SOROOR AHMED examines the devastation wrought by floods and mismanagement of Government of Bihar and irresponsible attitude of upper caste dominated media of the State which was looking the other way when the State’s north-eastern districts were virtually drowned.
Three crore souls perished in repeated famines in Communist China between 1958 and 1961. Some economists, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen among them, contrasted this with India and credited the Indian democracy which never let tragedy of such magnitude take place though the economic condition of our country was not better than our big northern neighbour. Free media and existence of opposition parties made the Indian government respond to the food scarcity in much better way than totalitarian China.
But there is a state in democratic India called Bihar, where thousands of people got swept away by a deluge reminiscent of the one which occurred during the time of Prophet Noah, yet the national media virtually blacked out the news for more than a week, in fact almost 10 days. Even the prominent national dailies having their editions in Patna never made it an eight-column banner headline till the water really crossed all the limits. Incidentally some Urdu newspapers from the state and Bhagalpur edition of a couple of Hindi dailies gave more prominence to this news. In television channels none bothered to report it till August 27 – the possible exception being the regional Sahara Bihar and to some extent ETV Bihar.
This criminal and shameful media under-reporting continued for so long notwithstanding the fact that flood expert-cum-activist Prabhat Kumar Shandilya rang up different newspaper offices in Patna to advise them to give prominence to the story related to the breach in the embankment of Kosi on August 17-18 night over Musharraf’s resignation or Prachanda’s oath taking. Several other experts pointed out that the change of course of river Kosi – which has been for centuries sorrow of Bihar – would completely decimate a huge part of north-east Bihar and that the damage limitation exercise should be swift and prompt. Telephonically Shandilya got in touch with, Daraen Shahidi, a top IBN-7 journalist in Delhi, to convey to him that catastrophe of unimaginable proportions had struck Bihar’s north-eastern districts. But barring a few in the media the rest chose to look the other way, and one way or the other tried to defend the criminal negligence of the state government. The motive of the upper caste dominated media was clearly political. Though they were all well aware of the devastation the deluge would cause in the next few days they chose to under-play it as it may cause Nitish Kumar dearly in the next election and benefit Lalu Prasad.
But then in democracy, if the Press of a particular state turns blindly one-sided, the other newspapers should not have shun their duty. There are opposition parties too. However, the state media, with the possible exception of some, started giving some coverage to the opposition leaders statements too. Some of the local print and electronic media people started sermonizing the opposition parties not to do politics on flood.
The fact is that the opposition parties’ role in this case was very positive. When chief minister, Nitish Kumar, himself made an aerial survey of the flood hit region two days after the breach in embankment he called it Parlay (Doomsday or Qiyamat).
When Bihar government continued to ignore and media chose to grossly underplay the catastrophe of such magnitude for several days the Union railway minister, Lalu Prasad, moved to Delhi to put up the case forcefully before the media there. He met Prime Minister to seek immediate central intervention. Manmohan Singh responded quickly, made an aerial survey of the flood-devastated districts, declared it as a national calamity, announced relief package of Rs 1,000 crore, besides, thousands of tonnes of food grains.
It was only after the opposition’s strong protest and after the situation turned extremely grim that from August 27 morning, the tenth day of Parlay, that newspapers and national channels started giving proper coverage to the devastating tragedy. But would you believe what was the death toll given by the state government and prominently carried in the newspaper. Just 10 dead. It is just for the chief minister to explain that how can Parlay kill only 10 people in the first 10 days.
Panic spread in the entire area when nine days after the breach in Kosi embankment the chief minister, Nitish Kumar, in a radio broadcast to the people of these districts, appealed them to shift to safer places. A day earlier one of his ministers, Narendra Narayan Yadav, while talking to Sahara Bihar asked the people of Madhepura to flee from the town as the river water is now engulfing the urban area too. These broadcasts may have been done with the view to saving the lives, but they proved somewhat counterproductive. How and where to flee? Thanks to Lalu Prasad, who as the railway minister immediately ordered railways to press into service 16 pairs of trains to evacuate people free of cost. About 50,000 people managed to shift between August 28 and 30 with the help of trains. The trains carried cooked food (khichdi) from railways for the stranded people. Perhaps never in the history of disaster management the railways played such a crucial role. But then it has its limitations too. Very soon most of the remaining rail-route also got submerged and the station of Madhepura got completely water-logged. And by August 30 evening the only road route left to connect Madhepura with Saharsa got swept away at several places.
Not only the state government with the help of friendly media tried to suppress the news in the initial days, it is concocted a fantastic story to put all the blames on the newly elected Maoist government of Nepal. The truth is that the entire embankment along the river Kosi and its barrage – though situated inside the Himalayan nation and not in the Indian side – is supervised and controlled by the engineers of the Bihar government under the India-Nepal Treaty of mid-1950s.
The people’s anger was not just over the unprecedented man-made deluge when the entire river Kosi changed its course – at places even over 100 km east – but also on the belated response of the state government machinery to rescue them out. Ironically, Bihar’s water resources minister and Nitish’s chum, Vijendra Yadav, hails from the worst-affected Supaul district. If the local LJP MP, Ranjeeta Ranjan, is to be believed the contract for the upkeep of this embankment was given to Vijendra’s brother-in-law. The tragedy is that the breach does not took place all out of sudden. The eastern embankment near Kushaha has been leaking since August 6 and it finally caved in on the intervening night of August 17-18.
This delayed response not only increased the devastation and death toll by many times but also hindered the disaster management team from the Centre from taking necessary steps in the initial period. This made the people of the region so furious that they started attacking the elected representatives of the ruling National Democratic Alliance. The BJP MP, Sukhdeo Paswan, three NDA MLAs – two of BJP and one of Janata Dal (United) – were publicly thrashed and locked at different places by the starving crowd of victims when they reached different flood-affected places empty-handed. One of the BJP MLAs, Janardan Yadav, had his hand fractured in the process. Even the chief minister and his deputy Sushil Kumar Modi faced hostile crowds when they landed at a marooned place. The victims of the flood were furious on this sight seeing visit when lakhs of people were engulfed with flood, clutching to their lives and starving for days. At some places they threw their children in the turbulent water of the flood as they died in their laps for want of food and water.
As the country mourns one of the worst disasters in the recent time and death toll continues to move up, economists like Amartya Sen will have to re-write their theories about democracy and its effect on people during disasters. After all in ‘democratic’ Bihar the Press imposed self-censorship just because of vested interests – the name of two top editors of television channels and at least one of print media figure in Nitish Kumar’s state planning board, an organisation which hardly plans anything. But there is a silver-lining, the opposition is really powerful in Bihar and is in power in Delhi.