Chief Minister Jyoti Basu's description of the flood havoc in West Bengal as a national disaster is not an exaggeration. The state has suffered an enormous human calamity. Nine districts have been submerged for a week. As many as 15 million people are trying to survive somehow in flooded fields and villages. Another three million are huddled in relief camps. Reports of conditions in the state rarely capture the whole trauma. Consider families crouched precariously on rooftops waiting in the rain for an Indian Air Force helicopter to drop their first meal in several days. Often the swirling water gets the packets of rice sweetened with gur before the people do. Such a scenario calls for West Bengal's politicians to put their quarrels aside and concentrate their energies on ensuring that rescue and relief work is carried out efficiently. That unfortunately is not the case.The Left Front has been distracted with preparations for a convention at which Mamata Banerjee will be denounced for conspiring to bring down the government. Banerjee herself was off in Hyderabad this week to recruitChandrababu Naidu to her political cause. She has belatedly turned her attention to the floods but only to find another stick with which to beat the Basu government. Questions are being asked about the timing of the release of water from various dams but her allegation that the Left Front government engineered the floods is ridiculous. She would do better to heed the advice of Naidu and apply her mind to helping refugees from the flood. With so many millions hungry, homeless and vulnerable to disease it is absurd for politicians to be arguing about whether this or that district should be declared a disturbed area. A national disaster demands undivided attention. Every resource should be harnessed to minimise the damage.Although relief operations have been mounted, a sense of urgency has been missing. The administration regards floods as regular if nasty visitations which nobody can do very much about till long afterwards. Why wait for the flood waters to recede before going to the aid of stranded people? Why, when floods are an annual occurrence, are West Bengal's emergency services not better equipped with rubber dinghies, cell phones and first-aid kits? Only on Wednesday when the army was finally called out to assist local authorities did the government seem to wake to the full extent of the disaster and to all the dimensions of the rehabilitation work that lies ahead. Now, political differences between the Left Front and the NDA threaten to result in a completely unnecessary delay over the release of Central relief funds for West Bengal. It would be unforgivable to bicker over human tragedy. Instead, the Centre and state should coordinate efforts to put people back on their feet. Political leaders have waxed eloquent inrecent days about their concern for West Bengal. Will they keep talking and leave it to the army, the air force and Anand Margis to provide practical help? Or will political parties also lend a hand and get down to the really hard but genuinely useful work of rehabilitating millions of dislocated people?
