Verdict by fire

The Uphaar judgment will be read in different ways by those most closely connected to it. But in convicting all the 12 accused in the case, the Delhi sessions court has upheld the liability principle. It has also recognised that each of the accused — from the owners of the complex to officials of the electricity department — are, to a lesser or greater extent, personally culpable for having created the conditions for that tragic inferno of June 12, 1997, which killed 59 and grieviously injured many others.

That the Uphaar case was kept alive through ten long years is, first of all, a testimony to the grit and resilience of the relatives of the victims. They wanted to translate their own irreparable personal loss into a public gain, so that the tragedy will always serve as a reminder that there can be no negotiation on public safety. There were other heroes too in this battle against forgetting, including a deputy commissioner, Naresh Kumar, whose meticulous and comprehensive inquiry report provided the foundation on which the case was pursued. It cited building bye-laws, cinematograph rules, and electricity standards to establish how each rule and regulation was flouted, either for cynical private gain or because of astounding carelessness.

The negligence was, of course, monumental. A Delhi Vidyut Board transformer was installed on the ground floor of the building with cars parked in front of it. There was a mezzanine floor that was illegal. There were no fire extinguishers around, and in flagrant violation of the cinematograph rules, a crucial gangway, exits and stairs were blocked in order to accommodate more seats. But there is nothing in this catalogue of wrongs and shoddy regulation to merit surprise. Ten years after the Uphaar fire — and indeed other conflagrations of this kind including the one that killed over 50 people in a consumer fair at Meerut’s Victoria Park in April 2006 — public safety continues to be the missing link in our infrastructure and event planning. An India on the growth path, with its brave new infrastructure changing urban skylines and rural lives, simply cannot afford the old callousness and familiar inertia that have created tragedies like the Uphaar inferno.