TOWARDS THE TURNING OF THE TIDE

Swarna Rajagopalan


“There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, when taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea we are now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare.

The human habit when something terrible happens, such as the tsunamis that hit South and Southeast Asia on December 26th 2004, is to conduct an examination of causation as if it matters and would reverse tragic outcomes. At moments this is simply about understanding the phenomenon in question; at moments, we weave our own fanciful theories about reward and retribution. These satisfy our need to feel we can control the universe around us; if I know the cause, I can prevent recurrence. (Or I can pretend that anyway, while remaining gainfully employed in the process!)

I want to submit that for us South Asians, the tsunamis provide a wonderful teaching moment analogous to 9/11. 9/11 afforded professional educators and public intellectuals in the US a chance to introduce information about unfamiliar cultures and political systems, new issues and new ideas into the lives of people whose daily struggles otherwise leave no time or energy for these. The tsunamis are a moment for South Asians to reflect on three inescapable realities of our lives that must shape our attitudes and order our policy priorities in the future.

Nothing is permanent, nothing stays the same

South Asia is a subcontinent where more than one indigenous philosophical tradition has stressed the impermanence of all experiences. The destructive tides of December 26th provided an unambiguous illustration of this.

I think of the people lost—the dead, the missing, the displaced—and what they may have said and thought minutes prior to the tsunami rolling in.

“No, no, I won’t forget to buy bread on my way back from my walk.”
“Hey, it’s my turn to bat now. You already batted for a long time.”
“I will come back from the day’s fishing and we can discuss this.”
“Must I leave you now and go?”
“Has the water come? I left my plastic pot in the queue for the tap.”
All our everyday concerns and preoccupations, all reduced to nothing in a split second.

The singularly loquacious people of South Asia may hold forth on the impermanence of life, but in their everyday interpersonal interactions, in their interactions within the community, as members of a community in society, and as agents and citizens of states, they find it as hard to walk away from a fight as diabetics with a sweet tooth from dessert.

Whether it is an arcane theoretical matter being discussed to the last drop of tea available at an adda, or a fight over the water-tap queue, or the scramble in chair-car coaches for luggage rack space, we yield no ground to anyone. Why then would we yield on the question of who spits more in the elevator, on renaming streets and universities, on who controls which inch of glacier at what latitude, altitude and temperature? The ground itself shifts, but the point is, we will not yield it.

Everything is impermanent. Except our intransigence on matters that ultimately do not matter.

Nature needs no visas

It is now many years since I have visited the Oregon coast, but the sense of wonder looking out at the ocean from Cape Meares viewpoint, never leaves me. I am so small, the Octopus tree is so old and the ocean so vast. I have no way of fathoming the stories and secrets the ocean holds. I carry the awe of that vision with me always.

And I am not alone. We have all felt the grandeur of nature and been humbled by its antiquity and proportions. A split second of homage, though, and we noisily pose for photographs, capturing the infinite on 35 mm film to be printed into neat little 4” x 6” rectangles. One more way of controlling the uncontrollable. We climb into our cars and then go back into our own little boxes—apartments, houses, communities, cultural groups, etc.

Nature has no borders, no belonging, no partiality, but we do. We imitate our children’s games, where we used to draw invisible lines in a shared space to create partitioned territories that were “my house” or “my kitchen” or even, “my friend’s feet.”

Rivers gather stories and silt and move forward inexorably, bringing the fragrances of one place to the air of another. We draw imaginary lines and say to our playmates, “Now that we both agree on this line, you can drink so many spoonfuls of water from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. and I may drink so many from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.” (Feel free to substitute “consume XX million cusecs for irrigation in the dry season and so many in the rainy” for that.) The catch is, we have no way of informing the river of our agreement. When the river is in spate, it washes away our teaspoons, our accords and thousands of lives, without so much as a please or a thank you, leave alone a sorry. It also does not check visas or passports, licenses or laws, religion or ethnicity before wreaking devastation. We do, before distributing assistance.

To say South Asia is a subcontinent is to say that there is a natural integrity to its resources. The mountains, rivers, monsoons, tides, all exist and flow without regard to state or region. When the snow melts in the Himalayas into the Indus, the Ganges or the Brahmaputra, we do not ask whether the snow is a Chinese citizen, whether the water has a visa for India, Bhutan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Nepalese tributaries flow into the Indian plains without any special treaty provisions to the effect. The tsunamis underscore this, and indeed extend it to include the whole Indian Ocean region. The earth shifted first in Indonesia, triggering tsunamis and aftershocks all the way up to the Kenyan coast.

We’re all in it together

We have paid a heavy price for thinking as though we live in airtight, sealed containers.

One of the strongest arguments against the use of nuclear weapons in South Asia has had to do with this natural integrity. It is argued that the course of the north-east monsoon assures that weapons used against Pakistan will result in fallout being imported into India. Similarly, the use of nuclear weapons against Indian ports will result in the contamination of Pakistani territorial waters.

The smaller the state, the better attuned it is to this reality. For over a decade, Maldivians have been talking about the disastrous consequences of global warming to anyone who will listen. They stand to lose their country through a small rise in sea-levels. On the eastern flank of the subcontinent, where the joint delta of the Gangetic and Brahmaputra systems overrun Bangladesh, that country and Nepal have consistently argued that the management of water resources is not a matter for bilateral deal-making but for regional consultation and negotiation. India, whose resources far outstrip theirs, would rather deal with its neighbors one by one and not give them the chance to ‘gang up.’

The wide swathe of devastation cut by the tsunamis and earthquakes of December 26th provides an opportunity to move beyond commiseration and condolences. Nature and natural resources are a common good and a common terror. If we want to be able to draw on them for our needs, not just now but forever, we need to do so sustainably, and that is sustainable which is also equitable. Moreover, boarding up just my house does not help when the tornado whips everything up off my street; all I have then is a boarded house aloft in the air!

Disaster management cannot be planned in isolation, each state with its own little plan. If we are to inhabit the same little corner of the world, we will be hit by the same calamities at the same time. Therefore, everything from information and early warning, to prevention and evacuation, to rescue and rehabilitation must be coordinated across regions that face the same threats—that is, coastal areas from cyclones and global warming, mountainous areas from landslides.

The gift of the tsunami?

As a result of the December 26, 2004, tsunamis large parts of Sri Lankan coast have come under water and many atolls in the Maldives have had a frightening preview of what will happen to them if sea-levels rise. The whole neighbourhood needs to think together about the consequences of its current resource use, consumption and waste disposal patterns and who pays the price for these. While this disaster may be unrelated to such questions, it is a clear precursor of the fact that we will certainly experience their consequences together.

In each instance—deforestation, siltation, flooding—some will be hit directly with death, destruction, loss of livelihood and habitat and displacement. Others will pay indirectly through the costs of absorbing, supporting and rehabilitating the displaced, the cost of health care when epidemics break out, and the continuing shortages of housing, water, energy and food that will follow. Further, there are political consequences to all of this. Are we prepared to face these consequences?

What we need to strengthen are two simultaneous centrifugal movements that undermine the dominance of the national capital in the policy universes of all South Asian states. The first movement results in regional cooperation and integration, between governments and civil society organizations. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation is one avenue but there are hundreds of functioning non-governmental contexts to which this could extend. The second movement results in a move towards the regions within the region and the grassroots—a coordination across borders on issues and local interests. For instance, in a region where water shortages abound, consultations at the municipal level that occur independent of the national government would be an example. This has already been happening in the European Union, if we need to have an outside model. In the EU, these two new levels have also developed consultative linkages that bypass the state.

To summarize, this article argues for greater mutual consideration and consultation between the states and peoples of South Asia. The issues we now focus on are unimportant in an ever-changing world. The reality of our lives is neither the half-century old fractured subcontinent we live in nor the fissures that are a few centuries older; it is the integrating flow and stride of physical features and natural resources. This makes us interdependent for our needs, vulnerable to the same perils and responsible for each other’s lives. Whether it is disaster management, resource use or development, working and acting together is the only logical way forward for the people of South Asia.


Swarna Rajagopalan

Chennai, India

December 27-8, 2004

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