Distress call

Political one-upmanship must not be allowed to distract attention from the task in Uttarakhand

A week after flash floods and landslides washed away vast habitations and roads in parts of Uttarakhand,the scope of destruction and human loss is still difficult to estimate. Tens of thousands have been evacuated,and rescue work was on over the weekend — one of the military’s most ambitious operations in peace-time — to get as many of an untold number still stranded to safe shelter before rains return and again hamper relief efforts. Indeed,once the affected people — pilgrims and local inhabitants — of the worst-hit districts of Rudraprayag,Chamoli and Uttarkashi are attended to,an immediate challenge will remain. With the monsoon season having only just begun,the unfolding facts of this tragedy are a counsel to quickly put in place emergency procedures to tackle — if not prevent — further disaster that the rains and shattered infrastructure may wreak. When a disaster of this scale strikes and washes away,literally,the ground beneath people’s feet,it shatters their confidence. This is a human tragedy on an epic scale and it will test the system’s resolve to stay the course by attending to big and small details real-time. It is a moment to restore confidence by putting the human dimension of the disaster at the centre,not use it to score political points or force-fit the destruction into one’s preferred ideology on development and ecology.

It is disheartening to witness the unseemliness that has crept into the political discourse over being first off the block with a possibly good suggestion,and its use to fuel a rhetoric of recrimination divorced from the urgent task of rescue and relief. There may be valid reasons for declaring this a national calamity,as the BJP and other opposition parties are demanding,but the gusto with which they have gone from making a suggestion to seeking its actualisation,is intemperate. It is a wilful attempt to use the issue to ignite oppositional politics,by presenting an instrument to help the state get easier access to funds as something that is urgent to the current operation. Compounding the unseemliness is the exchange of accusations between the Congress and BJP over the aerial survey undertaken by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi of the rain-affected terrain,in an apparent attempt to use the rescue effort to project his national ambitions as the BJP’s newly anointed campaign chief.

There will be a time for stock-taking,to determine whether and to what degree the scale of tragedy could have been lessened as well as whether the rescue could have been hastened. But it cannot be done in the midst of an operation now in swing,on war footing,and one that is being conducted in the little openings provided by fair weather.