Notes of Neglect.

It has been happening forever- whenever there is a problem, the silent and almost invariably, the innocent has to suffer the most. Until, of course, nature turns nemesis. And when a city with an area of just a little over 500 square kilometres has to house a population of over a million, there is a problem. A big one at that. Resources are pushed to a catastrophic  hilt till finally everything starts to fall apart and threatens to engulf with it all that ever was- the bubble of growth, the façade of modernization and the pretense of development.

Guwahati is a town in evolution. From a small sleepy town of the 80s to the hub of trade and commerce of North East India that it is today, the transformation has been drastic and very palpable.The Chief Minister would proudly add that it is, in fact, the 5^th fastest growing city in the country. The development is encouraging and has actually opened up a world of avenues in the city with international retail chains setting shops everywhere in the city. Very impressive indeed for a place where the waters of the great river that flows through it, had for so long, reeked of neglect and from the rest of the country

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But almost ironically, Deepor Beel, an abandoned channel of the might river itself and a wetland of immense significance for the city stinks of apathy from its own people now. An unexpected population explosion and its ugly aftermath have taken its toll on the lone Ramsar site of the state and the consequences are for all to be seen and felt today. A very dangerous development for the city that has been ,over the past decade or so, moving a tad too fast.

Beel means a wetland or a large aquatic body in Assamese and Deepor Beel is one of the largest and most important riverine wetlands in Assam's Brahmaputra valley and is representative of the wetlands found within the Burma Monsoon Forest biogeographic region. Spread over an area of 41.4 square kilometeres with varying depths of 4 meteres to 1 metre, this freshwater wetland is home to a diverse range of flora and fauna. The fauna here includes many an International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red listed species such as the Spot-billed Pelican ,the  Baers Pochard , the  Lesser Adjutant Stork , the  Pallas’s Sea Eagle, the Slender-billed Vulture , the Ferruginous Duck , the Greater Adjutant Stork ,the Asiatic Elephant ,the  Irriwaddy Squirrel, and the Hoolock Gibbon. Deepor Beel also happens to be one of the largest staging sites for migratory birds in India and a winter morning here is any avian fauna enthusiast’s dream or at least, used to be.

A dump yard right next to Deepor Beel

The Beel, bluntly put, is in shambles today. Reduced to a dump yard of a callous city, the filth in the lake cuts a pathetic picture.  A newly constructed railroad, along the southern  boundary of Deepor Beel, fragments the two previously dependent ecosystems, Deepor Beel and Rani/ Garbhanga Reserved Forests,  a development  that could spell disaster for the already much abused wetland. Unplanned and non-regulated fishing practices are making things worse. And to top it all, since the city has no space left , industrial and residential developments are starting to proliferate a little too close to the wetland. And as for the mayhem we as a species are capable of inflicting on nature, the lesser  said or written about it, the better it is .With humans at action, poaching and soil cutting within the wetland have also become rampantly common.

Deepor Beel is dying a slow and painful death. What is even sadder is that it will probably fade off noiselessly without the rest of the country ever having known of its existence, like so many other things in the state of Assam. The helpless pleas of the Beel for some attention have, for long, muffled by the bombs and grenades of the ULFA and the NDFB for perhaps, that is what we, as a race wanted the world to know and acknowledge us for. And now, beneath the comatose splendor of showrooms of designer labels and the sleek interiors of multi cuisine restaurants, what is actually ours is suffering under the heartless indifference of its own people.  If the Beel is to die, which it will in the present scheme of things, the blotch of apathy and ungratefulness on the collective consciousness of the state would stay with us to haunt us forever.   The Beel has to be saved, for it is indispensable to our existence as a state and more importantly, as a part of Mother Nature.

Of Hopes over Hate

  The Siliguri-Katihar line with stops, which are mostly obscure and hardly heard of small towns and even smaller villages, was one of the last surviving metre gauge lines in mainland India, with conversion work having completed only this year . Three stations off Siliguri, is another such non-descript dusty stop – at least on the face of it. But, then this village on the Terai region at the base of the Himalayas has many stories hidden in the dust of its pastoral humdrumness - all eerie ones though. It is where the first spark of a fire that was to engulf the whole region and, much beyond, over the next four decades was lit. The village is a part of urban folklore today for the most massive anti- establishment movement of Independent India takes its name from it. Naxalbari has moved on since that exceptionally hot summer of 1967 but the heat can be still be very much felt in parts of neighbouring Jharkhand, the state I’ve been living in for the past two and a half years now.

 More than 6000 deaths in just the last twenty years and loss of human spirit not estimable in cold numbers, in the most unambiguous fashion suggests, that something is seriously wrong with the bubble of democracy and equality we as a country have become so smugly comfortable with over the years.  I have very consciously decided not to include too many figures, for in the absoluteness of them, a lot that is not tamable in them goes unnoticed and because the problem is more profound- way beyond what rigid statistical projections can ever reveal. They blow up Panchayats offices and schools; the forces rape their women. Police vehicles are blown up by their land mines; their leaders are killed in encounters. Surely, this is not what the largest democracy in the world should breed or put more politically correctly, let be bred. 

I’m reminded of a conversation with a paramilitary personal on a train a few months back. Both of us did not have tickets and needed some sleep. I had to go attend classes the next morning; he had to fight a war. Finally, both of us talked the night away. He said he knew the people he was actually fighting weren’t his real enemy; it’s only the people who didn’t want the fighting to ever end. And unfortunately, they are the ones who matter. Every order of arms count, every kill is a step towards political advantage. I know he is honest, for people who’ve seem death from as close as he has, usually are. His best friend, he said rather dispassionately, was shot in the head the previous week. They say you’ve got to put emotions in the backburner when you’re a soldier but a soldier, as he morosely maintained throughout, fights for his countrymen, not against them according to the whims and fancies of some Madarchod Neta. The bloodshot eyes get even bloodier with rage. The sleep, I realize, has long gone.

No one is right. Not them, not the forces, not our leaders. Not, the least, us. Newspapers carrying front page reports of sabotage by them and encounters by the police, condemned during the course of the morning tea are used to  put Chakna on for the whiskey at night as Sarah Leone’s  pelvic thrusts laden dance moves in an episode in Big Boss is discussed. We’ve failed as a democracy, as a nation and most importantly as humans and we are answerable to kids whose schools are used as base camps for paramilitary forces, kids who are thrust guns even before they can hold a pen properly. In fact, there are so many layers to this tale of tragedy and trauma that every peeled off layer lets way to another layer we are so not ready for. What essentially began as a farmers’ emancipation movement has somewhere, amidst the merciless violence and hypocritical diplomacy, spiraled into a morbid malaise whose cure seems dauntingly tough. The class battles will not be over so soon, Mao Zedong’s war sermons will not whimper off so easily but an effort has to be made to heal the wounds and soothe nerves- an effort that does not reek of aluminum and mica interests.

 

Jharkhand is a state of sad paradoxes. It accounts for more almost ninety percent of the country’s mica and cooking coal deposits but remains one of the most economically backward regions of the country. The crippling malady of Naxalism coupled with a notoriously corrupt political class has plagued progress in a way that even hurts a blasé outsider like me. Blasé I call myself for in those initial days of college, I had honestly hated the place but then like all things that start to grow on you slowly and sweetly, Jharkhand is an indispensible part of me now. It’s my second home- it’s the place I’ve spent some of the most important years of life and have made bonds for life. For Jharkhand’s sake, I know, the bloodshed has to end. And we have to show the way- the pain has to be relieved, the anger has to be pacified and the void has to be filled. We’ve all made our share of mistakes, but we can still make up for them. Grass root connections will reinstall the belief in our country once again and I’m sure the effort is well worth it.  Guns and grenades will hurt us all for an eye for an eye still makes the world blind.