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The Bihar floods-India’s Beautiful Tragedy
Kalam Nishan Singh
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With the
core Sikh value of Sarbat Da Bhala, the WSN cannot but take
notice of the death and destruction in Bihar and the utter
apathy of the Indian nation state in reaching out |
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 At
the time of
Independence,
Delhi was agog in ecstasy, and Nehru’s Tryst With Destiny had no
reference to the murder and mayhem in Punjab. The country celebrated
as death’s dance went on and Punjabis on both sides of the border
died in their thousands.
Last week, the
great Indian middle class was again celebrating. The Nuclear Deal
had been done. The elite media, the middle class, the haves of
India
and all whose voice is heard, proclaimed that they have achieved a
membership of an exclusive club. The Nuclear Club. The high table of
the world’s super powers.
 Amid
the euphoria, the voices from the Kosi’s new banks were hardly
heard. Shamelessly, the Indian media repeated without any hint of
skepticism the figure of 27 dead in floods in which hundreds of
villages were washed away and rescue operations remained virtually a
mere rumour.
As a community
paper wedded to the core Sikh values, and swearing by the motto,
Sarbat Da Bhala, the World Sikh News cannot but take notice of
the death and destruction of lives and livelihoods in a poor region
of the world and the utter apathy of the Indian nation state in
reaching out.
Indian PM
Manmohan Singh made a visit, so did a few other VIPs too, but the
nation state’s soul has failed to stir. It is not just this year.
Biharis have been dying due to floods so regularly that the English
language media has perhaps lost its sense of news. There are
families in north
Bihar who have
lost their homes 14 times in floods since 1947. How many times have
we seen the media chasing the story?
 Last
Monday, The Tribune quoted an engineer from IIT working in
Bihar to focus
on local, decentralised ways of coping with floods, as saying:
“Bihar is destined to die. Nobody counts us...Nobody reads news from
Bihar.”
No one writes much, either.
Eight districts
of Bihar
turned into a watery grave this year, and the true story will
perhaps never come out. What
India is already
indulging in is usual blame game and mud slinging. Indian media has
spent more ink and paper on writing about how Gustav-tackling
measures were better than Katrina times but as far as the fate of
the poor goes, there is no focus, no will, no conscience involved.
Floods in
Punjab
did not elicit much different reaction. If we are focussing on Kosi,
it is because the scale of destruction and the degree of apathy was
much higher.
People in
Bihar
braved the floods for about a fortnight without any external
assistance. This happens because there is no accountability when it
comes to poor have-nots.
 But why is there
no brouhaha over all of this? Well, the reasons are not far to seek.
Poor people’s lives do not move us the same way as a highly paid
model who serves liquor in an illegal bar. Jessica Lal case coverage
was far richer in detail than the floods’ coverage. That’s because
we need big time scandalous news, lots of rotting corpses, scenes
from hospitals, pictures of mal-nutritioned children, lots of blood
splashed on the road, police beating young girls, teargas shells,
wailing women on our plasma TV screens to get our souls to move.
In
the days of nuclear deal, when Prez Bush calling Chinese Prez Hu
makes for thrilling stuff, and Indian officials in Vienna flash
SMSes from the meeting venue to mandarins in South Block to say they
have gate-crashed into the top club of the powerful, the powerless
marooned people in Bihar could not even churn out the required
imagery.
Everybody loves
a good drought, wrote conscience keeper journalist P Sainath. Well,
everyone also loves a good flood. A good flood is one which has all
the makings of a neat, clean, designer tragedy. Some 10 districts go
under water; thousands of villages washed away clean, and no cameras
in place. So no rotting corpses, no crowds of the unwashed masses in
hospitals, no stench from bloated blue skin, no blood-soaked
coffins, and no scenes of pyres burning in a long row of hundreds.
How many
candlelight vigils did you see? Were all those hearts to bleed only
for Jessica Lal (May peace be upon her)? Were school children to
pray only for justice for upper middle class victims? Why did we not
move immediately in gurdwaras, temples, mosques with appeals for
relief for flood victims?
Because Indian
establishment and the elitist media ensured that the tragedy remains
a neat one. Clean. Entire village washed away. Everyone and every
head of cattle. Poverty makes for ugly scenes. Villages washed away
of all poor people, and poorer surroundings, make for picture
postcards.
 Thousands
of invisible deaths later,
New Delhi sits
smug with a picture of 27 deaths. That’s less than the number of
people who would died of natural causes in 15 days in 10 districts.
But no one questions the figures.
A river changes
course by a 100 km, and unguarded, unaware, unprepared, get washed
away, struck against walls, poles, trees, debris, crushed under
falling logs, banged against railway tracks, but the Indian media
has found a fiction: 27 dead. Terrifying in its scale of a lie, the
media’s smugness is commendable. Top story remains Nuclear Deal.
Mamata and Singur remain second news.
Bihar’s
uncounted dead figure low in news rooms.
Sending
reporters into cut-off villages is not difficult. A teacher from
Purnia was rightly quoted by a rather perceptive journalist. Radhey
Shyam Sharma, who has lost his village home, said, “I think this
country wakes up to the pain of the poor only when it sees mountains
of their dead bodies.”
Thousands of
Punjabis have spent a few days in a refugee camp in 1947.
India’s
absent sense of justice ensured that many spent similar days in
refugee camps in 1984 again. So Punjabis must try and understand
what it means to see little children, being asked to queue up by a
lathi-wielding cop, clutching steel glasses and mis-shapen bowls,
nervousness and hunger writ large on their faces, to line up for a
few hours. It is milk distribution time.
As journalists
tried to go near the refugee camps, one or the other old man or a
woman in rags would fall to their feet, crying, haltingly
beseeching: “Babu ji, mera bachha. Mera bachha. Chatt par tha
babu ji. kishti mein jagah nahi thee, babu ji. Babu ji mera bachha...”
Trained to fit
the mould, the journalists dutyfully turn in the story, before the
deadline. The line of the dead, however, remains stuck: 27.
 We
may never really know how many died. But we know one of the victims
was called the conscience of the Indian nation state. Its body was
lying next to the soul of India’s elite media. No photographs were
available. Tragedies of this nature are manicured. Neat and clean.
Celebrate, for such is the mighty heart of this nation that even a
100 km shift of a Kosi cannot dim the spotlight India rightly
deserves. “India’s time has come.” Didn’t you read the edits? Don’t
cry for those who missed the boats in Bihar, celebrate because New
Delhi did not miss the bus in Vienna.
10 September 2008
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