Thar: crime of geography?

Suddenly the political lords woke up from the deep slumber they had been in. Higher officials visited Tharparkar, directed the concerned authorities to provide relief to the drought-stricken, suspended some minions of the bureaucracy and transferred a few others. 

All this happened when the horrific stories of the death of more than one hundred children started pouring in and the media started showing images of the dying babies. Were such happenings spontaneous? Did the lords of Sindh not expect such a catastrophe given the earlier warnings? 

The National Nutrition Survey 2011 had revealed that the Thar region was the most insecure in terms of food. If that were the case, then why wasn’t there any long-term planning done to ensure food security to the residents of Thar? Why did it not occur to our political masters that natural disasters can be mitigated through better management and planning? Why did the political elite and officialdom of Sindh waited for the death of more than a hundred kids? These are simple questions but their answers may not be that simple. Going into the theory of famines we may be able to come up with some answers to these questions.

Amartya Sen in his writings has analysed the phenomenon of famine in detail. Contrary to conventional beliefs, famines and droughts do not occur due to food shortages. Sen’s thesis is that harvest failure, reduction in food imports, drought etc may contribute towards the severity of famines, but far more important are the social and political arrangements in society that determine how food is distributed among the population. Absolute scarcity ie insufficiency of food to everybody in the country is very rare. What happens is that in a famine food does not remain within the reach of those who need it the most. So Sen argues that rather than focusing much on food availability, more focus should be placed on its distribution. 

Sen also argues that famines do not occur in democracies. In ‘Democracy as Freedom’, Sen argues, “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy”. This, he explained, is because democratic governments “have to win elections and face public criticism, and have strong incentive to undertake measures to avert famines and other catastrophes.” Thus lack of access to food rather than lack of availability of food and a functioning democracy are two important variables in the story of famines and droughts.

Do these two variables fit into the Thar catastrophe or is it just a crime of geography that the children of Thar are dying such an unnatural and untimely death? I think it is not ‘Mother Nature’ that is bent upon killing the sons and daughters of this area. According to media reports, wheat was available there but was either not delivered due to inefficient distribution system or was squandered away due to rampant corruption in the food department, and the people of Thar were left at the mercy of market forces. 

But the question here is: can a well-functioning democracy afford such callousness on the part of the ruling masters? After all, in a functioning democracy, people can vote out inefficient rulers in the elections. Does Sen’s thesis not hold in the case of Thar? It does but it has a big caveat -- that people are really empowered to vote out the inefficient and incompetent representatives. But I am afraid that the people of Pakistan do not have such a power, particularly in Sindh. 

The political landscape of Sindh is dominated by a small number of Syeds, waderas and pirs. Their stranglehold on politics, resources, and local institutions is such that people have no alternative except to vote for these waderas. The problem with these feudal lords is their medieval mindset which does not recognise that democracy works on the principle of ‘one man, one vote’. Democracy is not just bringing the voters, through inducement or coercion, to the election booths on Election Day. It is a social system where rule of law is held supreme and where the lives, honour, and dignity of a ‘hari’ or a man on street are equally sacrosanct. 

So the need of the hour is that social and political arrangements are redefined in the society. The sloganeering of democracy will not work for long unless we embrace it in its true spirit. All people, irrespective of the region of Pakistan they live in, should be ensured that they have access to basic food levels and health facilities and they do not die of hunger or malnutrition. Legislation for ‘food security for all’ may be contemplated as has recently been done in India. 

The political system also needs to be reformed to make democracy work for the poor and the disadvantaged. In its present shape, our democracy can hardly be called the sort of democracy Sen has talked about in the context of famines. If Tharparkar was faced with a famine-like situation, why did the public representatives remain insensitive to the misfortunes of the area’s residents? Why did public employees, reported to be the scions of bigwigs of the ruling party in Sindh, not taken to task?

The media had been persistently reporting that things were deteriorating in Thar day by day. The tragedy started unfolding with the death of peacocks from some mysterious disease. Then cattle started dying of sheep pox but all these failed to grasp the attention of Sindh’s officialdom. All the animals could not be vaccinated as the veterinary hospitals of the area did not have enough number of veterinary doctors. Even the sanctioned strength of veterinary doctors was not made available in the hospitals of Thar. Is it not criminal negligence to not vaccinate the animals especially in Thar where livestock is the major source of livelihood?

Similarly media reports confirm that wheat was available with the government but was not distributed among those who needed it the most due to corruption rampant in the food department. There are health centres there too, though insufficient in number, but they did not have proper medical staff and medicine. Is this not a governance issue? Is it a crime committed by nature or sheer bad governance that killed the children of Thar? 

Certainly the killer in this case is not the drought. Neither is it nature’s crime. It is sheer bad governance. It is mismanagement and lack of planning. It is corruption and incompetence and, above all, it is the apathy and callousness of the ruling elite and the Sindh officialdom that are responsible for the Thar tragedy.

Drought is not the real killer; the real killers are the powerlessness of the local population and the apathy of the ruling lords. It is time we took stock of the situation in a dispassionate manner. Rather than burying our heads in the sand or spending time to prove that the situation is not as bad as depicted by the media, the right course of action would be to concentrate on the rehabilitation of the affectees.

Further, those public functionaries, however powerful they may be, found responsible for the criminal negligence should be brought to book. Merely transferring them from their posts to calm the situation is not sufficient. In order to ensure that such criminal negligence is not repeated, accountability is a must. The Neros of Sindh who continued playing their fiddles while the children of Thar were dying should not go unpunished.

The writer is a graduate of Columbia University.