Many thousands estimated to be dead, over ten thousand
still stranded and in imminent danger, yet our politicians maintain a figure
hanging around 1000 – see, they have this ability to lessen the impact of death
and disaster by manipulating the data – superhumans! Aren't they?
Like a man is totally helpless and hapless when the nature
strikes with its fury, in the same way, the miserable Indians have resigned to
their fate on being trampled over and manhandled by the politicians.
What else one should say when we, who form the nation,
witness the politicians shamefully slogging out verbal volleys to hide their
failure and score their prospects midst one of the biggest disasters the country
has seen in the recent years – the Uttarakhand flash floods.
Failures and prospects – these two are relatively
contradicting terms. What hues failure takes directly affects the prospect. It
has been the norm. It is and it should still be the norm.
But like the socially responsible role of politics has
been pushed to the oblivion with rampant human greed of the political
corruption in India,
a trend, becoming a norm, that, indeed, is not the norm, this interdependence
of ‘failure and prospect’, too, has no functional dependence left.
In fact, Indian politicians of the day don’t believe in
normative forms of ‘failure’. They feel they fail only when they are not able
to score personal gains.
Failing in carrying out responsibilities for which they
have been voted in or have been accepted as political leaders doesn't amount to
failure for them any more.
And so the governance failure in making a natural
calamity, that the Uttarakhand flash floods is, a man-made disaster, doesn't
even register on the faces of the politicians when they react on it.
Instead, they are busy hobnobbing the state as if it is
some election campaign battleground and so an opportunity for photo sessions
and rallies. They don’t care if them rallying around by air, when air-lifting
is the backbone of the evacuation operations, hampers the relief and evacuation
process.
Politicians are scrambling to visit the disaster-hit state
as if they are rushing on government sponsored irrelevant study tours that
every year costs the exchequer millions from the public funds. It all looks so
crassly insensitive.
So, if biggies like Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, Narendra
Modi and many other known and small politicians including some chief ministers
were not enough to delay the rescue operations, another biggie, Rahul Gandhi,
who had become a matter of debate by his absence as he was not in India, too,
took the plunge today by visiting the flood-ravaged state.
Now who cares on the worthiness of such debates as delayed
responses or prolonged silences on issues of wider social repercussions have
become trademarks of Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi. One is the prime-minister
in office now while the other is the next prime-ministerial candidate of the
current ruling party! See the misery of ‘we, the Indians’!
But, they are superhumans, like most other politicians –
entitled to act so. So, they are trying to mitigate and lessen the impact of
the disaster in their trademark ways. They are making statements that nothing
could have been be done as they were not informed of such heavy rains yet they
have done impressive work and have saved many lives by acting in time.
But what about those thousands who were still trapped
while the helicopters were ferrying politicians?
But what about the unplanned development promoted by the
human greed and political corruption that has made this calamity so disastrous?
Politicians like Rahul Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Narendra
Modi, Digvijay Singh and others cannot answer it and they won’t bother to
answer it.
A report about a biggie politician says he evacuated 15000
trapped pilgrims from his state in one day; another politician says the people
from his states are being ill-treated in Uttarakhand; another politician
responsible for governing the environmentally fragile state refuses aid from a
state as the government there is of political opposition; a powerful political
duo sitting on top of the decision-making process of the country still doesn’t
find enough reasons to declare the calamity a national disaster – the list
about self-made and self-followed reflections of the disaster, that is just 9
days old, is long.
Our politicians, superhumans they are! They don’t buy what
the reality says. They follow what suits their interests, manipulating the
reality of the masses with the feasibility of their own interests.
They believe they are not answerable to anyone. Denial is
their primary weapon and manipulation is their ultimate weapon, even if it
comes at a cost of thousands of lives struggling to get out of the imminent danger
they are in.
Many thousands are still trapped in Uttarakhand while the
weather has started taking bad shape again making the rough terrain even less
accessible for the relief and rescue work and sadly, our sincere and honest
soldiers, carrying out the operations at many ‘ground zeros’ of the massive
devastation, are not superhumans!