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Reflections on the Tsunami |
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Humanitarian concerns figure little in the disaster management policies of the government; nor do they guide the functioning of various agencies expected to provide relief. The absence of coordinated strategies to provide aid to the affected renders futile any debate on the ability of science and religion to predict disasters or protect potential victims. |
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Sumanta Banerjee |
Natural calamities have always evoked reactions and responses in India that vary from people to people. Way back in the 1930s, during the disastrous earthquake in Bihar, Gandhi was said to have described it as god�s punishment for the sins committed by the people! Rabindranath Tagore, who otherwise respected Gandhi, came out in public, admonishing him for his superstitious explanation of the earthquake. There is a tendency among some intellectual circles today, to explain Gandhi�s observation as his attempt to speak in terms of the popular belief in �karma-phal� � which means rewards or punishment for acts done in the past. They interpret Gandhi�s public response to the Bihar earthquake � framed in his religious rhetoric � as his way of chastising the upper caste people for the sins that they had committed by oppressing the dalits.
Incidentally, Gandhi repeated the same argument � that past sins bring about divine retribution � when he visited Noakhali in East Bengal in 1946, at the peak of the communal riots there. When the Hindu landlords came to him, complaining about the atrocities committed on them by Muslims, Gandhi asked them to accept their fate as a punishment for their past sin of acquiring �ill-gotten gains�. Gandhi was obviously operating and intervening in a scenario that was marked by both conflict and collaboration between two sets of norms � traditional popular religious beliefs on the one hand, and modern political discourse on the other.
Today, in the aftermath of the tsunami disaster, we in India are caught up in the same debate between traditional beliefs and scientific solutions. On the one hand, the fisherfolk in Visakhapatnam, despite the devastation caused to them by the sea, are offering traditional prayers to the sea goddess called Gangamma, believed to be their protector. They think that the goddess was furious due to some reason or other, and now needs to be appeased. Two days after the catastrophe that wiped out their homes and near ones, they came in procession and prayed before the goddess in the temple located opposite the harbour (The Hindu, December 28). In Chennai, the goddess is Velankanni Amma, after whom a church is named where fishermen and their families met for Christmas mass just on the eve of the disaster. The guardian angel however failed to protect them (Hindustan Times, December 28). On the other hand, scientific experts are pondering over what went wrong with
communication systems, geophysicists and meteorologists are speculating over why the impact of the disaster could not be mitigated, and environmentalists and health specialists are examining the future effects on the ecosystem and survivors of the tsunami.
Traditional and Modern
This coexistence of the traditional and the modern, the encounter between popular religious beliefs and modern scientific thought in India continues to be an interesting object of study for social scientists, historians, and anthropologists among others. But as for the victims of tsunami, both the old religious belief system and modern scientific systems have let them down. Neither religion nor science could claim certainty � the former because of its inadmissibility, and the latter because of its inadequacy � in this trial on the clash between nature and humanity. In the wider perspective, in the contest between religion and science for winning the minds of people in today�s context, religion is being increasingly monopolised by destructive regressive forces that seek to drag us back to the age of barbarism. Similarly, science is being manipulated by ruling powers in the creation of weapons of destruction that are equally barbaric. While religion provides the umbrella for
murderous internecine conflicts, science provides sophisticated weaponry for the conduct of these conflicts.
Science has devised weapons that can aim at a target with deadly precision, but is yet to devise mechanisms to exactly predict an earthquake. The priorities in scientific research are clearly lopsided. Dictated by contesting ruling powers, they are less oriented towards humanitarian concerns, and more biased in favour of the militarist interests of the states which patronise scientists. More resources are thus spent on experiments in nuclear technology than on research and development for better living of the common citizens. As Robert Oppenheimer once observed: ��a great part of the present scene arises not from what we have learned, but by its application in technology. This, in turn, rests on an organisation of the economy and on our political arrangements. Neither of these derives from, nor is in any tight way related to, the sciences, because, although the growth of knowledge is largely responsive to human needs, it is not fully so� (The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises for
Physicists, 1961).
Even when technology is responsive to human needs, �organisation of the economy and political arrangements� stand in the way of its proper utilisation. Following the traumatic experience of the tsunami, some of our newspaper editors are finding fault with India and Sri Lanka for not having been a part of the international warning system operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It is a network of 26 countries which warn each other of potentially destructive waves that may hit their coastlines within three to 14 hours. But few among the faultfinders pause to question why Indonesia, a member of the network and therefore warned in advance, could not protect thousands of lives and millions of homes from the disaster. It is obviously not only the need for tying up with a warning system, but also the necessity to build up an adequate infrastructure to utilise it to protect the common people. The scattered islands in Indonesia were neither bound by the
necessary communication network that could have warned the islanders in advance, nor provided with the basic support system that could have helped their evacuation at the right time, nor guaranteed the healthcare and medical facilities that could now stem effectively the epidemics that threaten to break out.
It is this lack of humanitarian support services � in spite of the best of modern scientific technology available today � that puts India also in the company of Indonesia and other tsunami-ravaged countries of south and south-east Asia. Whenever there is a natural calamity � whether an earthquake (e g, in Bhuj in 2001), or a cyclone (e g, in Orissa in 1999) � or industrial accidents like the Bhopal disaster in 1984, the unsuitability and inefficiency of the existing infrastructure to cope with the after-effects, get exposed in all its horrid manifestations. The survivors die from epidemics because of the absence of requisite healthcare facilities. Primary health centres do not function in the interior villages, as neither doctors nor medicines are available there. Those who manage to escape epidemics, have to scramble madly to obtain the relief materials that are parsimoniously distributed by the government officials � many among whom siphon off the materials by selling them
elsewhere. The utter insensitivity and carelessness of government agencies, which cannot even coordinate among themselves, was evident recently when Indian air force helicopters dropped food packets in some Tamil Nadu villages which were totally untouched by the tsunami, while aid was still to reach the tsunami-affected villages in other parts of the state. It was the same story of ill-coordination in the islands of Andaman and Nicobar, where the government agencies failed to reach relief to survivors in Port Blair, while tonnes of relief material were rotting at an air base in Car Nicobar island (Hindustan Times, January 1, 2005). The false alarm about a second tsunami on December 30 which triggered panic in the affected areas was yet another instance of lack of coordination � and communication � between the Indian home ministry (which first set off the alarm basing itself on a message from a little known US private firm) and the ministry of science and technology
(which later assuaged fears by dismissing the message as hogwash).
Thus, the �organisation of the economy and political arrangements�, as pointed out by Oppenheimer, become decisive in the task of combating natural calamities. No one blames the Indian government for failing to take precautions against unpredictable fluxes of nature, like the tsunami � which was not anticipated by it, given its inaccessibility to the warning system of which it was not a part. But it has failed in saving lives and homes in the post-tsunami situation � primarily due to the built-in institutional inefficiency, and the sheer inhuman unconcern that marks the behaviour of its agents. Floods and earthquakes had been a part of human experience all over the world. Even the most advanced states, equipped with the latest sophisticated sensors, like Japan or the US, have not been able to predict the onslaught of nature. But what they can do, thanks to the efficiency of their protective social infrastructure, is to at least mitigate the effects of the unpredictable onslaught
by providing immediate relief to its victims � by evacuating them in time, and giving them the necessary medical care to save them from epidemics. In the US, there are flood insurance programmes to protect the pro-perties and belongings of the affected people.
These humanitarian concerns are absent in our government�s policies of disaster management, as well as the functioning of its agencies which are supposed to provide relief to victims of disasters. Debates over the ability of science or religion to predict disasters and protect their victims, have little meaning for the survivors. They expect that the science and technology that make India a nuclear power, should protect them from cataclysms like tsunamis and its after-effects. http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2005&leaf=01&filename=8132&filetype=html
In a HARDtalk interview on 13th January Zeinab Badawi talks to India's High Commissioner to Britain, Kamalesh Sharma.
The southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands were badly hit when the Tsunami struck.
At least fifteen thousand people are dead or missing. Yet amid the global outpouring of sympathy the Indian authorities have refused aid and assistance from other nations.
Why did they take this decision and has it cost them lives? And why does a country as technologically advanced as India not have a proper alert system?
On HARDtalk, Zeinab Badawi spoke to Indian High Commissioner to London Kamalesh Sharma. He responded to criticisms of India's decision to refuse bilateral aid.
"The requirement was not felt to be there. If a country has the capacity to attend to its own requirements, they should be able to do so. It's not a point of principle, it's a point of capacity that we have developed, and this has been demonstrated."
Self reliance
Mr Sharma said India was accepting private donations to the Prime Minister's Fund, but that it did not need aid to respond to the Tsunami.
"We are a country that believes very strongly in self reliance."
Many Indian and international commentators have linked the decision to refuse aid to India's longstanding bid to gain membership of the United Nation's Security Council, but Kamalesh Sharma rejected any link.
"I don't see how it in any way supports the claim of India to a Security Council seat, for the reason that if you take a post like that and if you're not equal to the challenge - which we believe we are - then obviously you expose yourself. India doesn't have to spin a catastrophe in order to burnish its credentials for membership of the Security Council."
HARDtalk can be seen on BBC World at 04:30 GMT,1130 GMT, 1530 GMT, 1930 GMT, 0030 GMT
It can also be seen on BBC News 24 at 04:30 and 23:30
We are a country that believes very strongly in self reliance.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/4173991.stm
- Forwarded by www.goa-world.com/goa/
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