Opinion - News Analysis   

Black farce, bleak prospects

Praveen Swami

The absence of a clear disaster-management plan has reduced earthquake victims to beggars.

Photo: Praveen Swami

INDOMITABLE SPIRIT: Five-year-old Salma Mughal, a Gundishot resident who was injured in the Kashmir earthquake, smiles at the camera. It was the first time she had been photographed.

EARLY IN 2002, a high-explosive artillery round from across the Line of Control ploughed into Abdul Qadoos Kanth's home in Tangdhar, blowing off its tin roof, gouging out the first-floor walls and almost killing his mother in the process. His newly rebuilt home is now one of just two that are still standing in the neighbourhood, but Kanth is not counting his blessings.

"Someone has cursed our land," he mutters darkly, "there's always some calamity or the other just around the corner."

To residents of the villages and hamlets that dot the LoC, the Kashmir earthquake is evidence of Kanth's proposition. For decades, like much of Jammu and Kashmir's mountain population, regions along the LoC had received little development assistance from administrations dominated by ethnic-Kashmiri bureaucrats and politicians from the plains. By any index, be it literacy, infant mortality or health, the Kashmir Valley is far ahead of the mountains that surround it.

In the days after the earthquake, some had hoped that the deluge of media attention brought by the Rs.650 crore relief package announced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would help build badly-needed rural infrastructure, and develop the kinds of facilities the region has long been denied. Now, as rain and snow herald the coming of a long winter that will cut off the more remote villages for months, the promises of reconstruction are starting to look like a cruel joke.

Black farce

It is hard to miss the elements of farce in what is passing for a relief effort in Tangdhar. When All Parties Hurriyat Conference chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq rolled in to Tangdhar on October 11, he was accompanied by nine vehicles packed with cheering supporters — and just one truck carrying actual relief supplies. More trucks bearing supplies organised by the APHC did arrive later, but the display did nothing to endear the organisation to Tangdhar's cold and desperate villagers.

For its part, the Indian state was also doing its best to convince local people of its incompetence. Hundreds of Central Reserve Police Force troopers who arrived in Tangdhar hours ahead of the Mirwaiz lined the narrow road leading to the small town, with no instructions on where they were supposed to go and what they were supposed to do. Some busied themselves erecting tents on vacant ground, a sight that must have caused particular irritation to local residents; others spent the afternoon foraging the local bazaar for biscuits and cigarettes.

Volunteerism was also in display, but ill-directed and worse-conceived. In Uri, enthusiastic young men who had gathered relief supplies from their neighbourhoods in Srinagar and Baramulla cruised along the main roads, throwing out biscuits and old clothes to villagers gathered along the way. While the spirit was commendable, the actions, insulting and pointless, were not. "We're being treated like the monkeys on the road to the Vaishno Devi shrine," said Abdul Majid, an Uri resident. "At least the pilgrims give them fresh bananas. We're just getting stale biscuits."

Heroics and half-measures

To be fair, the early relief effort did see incredible heroism. Troops in Tangdhar put aside their person grief at losing their comrades, set up impromptu field kitchens and help dig through the debris for survivors. Army aviation pilots flew dozens of rescue missions in their small four-seat Cheetah helicopters, struggling with the aircraft's manual controls until their hands were swollen from the effort. Civilian doctors from Srinagar, too, pitched in, walking across the hills to give what help they could.

Without overall policy direction, though, such efforts did little other than to marginally mitigate the early stages of the disaster. A major problem was the absence of a clear crisis-management plan — a failure that makes clear, if nothing else does, Jammu and Kashmir is indeed in tune with the Union of India. Despite a succession of major cold-weather crisis in recent years, the state has no protocols for major disasters. Surrounded by irate villagers in Tangdhar, Kupwara Superintendent of Police Sunil Dutt had this sorry message to give two days after the earthquake: "I can't give you what I don't haveand I cannot tell you when I will have something to give."

When supplies did arrive, the administration responded in the most inept ways possible. The sensible move would have been to set up tented colonies along the major roads and valleys, where food and medical aid could have been distributed with relative ease and shelter apportioned to the most vulnerable sections of the community. Instead, tents and blankets were handed out arbitrarily, allowing those most able to shove their way through milling, angry crowds to take what could be had.

Charity and entitlement

At the heart of the problem is that relief is seen as charity — not as an entitlement of disaster-affected citizens. Moreover, local elites — in the main the small-town contractor class spawned by development, traders in high-value products like almonds and government servants — are proving remarkably adept at cornering the best of what is on offer. In Teetwal, the richest families in the village have moved into the warm, well-built Primary Health Centre building. The poor, mainly small farmers and labourers, are huddled out in cold near the village mosque, while medical care is being disbursed from a tent.

Unsurprisingly, the chaotic management of relief has spawned an ugly take-what-you-can-get attitude. In the hamlet of Kandi Bala, villagers blockaded the road to hijack relief supplies meant for more distant villages until their needs were met. A few hours walk away, in Teetwal, the shortage of blankets led some to threaten to stop helicopters from evacuating the ill, the sole way they felt they could press their case. Violence between villagers, amongst neighbours and within families was the almost-inevitable outcome of the widespread desperation.

At the time of writing, there is still no winter management plan for Tangdhar — which means tens of thousands of families will have to face eight feet of snow without any form of organised state aid. Bar a minor miracle, much of the aid that will be handed out to earthquake victims in coming weeks will be spent just surviving the winter, and real reconstruction will remain a mirage. But as Abdul Qadoos Kanth warns, miracles, like everything else, have always been in short supply in Jammu and Kashmir's mountains.

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