Way back in 1853, the outside world was talking of the newly laid railroads of India. On July 22 that year, then London-based Karl Marx wrote: “I know that the English millocracy intend to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished expenses the cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures. But…you…cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion…The railway system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry.” It did.
In July 2011, however, India was talking of another record of its railways. Three major railway accidents had taken place in less than in a week, claiming a toll of over a hundred human lives. An unmanned level crossing caused the collision of a speeding train with a bus, killing all 38 members of a wedding party, in Uttar Pradesh (UP). Three days later, on a Sunday noon, another fast train derailed in another place in UP, leaving 68 dead. The same evening, a bomb blast on a railway track in Assam left about a hundred innocent passengers seriously injured.
The Indian Railways, the county’s largest public undertaking, has much to boast about. The world’s fourth biggest railway — after the American, Russian and Chinese counterparts — has a network stretching over 64,215 kilometres with 7,083 stations. It carries over 30 million passengers and 2.8 million tonnes of freight every day, and commands a work-force of over 1.6 million. All these grand figures, however, cannot prevent questions from the railway users about its growing reputation as a killer.
The most basic question, perhaps, is: are these all “accidents” that we are talking about? Of the latest, the bomb-caused Assam derailment certainly does not fit the description. Of the other two, one was the result of an unmanned level crossing, the cause of many other railway calamities as well. The second is suspected to be a case of mechanical failure, again not the first instance of its kind.
The “accidents’ are provoking increased popular anger, above all, because the political rulers appear to be showing no real concern over a matter of life and death for the people. Time was when a railway disaster made some political difference. Following the railway accident at Ariyalur in the southern State of Tamil Nadu, which took a toll of 144 lives, in 1956, then Railway Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri (who was to become the prime minister in 1964) resigned, and the incident is recalled every time a tragedy occurs on the tracks as it has been this time as well. The opposition of the day invokes the Shastri example as no other instance is available — and, while in power, it resorts to the same denial of ministerial responsibility for railway “mishaps”.
After the latest clutch of train accidents, the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has targeted Minister of State for Railways Mukul Roy, ostensibly for showing reluctance to visit the site of the Assam wreckage. The party’s ill-disguised objective was to exploit the event as yet another illustration of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s alleged “weakness” and woeful “lack of authority”. Roy has lost the portfolio in a minor ministerial reshuffle on July 12, but has been shifted to the shipping ministry.
Surprisingly, none of the by now professional spokespersons of the ruling Congress, devoting much of their time to debates on television channels, recalled the train-burning tragedy of February 27, 2002, in Gujarat’s Godhra, which led to the savage, state-wide pogrom under Narendra Modi. Nitish Kumar, then railway minister (and now the Bihar chief minister), did not visit the site. He insisted later that no tradition or convention obliged him to do so, though it was known that his decision was dictated by an anxiety not to incur Modi’s displeasure.
A more pertinent political point, made by many analysts, is about the role of regionalism and populism in programmes of railway expansion. Successive railway ministers have used the portfolio profitably to nurse their constituencies and states and to please or patronise their allies elsewhere. The Railway Budget for 2010-11, presented by Mamata Banerjee (now the chief minister of West Bengal), promised the launch of no less than 56 new trains. The riches, proffered without proper planning, have only made railway travel riskier for the people.
The safety of travelling citizens, in other words, has not been accorded anything like the priority enjoyed by the politics of security. It is not only the users of railways, from those perched precariously on the roofs of trains to others in reserved compartments, who have been exposed to extreme danger.
The record of road safety is no better. In 2009, the World Health Organisation (WHO), in its Global Status Report on Road Safety, said that more people died in road accidents in India than anywhere else in the world, including the more populous China. If the situation has improved since then, we have not heard about it.
All this should raise a paramount question about the politics of security as well. At least some are now asking for the results of the budget allocations of billions of Indian rupees for railway safety. No one from either of the two major national parties, however, can be expected to ask if the more astronomical, if unannounced, allocations for the ultimate weapons can possibly spell nuclear safety.
The poser must come from the people: can those, who cannot run trains and buses safely, be trusted with the bomb?
The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled At Gunpoint