Old Rajinder Nagars and many more

 “Safety is when a child sleeps in the back seat of a car with his parents at the wheels.”

After a full day of fun at the beach, a tired child chooses to sleep without worrying a bit about the risks involved in their return journey. He doesn’t think of the risks from the faulty design of the road bend, a missing road sign or a guard rail, the mechanical defects in the car, a tired father who might doze off while driving, and risks from other irresponsible drunk drivers on the road.

The child under the protective care of his parents from his birth instinctively chooses to trust their intent, and sincerity towards him and decides to trust them and their decisions for his life.

This quote above was not told by any child but by an adult with substantial lived experience.

He said this profound but seemingly innocuous line after realising how peacefully we live when we are made to believe that our safety is in the hands of the people who are well-intentioned, sincere and responsible for our wellbeing.

And he chose this child-parent situation to best describe it.

Are we different from a child when we trust the state?

When we board a train, just after finding our berths, we start setting up our beds for a comfortable and peaceful journey ahead. Do we even once think of the accidents in the recent past caused by defective coaches, poor maintenance of the rail infrastructure, cracked tracks, negligent drunk drivers, careless signal men, sabotage, and any such risk this train might face one of them? The same goes for us with the airlines, the mechanic at the garage we get our car serviced, the shopping mall we visit, the cinema hall we go to and the traffic police when he signals us to cross the intersections. We think that there are responsible people who would have sincerely done their jobs.

We perhaps have to trust to live normally. We don’t have a choice here.

The state like our parents has somehow managed to give us that sense of safety with its exaggerated intention for our well-being and the efficiency of its various arms of execution in the shapes of regulators, administrators and the judiciary to tell us that our life and well-being is in safe hands. The moot points here are,

-        How well-intentioned are these arms and how efficient are they?

-        What are the internal quality checks to evaluate their performance and what are the safeguards to ensure that they are not just responsible but are also accountable to the law?

-        What happens to the people who become victims of their neglect?

Let us take the case of the Old Rajinder Nagar, New Delhi incident as an example.

One coaching centre like many in that locality was operating its library in the basement of a building. Heavy rain in that area caused a flood-like situation, water entered the basement of one where some 20 civil service aspirants were preparing for their examinations, and the gushing water caused a short circuit in the biometric access control system thus trapping them underwater. 17 students could be rescued and 3 lost their lives. The driver of the SUV who sped through the water which caused a wave that disrupted the electronics was arrested. The matter would have died like any other had the characters been of a lower class.

The Rajinder Nager incident has stirred the collective emotions of people from every corner of the country. Many of us are distraught because the victims are of our socio-economic class who were fighting battles similar to ours. The pictures of those three young talented kinds are getting us closest to the pain as parents. The media reports of similar incidents happening in villages or in slums which usually lose steam after a day. Life gets back to normalcy and another incident takes its place in the pages of the newspapers. It turns into a nameless statistic and gets added to the list of unnatural deaths in the national portal under a certain category. Only researchers use them for analysis. No one learns any lesson from it.

While this article is being written, the MCD has responded by sealing some coaching centres operating at the basements, earthmoving equipment is mobilized to excavate now buried storm water drains which were in use for some years perhaps when the colony was established and people from their drawing rooms are deciding who to be made accountable, and the stakeholders in that community, the inspectors of the regulators and the policymakers are feigning innocence as if they do not know who is behind it and how it happened. Everyone knows how it happened, and everyone is waiting for this to pass. The best part is that these interventions are happening only at Old Rajender Nagar, not the whole of Delhi, not even New Rajinder Nagar.

Is such an incident happening for the first time?

The outbreak of fire is a common phenomenon in hospitals, and schools across the country, from newborns in incubators to patients in life support in an ICU die due to a small neglect by an electrician which has escaped internal quality checks and external audits. Train accidents happen in disturbing regularity and only incidents like what happened in Bahanaga make us question the internal workings of the system. But there are well-oiled systems in place on how to deal with it.

We are turning passive and philosophical to such deaths.

The less said about our attitude towards personal safety and others' safety the better. It can be nightmarish to the ones who are not born here. The confidence with which a bike-riding father with two kids takes the wrong side of the road braving all the oncoming traffic to drop his kids at the school before the school gate closes will remind you of the brave student who stood facing the barrel of a tank in Tiananmen Square, Beijing 1989. The government also accepts that a country of 1.44 billion people can always afford to lose a few million of them every year to unnatural deaths.

Questioning voices rise when some high net-worth lives are lost but then the state has the ultimate weapon to gag such voices – money.

Unlimited money can be granted under the glare of the media to the near and dear ones of the ones who lose their lives and limbs earning political brownie points. These instruments of gags are called by the name solatium or ex gratia awards. It works well to gag the whiners and wailers when the people are in a situation with no other option.

It does precious little to change those rusty cogs in the system that caused such a mishap and stands to do so in future.

Behind the image of paternal benevolence for which we trust the state for our safety and protection of human rights, we don’t see how generationally and tactfully they have kept themselves and their array of machinery starting from the regulators, administrators, inspectors and enforcers away from any accountability. The size of the establishment is so big, and the duration of their indemnification from any accountability, it now seems impossible to bring any change that can change the status quo.

The state is infamous for appropriating a cause by formulating a policy.

That leaves the nay-sayers with no evidence to blame the state of neglect or not for having the right intent. They do it not because they are serious about it. They do it because it is politically not wise not to stand with the cause. Call it political expediency.

Our constitution has established a system that insulates the government and its various arms from the adjudicating power of the judiciary about matters concerning neglect. By not giving enough teeth to the people and the laws to establish negligence and hold someone accountable.

When incidents like this happen the cause of it is internally investigated and what happens to the findings is kept under the wraps of the red tape. When the incident is too big to be handled internally, a judiciary enquiry is commissioned headed by a chosen person where the state is under no obligation to accept the recommendations. In our living memory, no penalty bigger than the suspension of a lower-level functionary for a few months has been awarded to anyone. We also have not witnessed any change in the system to enforce responsibility for deliverables linked to quality and time and to make anyone accountable.

The array of instruments of dilution at their disposal is mindboggling.

Having declared a policy, they can dilly dally on formulating the right laws, they may pass a law and not the rules, but they can weaken it by not giving adequate power and financial resources needed for implementation. They can weaken the regulatory bodies by not appointing any head for a period or by appointing someone who will not be an irritant with his hyper activism or appointing a pliable one who will stay dormant or of a particular ‘Bichardhara’ who will participate in establishing a hidden cultural agenda across the organization.

If someone asked you who is the government?

The best answer can be this – It’s a body formed by people from amongst us who can tax you at will and punish you for any deviation and assume responsibility for everything but if something goes wrong or questioned, can say that they are accountable for nothing.

Will this Old Rajinder Nagar incident be the last or there will be many more in future?

The answer is obvious.

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