(Bihar Times) Some seventeen years back, Economic and Political Weekly had carried an essay on the ‘irrigation mafia’ in its issue of 21 September 1991. According to its author, nearly 60 percent of the allocations meant for construction and repair of dams and embankment would be pocketed by the politician-contactors-engineers nexus. In fact, breaches in dams and embankments would be eagerly awaited by this nexus to keep the cycle of irrigation and flood-control projects going on. In fact, it is part of the folkloric wisdom that water resources department is the most corrupt government department in the state. An old classmate of mine coughed up more than lakh rupees just to get a peon’s job in Sinchai Bhavan in Patna. A co-villager constructed a modern double-storied house in just five years of his clerical career in the Kosi project. Given this state of affairs, I am surprised by the dominant public opinion which is tomfooling the recent floods as unprecedented.
True, it is unprecedented in the scale of its devastation and the unparalleled human misery it has wrought. Yet, it is not unprecedented in its genesis and in its unfolding of the politics of flood control in Bihar since Independence. There are reports that officials who had the official assignment of repairing the Kushaha dam were busy wining and womanizing. It is an open secret that irrigation inspection bungalows serve more as hideouts for vicarious pleasure of the-powers-to-be than its original purpose. Why should not there be an administrating enquiry fixing the responsibility for the breach of the dam and charging the officials with mass murder and violation of human rights? We know that old dictators have criminally been charged for their past political misdeeds. Logic and a sense of justice demand that we initiate criminal proceedings against the flood-control mafia who have been complicit in this man-made disaster right in front of our own eyes.
I understand it is easier said than done. First, it calls for a change in public discourse on floods. Floods are not merely nature’s fury – pralay- an euphemism used by the both ends of the political spectrum in Bihar. Secondly, dams and embankments (even if we finally get a high dam at Barahakshetra in Nepal where the Kosi emerges from the hills into the plains after draining a catchment that ranges from Kathmandu in the west to Sikkim in the east) are no solution to floods. I am not an engineer and also not looking at floods as a hydro-ecological phenomenon. Activists and scholars such as Dinesh Mishra and Dipak Giyawali have amply demonstrated the limitations of hydro-technical control technologies in controlling extreme flood events in the Himalayan Ganga basin.
Only politics can address the problem of floods. Yes, politics because it has the promise and potential to make the connection between individual and collective experiences and show how decisions taken in the political field impinge on their everyday needs of survival. It is politics that will conscientise the thousands trapped in the relief camps that struggles for a dignified livelihood do not mean personal strategies of migration by boarding a Delhi-bound train.
Dependence on privatised support systems of family and friends, kith and kin, and the prioritisation of individual escape routes from the overall general deprivation smack of democratic disillusion bordering on cynicism. That will further perpetuate the political culture of subordination. It is politics that will help these flood victims to overcome traditional weight of fear and the ingrained respect for public authority. Only then they will develop a critical discourse questioning the very legitimacy of all those who offer patronage. We have to fight against these so-called big men who drown us first and then offer us relief and shelter. We have to put contestory action at the very centre of local life.
This means that the future of the flood victims is in their own hands and not with the officials of the Central Water Commission. It is time we stopped expecting much out of endless meetings of Indo-Nepal Water Commission. It is time we stopped feeling sad about the lack of empathy and concern from a people’s government in the neighbouring Nepal whose anti-India rhetoric had the best of their humanitarian commonsense. It is time we realised that floods are not a disaster for everyone and, hence, flood-control is not an unadulterated public good. It is time we allowed the engineers and experts to discuss the nuances of hydraulics. For us, my friends, it is time we strengthened the hands of those voices of dissent and protest - groups such as the Bihar Kudal Sena (Bihar Hoe Army), Shaheedi Jattha (Martyr Squad), Tatbandh Virodhi Sangharsh Samiti (Anti-Embankment Agitation Committee), and Barh Mukti Abhiyan (Freedom from Floods Campaign) – which have the capabilities to foreground the politics of floods in our times.
In the ultimate analysis, it is politics that will enable us to challenge the endless deferral of the promise of flood-control to the time when the ultimate strategy is devised and its implementation perfected. As we know this promise has less to do with working out a solution for the floods. Instead, it legitimates the flood-control paradigm of the water establishment and helps sustain the myth of effective flood-control through technological measures. Only by multiplying democratic spaces which contest established forms of flood-control discourses we can contribute to more empowering forms of coping with floods.
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* Assistant Professor, Public Policy and Management Group, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, Joka, Kolkata-700 104. India.
