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I don’t have to offer any details of what happened at Wayanad. It is the worst disaster of its kind, or perhaps of any kind, that has ever happened in Kerala. But how could it have been so unexpected to the Malayali mainstream? This is what galls me.

For the whole region, full four decades back, was known to be unstable, ecologically fragile. Back in 1986, local environment watchers were already talking about the instability of Chooralmala and the surrounding areas. The local people knew of it. Landslides, smaller ones, were not uncommon there. The older generation of settlers in the 1980s there said that they did not buy land there; the adivasi elders were alert to signs of danger. In fact, just some years before my visit (in 1988), there had been a landslide there and lives were lost. (I know this because I was a budding researcher beginning to think about what I wanted to work on. My first chosen topic was the ecological history of Wayanad. I covered these areas in an early field trip,to learn more and work towards a proposal).

So what made everybody forget?

To answer that question, perhaps one must think about what dominated our imaginations of development in the three intervening decades. What made ‘development’ sound more like ‘devourlepment’? I think the sheer, serene beauty of the place was its curse. After liberalisation and the capture of our development imagination by neoliberalism post-2000, when everything appeared to be a potential resource to generate wealth from, the place turned into a tourist destination and a small town — like the many towns all over Kerala. This is not the failing of the people there. Perhaps the transformation of the Malayali imagination of space and time after the 1990s is probably responsible. These were times in which the understand of consumption as possible without any reference to the place in which it happens became widespread. It did not matter if you were building in the middle of a vast paddy field or on a choppy beach or on a highly-sloping hillside — you always built a home or a building that looked solid, ‘respectable’, and would be an asset whose value would depreciate less. That these became the abiding concerns was no surprise, for much of the money which built these houses came from the sweat and tears of Malayalis working in the Gulf countries, who did not want to risk their earnings from insecure jobs in productive investment or depreciating assets. This forgetfulness of place was common across all ecological regions in Kerala. The stress of this epidemic of forgetfulness has brought the land to its strain limit. It is at breakdown point, and there is more evidence, other than the present tragedy, that indicates this.

After the 1990s, obtaining the materials for such construction from anywhere, anyway became gradually normalised. Quarry capital is utterly respectable. They funded community kitchens during the COVID-19 pandemic, and resource-strapped panchayats heaved sighs of relief. They are everywhere. They are make a killing, of course, even though this government has increased the royalties and other fees they have to pay. They can bribe everyone from top to bottom of the regulatory system, such is the scale of profits they amass. They can summon muscle power, pay off local opposition, even appear to be saviours to the sections of local people upon who the largely-unusable land from these fragile slopes were thrust on, during Kerala’s land reforms. In Kerala, there are places where a stretch of 20 kilometers has more than 20 quarries, where three small hillocks now bear some 40 quarries. Even the site of the tragedy, classified as extremely fragile, had many quarries around in, within very short distances.

In the 1990s, the enthusiasm about local development and self-government was infectious but it lacked depth when it came to understanding either resource use or ecological security. Looking at the Panchayat Development Reports of granite-rich panchayats of 1996, I am struck by how not one thought of these hills and hillocks as a resource which local people could benefit from through responsible and sustainable use. Indeed, small quarrying here was frowned upon. Nevertheless, construction had already become one of the fastest-growing economic sectors which no one wanted to critique anyway. By the time natural resource predators entered the game — after the ban on mining river sand — the suspicions of panchayats waned progressively (and bribery became common)while the government did precious little to rationalise royalties and fees from this activity.

I am told now that the site of the tragedy had become a thriving tourist spot, with resorts, hotels, and homestays. (A search on Agoda yielded 11 properties in just Meppadi). After the Kerala government new rule that allowed ten percent of plantation land to be used for ‘other’ purposes — and that ‘other’ inevitably means engineering work completely unsuitable to the land and dangerous to human and non-human life. The devastation wreaked by earlier land slides in the vicinity (Puthumala, just 15 kilometers away, in 2019) was never properly assessed for the future dangers it might exacerbate.

The violence that this has perpetrated on the land, not just on Meppadi or Chooralmala, is unspeakable. Look at this map — it is also a map of bleeding wounds on the land. Yes, this was already vulnerable land, as the Gadgil Committee Report pointed out. But we have made it much worse and we will not take responsibility. Now that we have cloudbursts from climate change as triggers, we happily blame it.

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On social media, Pinarayi supporters blame the rain. For them ‘trigger’ is ’cause’. Very convenient. Bad logic, but who cares? Good logic is the logic that will hide the neglect, apathy and of course keep the looting going.

And any of us who open our mouths about the Gadgil Committee report’s observations — they would have sounded outright eerie had they been framed in the language of prediction — are immediately shushed: stop saying such things when the rescue is on ! It is disrespectful! It is a strange argument, completely baseless because no one making it is addressing the rescuers or the rescue machinery of the government (everyone except Hindutva majoritarian voices are cheering it ). But it seems strangely convincing, because not just the average cyber bully but also eminent figures, like the poet K Satchidanandan seems to have made it on Facebook. Alarmingly, this chiding seemed to have grown into a full-blown North Korean-style state ban by yesterday. An order passed by a senior bureaucrat prohibited scientific experts from making field visits there, speaking to the media about the issue and instructed them to secure proper permissions before any research.

It created an immediate uproar, and the Chief Minister had to withdraw it last night itself.

I get the argument that most people made in their shock — that this was evidence that the government has no plans whatsoever to retreat from the insane infrastructure-obsession that has been its hallmark since some years now. I mean, Kerala’s vision of local self-government and local development is no longer taken very seriously; local bodies continue to be useful of course for welfare distribution and as a space where empty piety can still be shown to this vision. So it is no surprise that the constant scolding that anyone who wishes to initiate a public discussion on what has led us to this point is understood as the milder form of the ruling classes’ and state’s gagging of free thought — and evidence for this mounts when the state itself issues a punitive command.

But this does not sound like an adequate explanation when one considers the fact that it runs alongside the constant celebration of Malayali greatness, unity, resilience etc etc in the face of adversity. On FB there is a constant stream of praise to the self — look, how Malayalis work together, look, how the poor contribute to the CM’s Disaster Relief Fund, look, how the small traders and merchants are giving up all their stock for relief. All of which is likely to be true, but it is troubling in the light of the fact that somehow the moral responsibility of making up for, repairing, the damage done by inexcusable neglect by the authorities seems to fall on the shoulders of the ‘people’ — and turning this into a carnival of giving and goodness requires that we suspend our anger against the neglect which led to the disaster in the first place.

I think the combination of the two bad arguments mentioned above seems convincing to many of us because it somehow holds up our terrified collective psyche. We are terrified by the prospect of death and destruction which is now very near each of us (land slides, as seen above, are not merely in Wayanad, and the fury of rivers is everywhere now). We do not want to think about it. Indeed, we will use the chorus of ‘Malayali resilience’ overcoming every danger imaginable to smother our own fears.

Such fears need to be addressed, not repressed. For they can, potentially endanger democracy. During the floods of 2018 and the pandemic, Pinarayi Vijayan rose up in our minds as a paternal saviour-figure who would ‘captain’ our ship and lead it out of the storm. But he can hardly be that, really — too many things have happened since, and it is harder to paint him in such colours. But clearly, that only worsened the trauma. I have always believed that the deranged behaviour displayed by many individuals during the disturbances generated by the Sabarimala temple entry controversy that broke out exactly a month after the Great Deluge of 2018, was actually a display of symptoms engendered by the sudden upturning of a sense of social (often elite) security by the flooding and the difficulties in rescue. Indeed, the elite psyche might have been rattled by the fact that many of them had to bend down to pick up loaves of bread thrown to them by members of Kerala’s often-stigmatised fisher communities from their boats (often because their mansions were constructed in ways that totally obstructed rescue efforts)! Even when such a direct connection cannot be drawn, there can be no doubt that the event caused much psychic trauma. The present tragedy has produced even more trauma perhaps, to not just the sufferers, but to the onlookers who have seen it unfold, witnessed the total helplessness of the victims and those who managed to escape with just their lives. For Malayalis, the destruction of the house (and not just the home and family) carries, probably, a special sort of trauma.

By telling those who want to make the government responsible for ecological security and prevent loss of life in the longer-term to shut up, we are playing out our traumas. Those among us who are outside Kerala should not feed these celebratory narratives: they are cries for help and need to be heard as such. They are cries for a healing state — and because we are colonised by the amoral infrastructural imagination of the neoliberal workfare state that is now the reality in Kerala, we cannot hear them thus.

The failure of the state’s disaster management machinery is huge indeed. Not just in predicting it. After the 2018 floods, the need for revival and refurbishment of the panchayati raj framework was evident, especially because it was evident that it was these institutions that actually that people looked to for help and support. It was important to revive the people-centric knowledge production effort that was once at the heart of decentralised development in Kerala. Instead, it was the highly technocratic disaster management machinery which took this process forward, and along with KILA, it produced a vapid questionnaire to assess the vulnerability of the local bodies to disasters and climate change. This was sent to local bodies. In our own fieldwork in Kerala’s local bodies after 2019, not many functionaries and Kudumbashree leaders had heard of the Disaster Management Report or remembered it vaguely even when some had received training in climate change issues. The questionnaire was filled up and sent back to the DM Authority.

In the wake of this calamity, I am stunned by how little we know about even the numbers of people in the affected area. Ideally, disaster preparedness will include having detailed and regularly-updated maps and data of human and infrastructure presence in the different parts of the local body, on a ward basis or otherwise. It will have data on the numbers of seniors, children, people with special needs, and at least a rough calculation of the resources that they may need in the event of an emergency. Just knowing what kind of buildings are submerged by the slush, and how exactly they are located in relation with each other might help rescue efforts considerably.

So, yes, Amit Shah, who is up to his usual tricks again, pushing the blame on the Kerala government, must be condemned. But that does not mean that we turn a blind eye to the failings of our own rulers.

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Struggling to grasp the political significance of this moment in our history, I stumbled upon Balachandran Chullikkad’s searing poem, Podi. For me, the landslide is also in our public. Somehow, Kerala’s past of fighting power and building a fair and loving society seems to have come loose, like the verdant forest atop the hill in Wayanad that fell. That Past, sadly dismembered into pieces of destruction, yes, quite like the logs of what were living trees, and the rocks that once held them in place, has been carried by the furious rush of greed, in the neoliberal predatory imagination of growth, and now threatens to end our public life. Or, as Balan says, it gathers up into the menacing cloudburst above, each mite swelling into an earth on its own, choking the Future.

Poets always say it so much better, so much more poignantly, gracefully. So I add here my translation of this splendid, brooding, poignant poem of grief:

Dust

Balachandran Chullikkad

The dust is everywhere.

On idols, on lamps

On flags, on drapes

On images, on books,

On thoughts, on feelings.

Everywhere, the dust.

It collects in between the word and its meaning

It shrouds memorials, ideas,

even civilizations.

Cloud-building material, of the Past

The wind bears it across the river

Sometimes each tiny mite rolls itself into an whole earth

And dams up Future’s throat.

In the end,

Night’s underclothes

Draw it all in.