By Ranjona Banerji
In 2010, the world watched on tenterhooks as 33 miners were rescued from a copper-gold mine in Chile having spent two months underground. It was jaw-dropping tension and movies and TV programmes have been made. You just have to Google “Chilean miners” and see a plethora of information.
In 2018, a junior football team and a coach were trapped in a cave in Thailand for over two weeks. Similarly, the rescue efforts were watched across the world. In India, the televised rescue of children who had fallen into wells in rural areas is often seen.
There is in these sometimes tragic, sometimes hopeful episodes much journalistic content: the human interest story, the technical story, the who is to blame story and the rescue story. For viewers and readers, human determination over difficult obstacles is always compelling.
So, welcome to Uttarakhand and its tunnel rescue story. It’s not the first in Uttarakhand. Not the first in this area. But the story suffers from some major faultlines. All focused on the “who to blame” angle of this story.
I understand of course there are major distractions. The huge humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, with Israel’s consistent barbaric assaults on Palestinian civilians to make them pay for Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7. It is the biggest disaster of the 21st century and it has sprung from all the mistakes and deliberate acts of betrayal of the 20th century.
And in India itself, we have other big distractions. Like Diwali, a cricket World Cup, elections in some states and the usual costume change dramas of the Great Panjandrum himself. A few workers – what is it, 40? – stuck in a tunnel now for seven days is not really top priority. When you consider that the ongoing civil war in the state of Manipur has been largely ignored by the authorities and the Indian media since May, what hope for a few construction labourers in another remote Himalayan state?
Should I tell you the problem?
Or have you figured it out for yourself?
The tunnel is part of the great Char Dham Four Lane Highway project. Sometimes, this project is for tourists to do the fastest pilgrimage ever. Sometimes it’s to get to the China border fast for national security reasons. I am not going to bore you with traffic problems within Dehradun itself, which has a lovely cantonment area. Inasmuch as the new rules still allow for cantonment areas.
The Himalayas – are you not tired of hearing this by now? – are called “fragile” because they are new mountains, still growing, and they cannot deal with being cut and chopped and drilled into. They tend to collapse. And that is what has dogged with project from Day One. You cut the trees, the slopes crumble. You scrape too deep, the slopes crumble. You drill, the hills crumble. It rains, the roads crumble. Often people die. But this is India. Labourers, poor people, the working classes, they die all the time. In the pandemic, the benevolent government watched as millions walked home in the burning sun. When they reached towns, the authorities washed them down with bleach. You know this, I know this.
So here we are. Forty labourers trapped in a tunnel that should not have been built. A little bit of media interest here and there. And no massive human drama because the Great Panjandrum wants the road and the road he shall get. A little bit of destruction and loss of life is a small price to pay surely for one man’s dream and a Himalayan nightmare?
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. Her views here are personal. She writes on MxMIndia on Tuesdays and Fridays.