Lessons from Uttarkhand -- I

What exactly happened in Uttarkhand (and why) is something that we will never know. The blame game has already run its course (and lost its way in the spin generated by the Congress and the BJP), the indignation and the outrage on FB and Twitter has already died down, the TV channels have already found something equally vicarious to feast on -- courtesy a Terror attack on the Bodh Gaya Temple.

Offline, most armchair experts mouth the word "cloudburst". A word that has gained notoriety since the Mumbai floods and thereafter attained apocalytic weight, after what happened in Ladakh.

And yes, this word is uttered with a gravitas bordering the funereal, its a word that brooks no argument.

To extend this logic further other armchair experts (what else are our ministers and bureaucrats, if not that -- ruling as they do from the comfort of their AC offices or cars/ SUVs) tried to pass it all off as a Himalayan Tsunami. Something against which, there could have been no safeguard, something akin to Shiva's Tandav (conveniently enough -- considering our current Government's secular credentials, its easy to blame it on Shiva, considering that the Char Dham yatra is to places like Kedarnath and Badrinath) against which mere mortals can do squat.

But what God kills his own?

So what happened?

There was a cloudburst and there was a lakeburst as well (a glacial lake on a slope above the Kedarnath temple broke through its moraine barrier) and there were a lot of landslides / mudslides from all the peaks around as well, converging onto the "town".

But was this all God's doing?

No; because that "town" had no business being that big and just the presence of so many people (along with their attendant needs for Tea, Coffee, etc, etc) must have itself been like a burr in the glacier's side.





No; because by all accounts, almost 70% of the "facilities" were illegal / unauthorized and had no right to be there in the first place, even it if was for just the duration of the yatra.

No; because the footfalls of the pilgrims have never been regulated, because the old and infirm have never been "discouraged" from this yatra.

In other words this was a tragedy waiting to happen, its just that "freakish" rainfall added to the magnitude of the toll. This was a tragedy waiting to happen because the pilgrims were golden ducks for everyone involved in the "logistics" side of the yatra -- the tour operators, the palanquin bearers, the mule drivers, the hotel owners, the temple administration board and so on...

Its expected that the Kedarnath Yatra will be closed for two years. Meanwhile, this tragedy will be forgotten, and no lessons will be learned.