How many deaths does it for something to be called a
‘tragedy’? What is more tragic, a long drawn
out war that takes more than a 100,000 lives, an insurrection that takes
60,000, a tsunami that kills 50,000, Dengue or CKDu that affects tens of thousands,
a flood or landslide that takes away a hundred or a child who has just learned
that her parents were buried alive?
Tragedy is described in numbers but it cannot be quantified.
Quantity is a non-issue for the dead and a small matter for the near and dear
who grieve. Numbers do matter, however,
when it comes to galvanizing relevant authorities into providing relief. They matter, more importantly, when tragedy
forces a re-visitation of policy, both at micro and macro levels.
Where did ‘Meeriyabedda’ come from? Was it a creation of victims who didn’t take
warnings seriously? Was it the plantation company that manufactured a mass
burial through criminal neglect including refusal to follow instructions from
relevant authorities to relocate people whose lives were in danger? Should the authorities take responsibility
for not enforcing a decision conveyed to the plantation company? Is it the Government that is at fault? Given that earth-moving processes often
involve the play of multiple factors over considerable lengths of time, we
could easily conclude ‘all of the above and perhaps something else as well’. It doesn’t lessen the tragedy of course, but
it can help us be more alert and respond better the next time.
If people are to blame, then this tragedy should
alert all people not to take warnings lightly.
If the Government is to blame, this is but one of many things one can
attribute to the sloth, arrogance and inability of officials and
politicians. The same goes for
plantation companies. While corruption
was rampant when the plantations were all run by state agencies, hanky-panky
has only taken a different form when the private sector regained lost ground. There are many companies who are in it for
short term again and therefore don’t have to worry about the welfare of workers
or making changes necessary for long terms sustainability. From state-control to
private sector control without regulation that does justice to the term cannot
be good.
Then there’s the issue of overall land use policy
dating back to the days of the British.
Deforestation has not only enhanced the possibility of natural disasters
but has had a negative impact on the entire country, especially the rivers
serviced by what used to be handsome catchment areas in the central hills. The crass neglect of plantation workers,
corrected somewhat by the rise of trade unions, is perhaps second only to the
immense dislocations that the Kandyan Sinhala Peasantry was subjected to, a
tragedy that hardly finds mention these days.
There has been very little discussion on the impact
of climate change in precipitating ‘Meeriyabedda’. Is it too big a topic, one wonders. Is it, as the biggest and most notorious
exploiters of natural resources say, a non-issue? Either way, the pernicious fingerprint of the
human species on processes that yield outcomes such as ‘Meeriyabedda’ cannot be
ignored forever.
This brings us to policy. Have we got our ‘development blueprint’
right? Do we have a pulse on the time
factor or are we in the business of extracting maximum value as quickly as we
can regardless of costs to the environment and therefore future generations,
not to mention the inevitable right-here and right-now tragedies such as ‘Meeriyabedda’?
As a nation and as a collective that is part of the
larger human family and the still larger community of earth-inhabitants, there
are questions we need to ask ourselves.
The easier ones will obviously be about response. That’s taken care of. The difficult ones will be about development
policies and activities. The most
difficult one will be about development paradigms.
We had systems that work. We had subsequent ‘systems’ that have made
recovery of the lost frames extremely hard.
We have thinking-systems that rebel against a reconsideration of that
which worked before. We are tuned to
follow, much like the rats and later the kids followed the Pied Piper. To disaster, we must add.
The point is that politicians, after they are done
with the photo-shoots at tragedy-site, will play blame games. They’ll throw so much mud at each other, but
not enough to bury one another which, some might say, is poetic justice. They will not question the dominant paradigm
of development.
That too is tragic and indeed a tragedy that is not
given to ‘numbering’. It is a bastard creature, without parents, an
orphan no one will pick up perhaps until there’s no one left to pick up either.
3 comments:
Send translations of this to Sinhala and Tamil news outlets as well. There has been criminal neglect and negligence.
Which particular plantation company is this?
Maskeliya Plantations
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