life in this country is ruled by irrationality and complete disregard for rules and human lives. The killing of a rationalist in Pune and the death of pilgrims who carelessly crossed a railway track in Bihar are pointers
Two tragedies last week proved that whether the rupee falls or rises and whether investors come or go, life in India always was, is and will remain ruled by irrationality, intangibility and disregard.
The first was the ‘mowing down’ of 28 people walking on a railway track in rural Bihar by a ‘speeding train’ — as almost all dailies reported with editorial monotonousness the next day. The other was the murder of a rationalist thinker who was seeking a law against unscrupulous shamans, the likes of whom our society abounds in. Reportedly, fanatics had been kind enough to ‘warn’ the thinker of the ‘consequences’ of his ‘anti-religious’ thinking for some time before they struck.
In an earlier column, this writer had outlined the unwritten hierarchy along economic, social and vehicular lines that substitute for traffic regulations in India. last week’s headlines confirm and demonstrate yet another that rules our society: One determined by the devotee and the pilgrim.
Pilgrims travel in numbers, crowds tend to panic, panic causes stampedes.
In 2007, 14 persons were killed in a stampede at Mughal Sarai railway station caused by a sudden announcement changing platform numbers for arriving trains. In 2008, 162 people were killed in a stampede at the Naina Devi temple in Himachal Pradesh, caused by the rumour of a landslide. A month later, 147 people were killed at the Chamundi Devi Temple in Jodhpur, again by a rumour of a bomb in the temple complex. In 2010, 71 people were killed at a temple in Kunda, when the gate of the temple collapsed. This February, 36 pilgrims to the Kumbha Mela were killed in a stampede — also caused by a sudden announcement of a change in schedule — at Allahabad railway station. A month later, 16 people lost their lives in Hardwar after a fight over who will take a holy dip in the Ganga first.
There are a thousand lacunae in our public services that amplify the severity of such tragedies. The arbitrariness of timetables, the complete disregard for the fare-paying public by — most of all — state-run corporations like Indian Railways, the low priority afforded by Governments year after year, to equipping and expanding the manpower of our security forces who are there to guard, not politicians and their families while travelling or shopping, but public spaces, against violators But after one has finished blaming ruling administrations for paying more attention to international airports and hardly any to tiny railway stations like the one in Bihar last week, where a lack of paths to the station — and of a platform altogether — is what is said to have forced the pilgrims to walk on the track, one must examine the psychology of the pilgrim too.
Travelling in numbers in the name of faith has always endowed pilgrims with a certain heady and irrational invincibility. What a lone pilgrim may hesitate from doing leaves travelling parties unfazed. To be a pilgrim is somewhat like being a patient: We willingly exempt both sick people and holy wanderers from routine social contretemps.
Pilgrims can jaywalk on urban highways: Indeed, the intoxicating sight of traffic deferentially peeling off like the Red Sea did for Moses, confirms to devotees that their meanderings are far more urgent than those which have drivers fretting and drumming their fingers on their steering wheels. What can be more imperative than arduous and ardent perambulation: To fetch holy water, to deposit it somewhere else, to carry statues to the sea for immersion, to carry them back from a pandal to the temple, to carry the deity to another shrine housing the lord’s consort, etc.
Through all this, the pilgrim has the uncontested ‘right-of-way’. And whether for kanwariyas, taziyas, or Amarnath yatris, their well-wishers setting up shamianas for their rest and recreation, too, have the right to usurp pavements and every inch of public space.
Given India’s rising literacy rate and the large component of educated, urban Indians who go on pilgrimages, one can no longer assume naively that everyone on that fateful track in Bihar last week was illiterate. In any case, it doesn’t take a doctorate in behavioural sciences but mere human intuition to know that walking on a track — sandwiched between two trains — is potentially suicidal.
That ‘speeding’ train was not scheduled to stop at that station; it was meant to rush through it. Not even the fastest and most advanced trains in the world are equipped with brakes that can avert a tragedy in a split second. The terrible train crash of May in Spain in which 79 persons were killed, stands as a grim reminder. But while the driver in Spain was talking on his cell-phone and well over the speed limit, the driver of the train in Bihar was merely carrying out his assigned duties. So where was the logic, sense and fairness, in the enraged onlookers assaulting the poor man and setting his train on fireIJ
Such behaviour can only be explained as ‘Maya’, the illusion that seems to envelop pilgrims that somehow, the larger power of God will shield them from all disasters while on that holy journey. It follows therefore that the blind rage that follows a sudden tragedy and causes angry grievers to make scapegoats of innocent people, can only be as irrational as the illusion itself.
But even pointing out the fragility of religious belief seems to make one a target of rage, as a second chilling indicator — the murder of rationalist Narendra Dabholkhar — demonstrated.
Neither the train tragedy nor the murder will be the last of its kind. Perhaps it is wiser to accept that we Indians will never change. let’s do away with international norms for public services. let’s innovate and introduce new ones custom-made to fit our psychology. let’s acknowledge that the magnetic power of the intangible and all its attendant emotions — the ecstasy and the rage — will always remain India’s hamartia.
let trains stop at every station and wherever great surges of humanity require it. let vehicular traffic do the same. let’s shed time-tables — and therewith the panic over missing a connection — altogether. let people be duped in the name of religious belief; it is a free country, why warn themIJ
Western societies parented —and patented — a certain kind of democracy and spread its seed around the world, without pausing to think whether the local soils and seasons would suit it. let us work on a new blueprint: One that accommodates the last of our tragic faults. That way and if we fail, we’ll have no one else to blame.