LONDON, 29 December 2004 — The ever-escalating casualty figures, the devastation of regions and nations thousands of miles apart, the presence of thousands of Westerners: All these factors have forced the wider world to focus on the ramifications of Boxing Day’s massive earthquake off Sumatra to a degree that is unusual for Asian disasters.
For the countries of South Asia, unfortunately, there is nothing very novel about what happened on Sunday morning. Natural disasters nearly as dreadful as this one happen all the time, every couple of years. And always, it is the poorest of the poor who bear the brunt.
The thousands of fishermen swept out to sea from their homes south of Madras are typical victims of Asia’s great earthquakes, cyclones and floods. India’s fishermen occupy a desperately humble place in the social structure: untouchability was abolished decades ago, but they are still trapped in poverty, scrabbling a mean living from the sea, living in shacks where they are in permanent danger of being flooded or sucked out to sea. They cling to life by their fingernails. And when disaster strikes, they are the first to go.
We in the West are obsessed by the numbers of the dead: Every twist of the statistical ratchet gives the story a new lease of life. Perhaps you need to have lived in South Asia to appreciate how unreal this obsession appears on the ground. Life on these margins has always been cheap. If your husband or father or wife or child dies, that is a tragedy; if your family is wiped out, no greater disaster can be imagined. Beyond that, whether it’s a hundred who die, a thousand or a million, is an abstract matter which means little.
Our obsession with how many died presupposes the existence of an authority that cares about such marginal people. But authority in South Asia is more often both careless and corrupt. Several years ago, there was an appalling cyclone disaster in the northwest Indian state of Gujarat: The raging sea came towering in over the salt flats on the coast, flattening every thing in its path and dragging the great majority of the victims out to sea, never to be seen again. Thousands died in the disaster, most of them workers in the salt fields. But how many thousand? The best local sources believed the figure could have been as high as 20,000. But the official figure never went above 5,000. These were low-caste migrant workers from far away in the middle of the country, uncounted by their employers and with no political significance. There was no persuasive reason for looking too deeply into what had happened. The local media’s attention rapidly shifted to other matters — victims’ relatives allegedly scrounging more than their share of compensation, for example.
There is much that is gruesomely familiar and repetitive about these disasters and their aftermath: The shocking numbers, the numbing consolation of fatalism that kicks in among the bereaved, the political ineptitude or callousness that always comes to light — the fact, for example, that the countries of this huge, seismically vulnerable zone had failed to install a tsunami warning system, as is used in the countries of the Pacific Rim.
Next comes the arrival of gigantic quantities of foreign aid — and the crafty maneuvering of local political parties and politicians to ensure optimum seats on the gravy train. “Everybody loves a good drought” was the title of a collection of reports about Indian disasters published some years ago that summed up the prevailing attitude. Everybody (bar the immediate victims) loves these events because finally the outside world pays attention and begins flinging money.
Amid all the cynicism and opportunism, it is the extraordinary resilience of the poor survivors that shines through. After an Indian earthquake in which many thousands died, I witnessed an old man being rescued from the rubble of his home after nearly a week entombed. In hospital a few hours later, I asked him how he had managed for a week without water or food. He gave me a piercing stare with his milky, suffering eyes. “I ate and drank the name of my god,” he said.
And then there are the Western tourists. It has always been piquant and curious, this cohabitation in the Tropics of the poorest of the poor with the mind-bogglingly rich (from the local perspective) tourist visitors: Sharing the same sand, the same coral reefs, all in a similar state of undress; but one group reading their environment as their harsh, menacing, desperate lot, the other seeing it as a fine, emblematic reward for their success in life.
Usually, it is places like Bangladesh or Gujarat that bear the brunt of nature’s fury, places which for all their beauty have never lured high-spending sun-seekers. But this time, some of Asia’s most sought-after resorts were plumb in the way.
In the chaos of the tsunamis’ aftermath, the visitors share the natives’ grim fate: There is so far only the haziest idea of how many tourists have perished. In the most appalling way, the West has learned that these idylls have another, brutal face.
