Incendiary Circumstances Read online

  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.

  Clearly the central government is aware that there is a problem, for the relief operation was restructured on January 2, reportedly at the personal intervention of Sonia Gandhi. What is more, several senior members of the ruling party have been dispatched to the outlying islands, not just for token visits but to make sure that supplies are properly distributed. These are welcome first steps, but it is essential for the central government to move quickly to create a more responsive and efficient disaster relief operation in this region, not just for the management of this disaster but for the long term. If anything can be said with any certainty, it is that the tsunami will not be the last seismic upheaval to shake the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

  In 1991, after lying dormant for two hundred years, the volcano of Barren Island became active again, and there are reports that it erupted around the time of the earthquake of December 26. On September 14, 2002, a 6.5 magnitude earthquake occurred near Diglipur in North Andaman Island; now there are unconfirmed reports of a minor eruption in the same area. The signs are clear: no one can say the earth has not provided warnings of its intent.

  In Port Blair I found that the tsunami's effects on the outlying islands could only be guessed at. The refugees in the camps spoke of apocalyptic devastation and tens of thousands dead; the authorities' estimates were much more modest. There were few, if any, reliable independent assessments, for the civil authorities had decided that no journalists or other "outsiders" were to be allowed to travel to the outlying islands. The reason given was that of the battlefield: too many resources would be spent on their protection. But no battle was under way in the islands, and the dangers of the tsunami were long past. Public ferry and steamer services linking Port Blair to the outer islands were in operation and had plenty of room for paying passengers. And yet journalists, Indian and foreign, who attempted to board these ships were forcibly dragged off.

  On January 1 there was an unexpected parting in this curtain of exclusion. A couple of senior members of the ruling party came to Port Blair with the intent of traveling farther afield. It was quickly made known that an air force plane would be provided to take the ministers, and a retinue of journalists, to Car Nicobar the next day. This island, which is positioned halfway between the Andaman and Nicobar chains, is home to some 30,000 people, and it houses an air base that makes it something of a hub in relation to the more southerly islands.

  Hoping to get on this plane, I duly presented myself at the airport, only to find that a great many others had arrived with the same expectation. As always in such situations, there was considerable confusion about who would get on. After the ministers had boarded, a minor melee ensued at the foot of the ramp that led to the plane's capacious belly. Knowing that I stood little chance of prevailing in this contest, I had almost resigned myself to being left behind when a young man in a blue uniform tapped my elbow and pointed across the airfield. "You want to go to Car Nicobar? That plane over there is carrying relief supplies. Just go and sit down. No one will say anything."

  I sought no explanation for this unsolicited act of consideration; it seemed typical of the general goodwill of the military personnel I had encountered on the islands. As if on tiptoe, I walked across the tarmac and up the ramp. The plane was a twin-engine Soviet-era AN-26, rusty but dependable, and its capacious fuselage was lined with folding benches. The round portholes that pierced its sides were like eyes that had grown rheumy with age; time had sandpapered the panes of glass so that they were almost opaque. The cargo area was packed with mattresses, folding beds, cases of mineral water, and sacks of food, all covered with a net of webbing. Some half-dozen men were inside, sitting on the benches with their feet planted askew beside the mass of supplies. I seated myself in the only available space, beside a short, portly man with thick glasses and well-oiled, curly hair. He was dressed in a stiffly ironed brown safari suit, and he had an air of irascibility that spoke of a surfeit of time spent in filing papers and running offices. He was muttering angrily when I came aboard: "What do those people care? What have they ever done to help anyone...?" Ofall the people on that plane, he was perhaps the last I would have chosen to sit beside. I was keen to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, while he seemed determined to draw attention to himself. It could be only a matter of minutes, I thought, before the airmen evicted him. Inexplicably, they did not.

  When the engines started up, my neighbor turned his attention to me. "These big people think they are so great, but what help have they given?" I assumed this to be a general expression of disgust, of the kind that is to be heard on every train and bus in the country. But then he added suddenly, "Let them go through what I have gone through. Let them suffer—then they would see..."

  This hit me with the force of a shock. His well-laundered safari suit, his air of almost comical self-importance, his irascibility— there was nothing about him that bespoke the victim. But I understood now why the airmen had ignored his rants; they knew something about him that I did not, and this was their way of showing compassion.

  In the meanwhile the tirade continued: "If those politicians had suffered as I have, what would they do? This is the question I want to ask."

  I winced to think of my first response to his mutterings. "What exactly has happened?" I asked. "Tell me."

  He did not want his name published, so I shall call him "the Director." This indeed was his official title: he had been posted to Car Nicobar in 1991, as the director of the island's Malaria Research Centre and had lived there ever since. He was originally from Puri, in Orissa, and had been trained at the University of Berhampore. During his tenure in Car Nicobar, he had married and had two children, a son, who was now thirteen, and a daughter, who was ten. His home was in Malacca—the seafront township I'd heard about in the camps—and his office was just a few minutes' walk from where he lived. In this office he had accumulated a great wealth of epidemiological knowledge. Car Nicobar had once been rife with malaria, he told me. In an island with a population of just 30,000, the annual incidence had been as high as 3810, even as recently as 1989. But during his time there he had succeeded in bringing the rate down to a fraction of this number. It was clear, from the readiness with which he quoted the figures, that he was immensely—and justly—proud of what he had achieved during his stay on the island.

  On December 25, 2004, the Director was in Port Blair, on his way to New Delhi. Since he was traveling for official reasons, he had left his family in Malacca. He spent the night of December 25 in a government guesthouse—the Haddo Circuit House, which stands close to the water. On the morning of the twenty-sixth he was woken by the shaking of his bed. He stepped down to find the floor heaving and realized that an earthquake had hit the town. As he was running out of the building, his mobile phone rang. Glancing quickly at the screen, he saw that his wife was calling from Malacca. He guessed that the earthquake had struck Car Nicobar too, but he was not unduly alarmed. Tremors were frequently felt on the island, and he thought his wife would be able to cope. The guesthouse, meanwhile, was still shaking, and there was no time to talk. He cut off the call and ran outside; he would phone back later, he decided, once the tremors stopped.

  He waited out the earthquake outside, and when the ground was still at last, he hit the call button on his phone. There was no answer, and he wondered if the network was down. But he had little time to think about the matter, because a strange phenomenon had suddenly begun to take place before him: the water in the harbor had begun to rise, very rapidly, and the anchored ships seemed to be swirling about in the grip of an unseen hand. Along with everyone else, he ran to higher ground.

  The islands of the Andaman chain rise steeply out of the sea, and the harbor and waterfront of Port Blair are sheltered by a network of winding fjords and inlets. Such is the lay of the land that the turbulence that radiated outward from the earthquake's epicenter manifested itself here not as an onrushing wall of water but as a surge in the water level. Although this caused
a good deal of alarm, the damage was not severe.

  It was not long, however, before it occurred to the Director that the incoming swell in Port Blair's harbor might have taken a different form elsewhere. The Nicobar Islands do not have the high elevations of their northern neighbors, the Andamans. They are low-lying, for the most part, and some, like Car Nicobar, stand no more than a few yards above sea level at their highest point. Already anxious, the Director became frantic when word of the tsunami trickled down to the waterfront from the naval offices farther up the slope.

  The Director knew of a government office in Car Nicobar that had a satellite phone. He dialed the number again and again; it was either busy or there was no answer. When at last he got through, the voice at the other end told him, with some reluctance, that Malacca had been badly hit. It was known that there were some survivors, but as for his family, there was no word.

  The Director kept calling, and in the afternoon he learned that his thirteen-year-old son had been found clinging to the rafters of a church some 200 yards behind their house. Arrangements were made to bring the boy to the phone, and the Director was able to speak to him directly later that night. He learned from his son that the family had been in the bedroom when the earthquake started. A short while later, a terrifying sound from the direction of the sea had driven the three of them into the drawing room. The boy had kept running, right into the kitchen. The house was built of wood, on a cement foundation. When the wave hit, the house dissolved into splinters and the boy was carried away as if on a wind. Flailing his arms, he succeeded in taking hold of something that seemed to be fixed to the earth. Through wave after wave he managed to keep his grip. When the water receded, he saw that he was holding on to the only upright structure within a radius of several hundred yards. Of the township, nothing was left but a deep crust of wreckage.