Published in Times Crest on July 13, 2013.
Read the article here.
Courtesy: Indian Express
(Image used for representational purposes)
His maroon-grey striped shirt hangs
limply on his bony shoulders. He has lost a lot of weight in the last two
weeks, he confesses, as he rummages through his black leather handbag for a
photograph of his mother. He takes out her passport-size picture.
I notice the curve of her nose and
the cleft chin. “You take after her,” I tell him. Bhupendra Chavan smiles
through his sunken cheeks. It comes as a relief. This is my first breakthrough
in an hour.
Before she went on the Chardham
Yatra, like several pilgrims, 58-year-old Manda Chavan decided that she had had
a long and happy life. Her 33-year-old son Bhupendra had a stable practice as a
lawyer and his wife had even blessed her with a grandchild. With a
nothing-to-lose air, she could now go on the journey to the four holy shrines
in Uttarakhand, believed by many-a-Hindu as a rite of passage, situated in the
foreboding terrain of Himalayas. On the night of June 15, she called her son
Bhupendra: “I will be leaving for Gaurikund tomorrow. All is well.”
Courtesy: Bhupendra Chavan
Manda Chavan went missing since June 15 after the cloudburst in Uttarakhand
That was the last they heard of her.
The rest, as they say, was a cloudburst. The news anchors clamoured from the
tube about the disaster wreaking havoc in Uttarakhand, killing locals and
pilgrims indiscriminately. From their living room, the Chavans struggled to get
a stock of the situation from the hyperbole expected from the news channels. As
the videos of the Ganges in all its fury played on loop in the background,
Bhupendra logged on to Google Maps.
“Right in the heart of Gaurikund,
there were houses stripped off their roofs. I could read the names of what used
to be roads but all I could see was water and debris,” said Chavan. Repeated
attempts to contact his mother, her sister Sharada Lokre who had accompanied
her, and their fellow travellers had by now proven unsuccessful. He knew he
could not stay rooted in their Latur house any longer and boarded a flight to
Dehradun.
It was a similar case to Ashok
Khetan, an iron and steel trader from Nagpur. Earlier in the month, his elder
brother Mahesh had taken his wife, three kids to the yatra. They were
accompanied by several of their friends and relatives. As the images on the TV
kept getting murkier, so did his temper.
“I could see that the government was
doing next to nothing. There were no relief operations in sight,” says Khetan.
The life of 15 of his closest people was at stake. “I thought, I will take one
of the private helicopters they rent to tourists and do something myself.”
Along with 7 relatives, all of them men, he made way to the Nagpur airport.
Khetan and Chavan reached Dehradun
airport around June 18. Over the next few days, the two combed all the
hospitals in the town from dawn to dusk and then some more. They went through
the relief camps, transit points, airports, watched news for hours on end, put
up posters of the missing persons, begged the army to let search in the
forests, got stonewalled by the authorities, even got in touch with the chief
minister.
“I managed to get his number from a
local politician from Nagpur. The CM assured me that they were doing their
best. But it’s their job to give assurances,” says Khetan wearily. “Does it
ever mean anything?”
There were no silver linings for
Chavan either. “All my relatives kept saying, ‘He is a lawyer. He knows his way
around the government people.’ But once you reach there, everyone is the same –
victim, survivor or an army uniform.”
By now, they were a group of about
40 people, mostly Marathi like themselves, similarly in search for their loved
ones. It was here that the two crossed paths, and met another son from Latur
who had lost both his parents, one from Nagpur who had lost both of his
parents; an inconsolable youngster from Agra who had had a love-marriage only
20 days ago and had now lost his wife and family to the floods. Then they heard
of 400 villages that were completely off the radar.
“Numbers helped,” says Chavan. The
hunt was still on but he managed to regain some of his flagging composure. They
weren’t the only one suffering. “Once at the government of Maharashtra camp, we
saw a family of five who had just been rescued from the affected region
struggling to convince the officials that they were from Maharashtra. The
standard practice is that each of those rescued gets Rs. 2,000 to reach home.
But nobody had filed a missing complaint for them, nor did they have any IDs.”
Struck by the obtuseness of the authorities, he and his group pitched in Rs.
300 each to help out the family. Already disillusioned by The Divine, they had
one more entity to add to the list.
The military rescue operations were
halted by July 28 due to rough weather. None of the 40 of his group managed to
make any headway and returned to their respective towns one by one. Khetan went
back to his job with a bad taste in his mouth from the experience and the
government’s lackadaisical approach. “If not for the army, I doubt if even half
the people would have been rescued,” he says.
I met Chavan on July 3 when aboard
the Dehradun Express on its way to Mumbai. Latur doesn’t fall en route but he
had just caught the first train out. He has bigger problems to tackle than
travel convenience.
“I still haven’t told my father
about this. For him, I am in Nagpur, working on some case for the High Court,”
he says. He doesn’t want to bring himself to choose what is more important –
the truth or the life of his 60-year-old father, a heart patient.
THE
OFFICIAL VOICEBOX:
Even after four weeks, the details
about the aftermath the tragedy continue to remain foggy. The army claims to
have evacuated about 42,542 people while Director General of Uttarakhand Police
Satyavrat Bansal has put the rescue figure at 1,50,000 from all across the
region. Similar is the case in deaths – the Uttakhand government has put the
toll at around 4,000 whereas an UN agency estimates that it is 11,000.
It is a general consensus among the
authorities that the people missing are dead. “At this stage, the chances of
finding more survivors are very less. We will keep our efforts on till July 15
(when the tragedy completes a month) after which the government will give out
compensation,” said Satyavrat Bansal, DGP of Uttakahand.
Officials at the disaster management
cell state that the operations in most areas were rounded off by July 1-2 and
the one at Kedarnath ended on July 7. Bansal added that bodies are still being
found buried under debris and will be so for next few months.
“We are still in the process of
compiling the list of those missing. There has been a lot of duplication since
people have filed FIRs at multiple places. In the next 2-3 days, we expect to
release a definite figure of the number of people missing,” said Bansal.
