ged the police, but even had complainants beaten into silence.
There is a well known nexus between the government and shadowy business interests. Prominent among them are big industrialists, property sharks, and speculators constructing shopping malls and cinema multiplexes. Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Rajkot have re cently witnessed a spate of demolitions of the homes of the poor. People with legal titles have been uprooted to make room for pizza parlours and chrome-and glass-front shops that even the middle middle-class may not enter.
Much of the mainstream media condoned the entrepreneur-politician-bureaucrat network. Sections of it strongly advocate a massive rehabilitation effort to revive Gujarat's business "spirit". And yet, they stiffly resist increased taxation to finance this. When they can, they cover up the failures of the Patel Ministry. When these become too stark, they change the tune: let non-governmental organisations (NGOs) do relief and rehabilitation; governments cannot. Some newspapers, in fact, urged corporations to "adopt" whole villages by the simple device of making donations to NGOs. They painted a rosy picture of corporate efficiency. In reality, few NGOs existed on the ground, especially in Kutch. Most had no experience of emergency service provision. Some were deeply involved with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Worse, a large number of recently formed NGOs stand charged with discrimination against the low castes and religious minorities in the matter of relief distribution. According to Indian Nat ional Social Action Forum (INSAF), rank casteism is rampant among many.
For all the hype about the munificence of private industry, its promised donations have been a measly one-hundredth of the estimated cost of reconstruction. Some corporations made public relations capital out of the quake by flying journalists to Kutch by helicopter. However, the highest promised donation by any of them is Rs.15 crores. In contrast, public sector oil companies alone put in an equivalent amount. Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) and Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) - onl y remotely connected with Gujarat - donated Rs.12 crores and Rs.10 crores respectively.
Certain interests used the glaring failures of the Keshubhai Patel administration to attack ideologically all government and emphasise a new "targeting philanthropy", which means "getting the maximum bang from each charitable buck." Most odious of all, some pushed to turn the entire earthquake-affected area into a "special economic zone" with its own laws. These should, they pleaded, "make the policy environment as liberal and friendly for foreign investment and trade (as in) China... a laborator y for trying out... innovative business models (such as) privatisation; joint ventures; involvement of foreign companies to induct technology, finance.... (and) long-term leasing;... securitisation... etc".
SEEN in the larger context, this overall elite response to one of India's greatest natural disasters exposes a terrible social pathology. Despite its donations for earthquake relief, the elite largely remained "dry-eyed", to use a British observer's term . It has learnt little from the catastrophe.
As argued repeatedly in this column, "natural" disasters are far from natural in their consequences, as distinct from causes. Their effects are especially harsh upon the underprivileged and those who are forced to live unsafely.
The key to mitigation of these effects lies not in fancy high technology, but in long-term prevention, including rational urban planning, building codes, emergency provisioning, pooling of equipment such as cranes, earthmovers and fire engines, and effec tive warning and communication. Central to this is combating social and class biases in the official machinery and making it responsive to the people. All this is part of the democratic agenda of making government accountable. The government alone can pr ovide certain indispensable services. It must be held down to the task. But the middle-class elite has set its face against this agenda.
Second, the elite looks for short-cuts and quick-fixes: for example, NGO assistance, although this cannot be a sustainable substitute for government. Early corporate intervention might bring limited relief to the privileged few who have the "right" conne ctions, but it cannot possibly provide universal relief. There can be no "adoption" of a village by entities like corporations whose sole rationale is to generate profits for privileged minorities such as directors.
Three, natural disasters, even when they are not "levellers", provide an opportunity for societies to reflect upon their own failures and internal hierarchical structures. They raise questions about the worth of a social order in which unequal starting p oints lead to yet further inequalities or growing disparities in opportunity. Someone born in a low-caste, poor family is already disadvantaged in establishing access to universal social goods such as education or healthcare. Surely, his/her opportunity should not erode further when it comes to relief in the event of a natural disaster. The lesson that the elite draws is the opposite. If inequality of opportunity snowballs, it should grab whatever comes its way; its greed is "natural".
Four, enlightened leaders of society can counter such perverse perceptions by invoking universal compassion, and upholding values such as equality, human dignity and justice. Regrettably, such leadership was absent in the Gujarat case. Instead, we had th e sordid examples set by the Patels, Advanis and Vajpayees. Following these, sections of the elite also exhibited gung-ho confidence (or is it contrived, phoney, self-assurance?) in Gujarat's "irrepressible" ability to "bounce back" - just as they had do ne (prematurely) after the scorching Mumbai pogrom of 1993 and the Surat plague of 1994 which, they mortally feared, would send out the "wrong message" to foreign investors. Accompanying this "confidence" was hubris about India's "resilience", even invin cibility.
YET, we would do well to reflect upon just two facts.
Fact One: There was utter confusion and panic in the military establishments of both India and Pakistan shortly after 8 a.m. on January 26 over whether there had been an earthquake or a nuclear attack. This lasted a full half-hour. Stephen Cohen, now wit h the Brookings Institution, whom India's strategic experts are otherwise fond of quoting, confirmed this on CNN. This underlines the hair-raising possibility of what a knee-jerk, launch-on-warning (or launch-in-retaliation) response would have me ant if the summary assessment was that a nuclear attack had indeed occurred: missile flight-times are just three to eight minutes between Indian and Pakistani cities.
Fact Two: The bombing of a population centre like Ahmedabad with a crude nuclear weapon, smaller than what either Pakistan or India possesses, would be effectively 10 to 50 times more devastating than the Bhuj earthquake. It would release vast quantities of extreme heat and radiation - in addition to blast waves and tremors. It would also make any relief operation virtually impossible. Bhuj and Bhachau were flattened by the earthquake. But will Ahmedabad - or Mumbai and Delhi - survive under a nuclear a ttack? Have we not, millions of us, become utterly defenceless after the Great Folly of May 1998?
Do we need more lessons in plate tectonics or in plain morality to understand this? and to comprehend that nuclear catastrophes, which states plan to inflict upon each other, are a far closer, greater - and preventable - likelihood than a geologic al event with a less-than-predetermined occurrence?
COMMents
COMMents
SHARE