Too bad you are dead, cheque is in the mail

Ordinary lives are cheap in India. So all government has to do in name of disaster management is to dole out relief money. There is a cruel little tattle involving the late Giani Zail Singh which came back to me after 37 years. It was well known that Gianiji, then chief minister of Punjab, loved his siesta and could never be disturbed except in a terrible emergency or, of course, when Indiraji called. He was shaken awake abruptly on February 11, 1977 by his political secretary. "Kaunsi qayamat aa gayiji (Which catastrophe has descended)?" the irritated chief minister asked. "Maaf karein, Gianiji, woh Fakhruddin Sahib ka inteqal ho gaya hai," said the apologetic aide. The president of the Republic, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, had just died of a heart attack, while in office.

But Gianiji was irritable. "Theek haiji, de do na uski bewa ko dus hazaar meri taraf se bhi (OK, give his widow Rs.10,000 on my behalf as well)," he said. I was then a journalism trainee and this was the secretariat press room's hottest scuttlebutt, so I will not vouch for its accuracy one way or the other. I also worry that it could be insensitive in the context in which I make this week's argument, and I apologise to Fakhruddin Sahib's wonderful family. But since we are talking about precisely this, the establishment's chronic, terminal insensitivity to the suffering of fellow Indians, this is too fitting a story for me to resist its use.

This week's context is the destruction and death caused by the flood in Kashmir. Last year it could have been an enormously more murderous flash flood in Uttarakhand, or going back, a cloudburst in Leh (2010), the great 12-hour Mumbai deluge of July 2005 or any of the many earthquakes, temple stampedes and rail crashes. The storyline remains the same: lack of warning, prevention and preparation, mostly avoidable death if not destruction, and then the establishment's first response: announcement of relief amount to the victims' families. It is our natural, callous and insensitive response to the suffering of others, especially if we think they are lesser fellow Indians. Fakhruddin Sahib wasn't one, but I use the story to illustrate this deep-seated establishment cynicism.

It is not as if our system has not paid attention to the challenge of disasters. Tucked away in the inside pages of newspapers this Wednesday was a three para plug from North Block saying that responding to the crisis in Kashmir, Home Minister Rajnath Singh had signed on the pending file for raising three more battalions of the National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF), which will now be 12 battalions strong, each with about 1,100 men specially trained for relief, search and rescue. It sounds impressive, and they do a good job when they are called out, as in Kashmir now. But if you think with some calm detachment, what kind of a semi-superpower nation, and a tusker, if not a tiger, economy, creates permanent bureaucracies and establishments only to deal with disasters? Not just the NDRF, another new acronym, with full sarkari bandobast, fancy sinecures and advertising budgets has come up in the form of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA).

By the way, an aside, but an important one. One of the first actions of the Modi government was to dismantle the NDMA. Among the retirees offered sinecures on it by the outgoing UPA was Saleem Ali, who, as CBI special director, had headed the Ishrat Jahan encounter investigation.

I mention this not as a mere digression because it exposes our state's callousness. A bit like our police's favourite practice of temporarily stationing a cop in front of a house that's already been burgled, we also respond to public anger at disasters by creating newer uniforms, more bureaucracies and new acronyms.

Why do you need a central NDMA, for example, to routinely advertise precautions people must take in case of floods and earthquakes? Shouldn't these be part of our basic education and training as citizens? There was a time, with wars usually lurking around the corner,  that some national effort was made at civil defence training. But it has died with the threat of wars. For all other disasters, we call out central forces and, ultimately, army, air force and navy, all doing such a remarkable job in Kashmir now. This is the pattern with all our disasters, rushing of central troops and relief, that quaint Indian obscenity called the aerial survey, and then haggling between the state and the Centre over the size of the relief "package". How is all this any different from Gianiji's rumoured response to his president's death?

Besides creating an impression that India is the disaster capital of the world, or what news TV would call a permanent Ground Zero, creation of these new forces, structures and purely relief-oriented activity make some unsound presumptions. One, that disasters can't be prevented. Two, that local civic authorities, health systems, district administrations and entire state governments have neither the ability nor responsibility to do anything. It all gets distilled to numbers: battalions of central forces, boats, columns of army, helicopters and, finally, relief money. We Indians have been persuaded to believe that nature will continue to be cruel to us. So learn to endure. Maybe our planets, even vaastu, are all wrong.

Basic facts, however, would tell you a different story. I trawled for data from the comprehensive reports of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). It tells you that unnatural deaths have been on the rise in India, approximately at a rate one and a half times the corresponding rise in population. But out of these, the share of deaths attributable to nature are actually declining, if slowly. Our greatest national disasters are, actually, man-made. In 2012 we lost 1,39,091 lives in road accidents and almost a fourth of these, 32,318, involved two-wheelers.

Yet so many of our states and cities, even one as literate as Pune, keep resisting helmets. Our basic trauma care and evacuation of highway casualties, which can reduce fatalities drastically, are non-existent. The second biggest mass murderer is our railway. While rail crash deaths have actually been declining (1,762 in 2012, compared to 2,222 in 2007) NCRB data paints a shameful picture of rising rail-related deaths in the same period from 24,162 to 27,042. This means, every year more Indians die falling off trains or run over by them than all our uniformed lives lost in the wars of 1962, 1965 and 1971. In Mumbai alone, ten human beings die each day on the rail tracks. Of course the railway pays all their families compensation because one thing our establishment knows is to convince us to monetise human lives, particularly if victims happen to be poor.

That is not the way decent societies work. The solution lies in increasing social awareness, survival and rescue training. We now know that extreme weather events are to be expected. Timely warning and resolute prevention can work wonders, as Odisha and Andhra showed with Cyclone Phailin. Civic and local relief and rescue capacities have to be built. Remember the stirring New York Fire Department performance on 9/11. They fought heroically, lost 343 lives, or nearly 15 per cent of all fatalities, but saved thousands. They did not wait for any "federal forces" or special equipment to arrive. The lesson is, no new uniform, acronyms, special budgets or relief cheques can make up for lack of vigilance, awareness and sensitivity, which is chronic to India.

Postscript: History bites, and how, in Tamil Nadu. One of the news highlights of this week was Jayalalithaa filing for libel against Subramanian Swamy. The two have fought and made up so many times already that it must be the longest lasting Tom and Jerry show in politics, where in-deed the roles keep reversing.

I am a particularly affected party because in a three-page interview published in INDIA TODAY in December 1992, probably Jayalalithaa's most candid ever, she had said things about Swamy that were not exactly complimentary.

Swamy responded as Swamy would, suing her for libel, and along with her the purveyors of that interview, that was me, Prakash M. Swamy (my Chennai colleague then, who shared the byline) and Aroon Purie (as editor-in-chief).

While lawyers were drafting replies, I was struck by, what else, but re-porter's luck as I found myself seated next to Swamy on an Indian Airlines flight to Chennai (then Madras). "I am sorry, Dr Swamy, just your luck that you have drawn me next to you," I said somewhat cheekily, being a quarter century younger. "My only problem with you is, what is a nice guy like you doing in INDIA TODAY?" he replied. One thing you will never find Swamy lacking in is humour and repartee. "What to do, Dr Swamy," I said, "when you haven't found me another job?"

"A job?" he said, with the mischievous prime-time smile we the nation are so familiar with now. "I am trying to send you to jail." "I will go to jail for your sake, sir, but can you do me a favour?" I asked. "What do you want now?" Swamy was smiling kindly. "Get me solitary confinement, sir, a jail sentence with Jayalalithaa and Aroon Purie would be really tough," I said.

We both laughed. And Swamy had the last laugh. Soon enough, he had made up with Jayalalithaa and withdrawn the case against her. As for what happens to her case against him now, keep watching this space.