When the Prime Minister arrived, he was given a sanitised tour so that he could remain oblivious of the flaws in his vaunted Gujarat model. (Express Photo)-What happened last week in Morbi was much, much more than a horrible, heartbreaking, needless tragedy. Look carefully into the debris of that broken suspension bridge and you will see a mirror that reflects the face of Indian officialdom. It is an ugly sight. A shocking reminder that the men and women who govern us lack compassion and basic humanity. They were more interested in saving their skins and their ‘image’ than in offering genuine succor to people now condemned to live out their lives haunted by the memory of those they lost for no reason. Every parent whose child died that day will be tormented forever by the thought of what the little ones may have suffered in the last terrifying moments of their tragically short lives.
You would think that the first thing that those responsible for allowing 135 people to die so horrifically would consider as their foremost duty would be to assuage the pain of survivors of this totally preventable calamity. Instead, they worried about the impression they would make on the Prime Minister. So, in Morbi’s Civil Hospital, officials allowed grieving relatives to wait while they got busy whitewashing the walls of the hospital and bringing in new water coolers, beds, and clean sheets so that Narendra Modi would not see how disgusting and dirty provincial hospitals usually are.
When the Prime Minister arrived, he was given a sanitised tour so that he could remain oblivious of the flaws in his vaunted Gujarat model. He met survivors in the newly refurbished hospital ward but not those whose lives have been destroyed like the pregnant woman who lost a husband and two children and told an NDTV reporter that she needed nothing anymore. “What help can anyone give me now. I have lost everything.”
Speaking of NDTV I want to put on record that this channel’s reporters showed sensitivity and genuine concern while reporting the sad, horrific details of the tragedy and the coverup. What was worrying was that so many other channels behaved as if the needless death of so many people was of no consequence. And within hours of the Prime Minister’s visit to Morbi, BJP trolls were activated on social media platforms to start blaming the accident on ‘urban Naxals’. What makes the Morbi tragedy more consequential than others is that it brought out so many of the flaws in our system of governance that we know exist but whose existence we normally ignore.
Why were people allowed onto a bridge that was not certified as safe? Why was the contract to repair the bridge given to a company that makes clocks and electrical fittings? Who were the officials responsible for oversight? Were they corrupt or blind? They must be publicly shamed and sacked. Why was the owner of the company responsible for the murder of more than a hundred innocent people allowed to vanish into thin air? Will we be witness yet again to murderers going free?
One of the most painful stories I covered was the Uphaar Cinema fire in 1997. Fifty-nine people died and several suffered serious injuries only because the cinema’s doors remained locked. People suffocated to death slowly and horribly, watching their children die before their eyes. The wife of a man I know gave him on her cellphone a detailed account of the deaths of their three children before dying herself. Nobody would have died in that cinema if the doors had been opened. It was as preventable a tragedy as the collapse of the bridge in Morbi and as far as I know nobody except some underlings were punished. Justice moved as it usually does in our country at a pace so slow that the owners of the cinema remained unpunished for decades.
The Prime Minister has promised a ‘detailed inquiry’ into what happened in Morbi. This is about the most useless thing to do because all that will happen is that taxpayers’ money and time will be wasted on discovering what we already know to be true. The contract to repair the bridge was given to the wrong people who sub-contracted further to a local contractor who clearly had no experience of repairing bridges. Do we need a ‘detailed inquiry’ to establish this? The officials responsible for oversight should already be in jail charged with murder. As should those officials who did not notice that the bridge was being opened before it had been checked for safety. An inquiry, if needed at all, can happen after this. First, there should be a serious attempt to bring about speedy justice.
Meanwhile, someone at the highest levels of the BJP needs to take charge of ensuring that the social media trolls already deployed to blame everything on ‘urban Naxals’ are told to shut up. There are those who are already screaming about how ‘politics’ is being played over the pyres of the dead. They should be ordered to shut up too or at least learn the difference between politics and governance. The people who lost their lives that afternoon when they took their small children, dressed in festive finery, onto the bridge for some thrills and fun died not because there was a failure of politics but because there was an unforgivable, criminal failure of governance. Unless there are special courts set up for quick trials and punishment this will happen again and again and again.