By Pranab Bora, Former Editor, The Telegraph, Guwahati
It is numbing to see Assam’s flood situation worsen, something that I, like many other reporters in the state, have covered for decades. Not this time, though, as I haven’t been field reporting for some time…
Like the pictures of the Assam Agitation and the ULFA movement and its aftermath, there are visuals that stick and refuse to go. This time round, it’s the visual of a woman, whose body had to be tied to a betelnut tree, so it does not get washed away by flood waters. Sometime earlier, when field reporting was a daily thing for me, there was this conversation I had had with a bank official at Pan Bazar in Guwahati. He had got stuck in his village for weeks before he could return to work. “My sister died in the floods but there was not a single patch of dry land where we could cremate her, nor any dry wood,” he said. “Finally we drowned her body and held it down with rocks…” Nothing to say, no condolences to offer, just unbearable silence. And that picture of a father who had lit a few incense sticks and a lamp, forehead to the ground and weeping, and praying to the Brahmaputra that the river return his son to him. That image has never left me and has somehow grown personal.
Then the images of relief camps, of squalor and illness, of people living on highways, of women being denied that basic bit of privacy that they so need. Of tarpaulin sheds being ripped apart by the wind,of only a few tin roofs left visible in entire villages that used to be, of people in unending queues for relief material, people who would at any other time have their own homes, with a courtyard and a garden and a pond behind. Underprivileged maybe, but not impoverished, people who did make ends meet given the land and its natural riches.
“Barir sukor dhekia…” has been a part of our folk music, of iron-rich ferns that grow wild in our villages and forests, of kolmou xaak, and khutora xaak and borali bokua, and scores of other saags that are just there, to be picked and cooked with fish readily available in our rivers, streams and ponds as long as one knows how to throw a line or a net… “Xeiya saa,” my mother would say, “dhaan gereli hol”. A beautiful community with a beautiful nuanced language. That bit means the rice in the field had fattened, the comparison being with a fat bellied kid. ‘Ruoni’ and ‘daoni’, have always been words one could shout across a field to women planting or harvesting paddy, to always get a response, total strangers held together by Nature’s bounty. Just about every village home had a granary, and cows, and ducks. And then come the floods and life turns hell, just like that, in an instant. And yet people will fight, survive, rebuild their homes and their namghors and kids will go to school again… This place is not as “lahe lahe” as people have made it out to be. People in these parts are fighters and survivors and even with Nature, will not take ‘no’ for an answer… Yet the disaster is unnerving: people killed, entire villages wiped out, livestock dead, crops washed away, homes buried in silt, the only telling sign of the fury of the flood being the mark that floodwaters leave behind on trees still standing…
And yet Assam still does not have a solution to floods and things only get worse, by the year. Climate change, cloudbursts in catchment areas, unprecedented and unpredictable rainfall, with both victim and government left wondering how many “waves” of floods the state will face in any given year. And that is to be often followed by hot dry spells and often “drought like” situations.
In newsrooms across the state, it begins with rain reports, then scary, but routine, reports of what level rivers are flowing at, how much left to go before they cross the danger mark, before the mayhem sets in. In our forest reserves, the damage is calculated similarly. Number of animals killed, those run over by vehicles while crossing over into the tea gardens on the other side of the highway, that being their only source of fresh grass during floods say in Kaziranga. And the number of animals rescued. “Dangor paani” is the time when elephants begin to leave the deepest parts of the sanctuary. As many Kaziranga guards will tell you, they all fear the day when flood waters will suddenly rush over human-built highlands where animals find shelter during floods. Come the rains and floods and be it Nameri or Kaziranga or Pobitora, they will all shut, the only sign of human life then being forest guards in camps on tall stilts, there in the toughest of conditions, protecting their flock through the heat of the day and the stillness of the night.
Assam still does not have a solution to floods. While it was heartening to hear the chief minister say that the Subansiri dam was helping control, to whatever extent, the situation in some parts of upper Assam,the damage has obviously been widespread. So do we dam all the violent rivers of the state? If so, how? Will there be resistance to big dams despite it all? Will smaller dams be the solution? Can the violence that our rivers unleash be controlled by a series of dams? If so, how have we not managed to have them in place yet?
And there is the social side of things… Should our villages reorient from houses on the ground to houses on stilts like some of our communities make for themselves? Can we make the switch when we know the floods will come anyway? Every year? Do we have tall, large community centres to house entire villages and their livestock during floods? Where it’s easier to get relief to, be it food, medicine or fresh drinking water? What do our town planners have in mind when towns that have never seen floods are now inundated?
And why is it that North-east India does not have a common plan and a joint task force to handle deforestation, hill destruction and rivers? How can a cloudburst in Arunachal Pradesh be seen in isolation? Or building collapses in Mizoram?How can there be huge concrete buildings built on hillsides? Why don’t we have joint soil studies with the entire region seen as one? Rains in Assam also mean landslides and unimaginable mudslides. Why are we not doing what Meghalaya used to do: build on a hill without disturbing the topography of the hill? Does everything have to be huge and concrete?Can our hills, with their composition, bear the weight of massive buildings, leave aside how out of place huge constructions may look to start with?Not to even mention the seismic side of things…
Our rivers can be deceptively calm during the dry season. One particular autumn while I was looking after a newspaper here, we travelled to various rivers of the state to shoot for a calendar. From Beki to Aai, to Pagladiya to Kolong to Champa to Dikhow to Disang to Dhansiri to the Jia Bhoroli to the massive Brahmaputra, you name it and each river that criss crosses this land is enchantingly beautiful. Like the silken yarn that weaves through Oxomiya fabric, they are an inseparable part of our lives. Hundreds of songs written about them, hundreds of poems penned. Bhupenda goes from ‘Disang mukhor nixati’ to ‘Kopili Kopili rangdhali suali’ to ‘Luitor boliya baan’ and another where the protagonist promises: ‘noikhon eibar bandhimei…’ (we will dam the river this time). It’s an unending cycle, of life, living, disaster, death and rejuvenation. And yet every time it rains in these parts, there is perhaps not a soul who doesn’t quietly wonder what a few extra showers could bring: poetry or pain?
Having come this distance, through dozens of political upheavals and militancy and army operations, it is time for this region to think as one when it comes to its hills, forests and its rivers. And for Delhi to see that through. The sooner, the better. For all of us.
About The Authors – (Pranab Bora is the editor of thebharatiya.in at Guwahati)
Disclaimer – (The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Indian Masterminds. For feedback or queries, please write to [email protected].)
