Incendiary Circumstances (2 page)

That morning, as the family was gathering outside the house, the earth began to heave with a violence that none of them had ever experienced before; it shook so hard that it was impossible to stand still, and they were forced to throw themselves on the ground. Then the ground cracked and fountains of mud-brown water came geysering out of these fissures. Like all the islanders, Obed Tara was accustomed to tremors in the earth, but neither he nor anyone else there had seen anything like this before. It took a while before the ground was still enough for them to regain their footing, and no sooner had he risen to his feet than he heard a wild, roaring sound. Looking seaward, he saw a wall of water advancing toward his house. Gathering his relatives, he began to run. By the time he looked back, his house, and the neighborhood in which it stood, had vanished under the waves. Two elderly members of the family were lost, and everything they possessed was gone—the car, the phone booth, the house. The family spent a couple of nights in the island's interior, and then the elders deputed Obed Tara to go to Port Blair to see what he could secure for them by way of relief and supplies.

By the time he finished telling me this story, there was a catch in his voice, and he was swallowing convulsively to keep from sobbing. I asked him, "Why don't you go to the army offices and tell them who you are? I am sure they will do what they can to help you."

He shook his head, as if to indicate that he had considered and dismissed this thought many times over. "The sea took my uniform, my ration card, my service card, my tribal papers—it took everything," he said. "I can't prove who I am. Why should they believe me?"

He led me to the far side of the camp, where another group of islanders was sitting patiently under a tent. They too had lost everything; their entire village had disappeared under the sea; saltwater had invaded their fields and taken away their orchards. They could not contemplate going back, they said; the stench of death was everywhere, and the water sources had been contaminated and would not be usable for years.

The leader of the group was a man by the name of Sylvester Solomon. A one-time serviceman in the navy, he had retired some years ago. He too had lost all his papers; he had no idea how he would claim his pension again. Worse still, the bank that had custody of his family's money had also been swept away, along with all its records.

I told him that by law the bank was obliged to return his money, and he smiled, as if at a child. I wanted to persuade him of the truth of what I'd said, but when I looked into his eyes, I knew that in his place, I too would not have the energy or the courage to
take on the struggles that would be required to reclaim my life's savings from that bank.

In the same camp I encountered a Sikh woman by the name of Paramjeet Kaur. Noticing my notebook, she said, "Are you taking names too? Here, write mine down." She was a woman of determined aspect, dressed in a dun-colored
salwar kameez.
She had come to the islands some thirty years before, by dint of marriage. Her husband was a Sikh from Campbell Bay, a settlement on the southernmost tip of the Nicobar island chain, less than 125 miles from northern Sumatra. Like many others in the settlement, her husband belonged to a family that had been given a grant of land in recognition of service to the army (to distribute land in this way is a tradition that goes back to the British Indian Army and its efforts to engage the loyalties of Indian sepoys). But Paramjeet Kaur's in-laws came to the Nicobar Islands well after independence, in 1969, at a time when agricultural land had become scarce on the mainland. They were given 15
bighas
of land and a plot to build a residence. The settlement that grew up around them was as varied as the regiments of the Indian army: there were Marathis, Malayalis, Jharkhandis, and people from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

"There was nothing there but jungle then," said Paramjeet Kaur. "We cleared it with our own hands, and we laid out orchards of areca and coconut. With God's blessing we prospered, and built a cement house with three rooms and a veranda."

The strip of land that was zoned for residential plots lay right on the seafront, providing the settlers with fine views of the beach. It was no mere accident, then, that placed Paramjeet Kaur's house in the path of the tsunami of December 26: its location was determined by an ordering of space that owed more to Europe than to its immediate surroundings. The sea poses little danger to the smiling corniches of the French Riviera or the coastline of Italy; the land-encircled Mediterranean is not subject to the play of tides, and it does not give birth to tropical storms. The Indian Ocean and especially the Bay of Bengal, however, are fecund in the breeding
of cyclones. This may be the reason that a certain wariness of the sea can be seen in the lineaments of the ancient harbor cities of southern Asia. They are often situated in upriver locations, at a cautious distance from open water. In recent times the pattern seems to have been reversed, so that it could almost be stated as a rule that the more modern and prosperous a settlement, the more likely it is to hug the water. On Car Nicobar, for example, the Indian Air Force base was built a few dozen yards from the water's edge, and it was laid out so that the more senior the servicemen were, the closer they were to the sea. Although it is true that no one could have anticipated the tsunami, the choice of location is still surprising. Cyclones, frequent in this region, are associated with surges of water that rise to heights of 40 or 50 feet, and their effect would have been similar. Surely the planners were not unaware of this? But of course it is all too easy to be wise after the event: given the choice between a view of the beach and a plot in the mosquito-infested interior, what would anyone have chosen before December 26, 2004?

On the morning of that day, Paramjeet Kaur and her family were inside their sea-facing house when the earthquake struck. The ground rippled under their feet like a sheet waving in the wind, and no sooner had the shaking stopped than they heard a noise "like the sound of a helicopter." Paramjeet Kaur's husband, Pavitter Singh, looked outside and saw a wall of water speeding toward them. "The sea has split apart
[Samundar phat gaya],
" he shouted. "Run, run!" There was no time to pick up documents or jewelry; everyone who stopped to do so was killed. Paramjeet Kaur and her family ran for more than a mile without looking back, and were just able to save themselves.

"But for what?" Thirty years of labor had been washed away in an instant; everything they had accumulated was gone, and their land was sown with salt. "When we were young, we had the energy to cut the jungle and reclaim the land. We laid out fields and orchards and we did well. But at my age, how can I start again? Where will I begin?"

"What will you do, then?" I asked.

"We will go back to Punjab, where we have family. The government must give us land there; that is our demand."

In other camps I met office workers from Uttar Pradesh, fishermen from coastal Andhra Pradesh, and construction laborers from Bengal. They had all built good lives for themselves in the islands, but now, having lost their homes, their relatives, and even their identities, they were intent on returning to the mainland, no matter what.

"If nothing else," one of them said to me, "we will live in slums beside the rail tracks. But never again by the sea."

 

How do we quantify the help needed to rebuild these ruined lives? The question is answered easily enough if we pose it not in the abstract but in relation to ourselves. To put ourselves in the place of these victims is to know that all the help in the world would not be enough. Sufficiency is not a concept that is applicable here; potentially there is no limit to the amount of relief that can be used. This is the assumption that motivates ordinary people to open their purses, even though they know that governments and big companies have already contributed a great deal. This is why no disaster assistance group has ever been known to say, "We have to raise exactly this much and no more." But when it comes to the disbursement of these funds, the assumptions seem to undergo a drastic change, and nowhere more than in out-of-the-way places.

In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, although the manpower and machinery for the relief effort are supplied largely by the armed forces, overall authority is concentrated in the hands of a small clutch of senior civil servants in Port Blair. No matter the sense of crisis elsewhere; the attitude of the officials of Port Blair is one of disdainful self-sufficiency. On more than one occasion I heard them dismissing offers of help as unnecessary and misdirected. Supplies were available aplenty, they said; in fact, they had more on their hands than they could distribute, and there was a danger that perishable materials would rot on the runways.

This argument is of course entirely circular: logically speaking, bottlenecks of distribution imply a need for
more
help, not less. But for the mandarins of Port Blair, the relief effort is a zero-sum game in which they are the referees. What conceivable help could their subjects need other than the amount that they, the providers, decide is appropriate to their various stations?

Are supplies really available aplenty, throughout the islands? The tale told in the relief camps is of course exactly the opposite of that which echoes out of the lairs of officialdom. Most of the refugees had to wait several days before they were evacuated. Forgotten in their far-remote islands, they listened to radio broadcasts that told them their nation was rushing aid to Sri Lanka and had refused all outside help as unnecessary. For the thirsty and hungry, there was little consolation in the thought that these measures might help their country establish itself as a superpower. In Campbell Bay, according to several reports, refugees were moved to such fury by the indifference of the local officials that they assaulted an officer who was found ushering in the New Year with a feast. Accounts of this incident, confirmed by several sources in the coast guard and police, were, characteristically, denied by the civil authorities.

In Port Blair, relief camps are the main sources of aid and sustenance for the refugees. These are all sustained by private initiatives: they are staffed by volunteers from local youth groups, religious foundations, and so on, and their supplies are provided by local shopkeepers, businessmen, and citizens' organizations. I met with the organizers of several relief camps, and they were unanimous in stating that they had received no aid whatsoever from the government, apart from some water. They knew that people on the mainland were eager to help and that a great deal of money had been raised. None of these funds had reached them; presumably the money had met the same bottlenecks of distribution as the supplies that were lying piled on the runways. That it should be possible for the people of a small town like Port Blair to provide relief to so many refugees is the bright side of this dismal story: it
is proof, if any were needed, that the development of civil society in India has far outpaced the institutions of state and the personnel who staff them.

The attitude of the armed forces is not the same as that of the civilian authorities. At all levels of the chain of command, from Lieutenant General B. S. Thakur, the commanding officer in Port Blair, to the
jawans
(privates) who are combing through the ruins of Car Nicobar, there is an urgency, a diligence, and an openness that are in striking contrast to the stance of the civilian personnel. Indeed, the feats performed by some units speak of an exemplary dedication to duty. Consider, for example, the case of Wing Commander B.S.K. Kumar, a helicopter pilot at the Car Nicobar airbase. On December 26, he was asleep when the earthquake made itself felt. His quarters were a mere hundred feet from the sea. Not only did he manage to outrun the tsunami, with his wife and child; he was airborne within ten minutes of the first wave. In the course of the day he winched up some sixty stranded people and evacuated another two hundred and forty. His colleague, Wing Commander Maheshwari, woke too late to escape the wave. As the waters rose, he was forced to retreat to the roof of his building with his wife and daughter. Along with twenty-nine other people, he fought for his footing on the roof until all were swept off. He managed to make his way to land but was separated from his family; two hours passed before they were found, clinging to the trunk of a tree. Of the twenty-nine people on that roof, only six survived. And yet, despite the ordeal, Wing Commander Maheshwari flew several sorties that day.

Considering the diligence of the armed forces and the enthusiasm and generosity of ordinary citizens, how is the attitude of the island's civilian administration to be accounted for? The answer is simple: a lack of democracy and popular empowerment. As a Union Territory, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have no legislature and thus no elected representatives with any clout, apart from a single member of Parliament. Elsewhere in India, in any crisis, officials have to answer to legislators at every level, and a failure to
act would result in their being hounded by legislators and harried by trade unions, student groups, and the like. As Amartya Sen has shown in his work on famines, these mechanisms are essential to the proper distribution of resources in any situation of extreme scarcity. In effect, the political system serves as a means by which demands are articulated. The media similarly serve to create flows of information. These are precisely the mechanisms that are absent in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. There are no elected representatives to speak for the people, and the media have been excluded from large swaths of territory. It is not for no reason that on the mainland, where these mechanisms do exist, the attitude of administrators in the affected districts has been more sensitive to the needs of the victims and substantially more open to the oversight of the press and to offers of help from other parts of the country.

It is common for civil servants to complain of the perils of political interference. The situation on the islands is proof that in the absence of vigorous oversight, many (although certainly not all) officials will revert to the indifference and inertia that are the natural condition of any bureaucracy.