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The Odisha Government did a creditable job in minimizing the immediate impact of Cyclone Fani, which made landfall in Puri 10 days ago. Besides disaster relief workers and police the state’s administration roped in civil society volunteers to evacuate millions of people, who were moved to cyclone shelters. It warned fishermen to not venture towards the sea and summoned personnel and equipment to clear roads and remove uprooted trees and other debris. But the challenge posed by Fani is not yet over. The cyclone has left behind a trail of devastation and suffering in 14 districts of Odisha. According to official records, more than a corer people have been affected, almost all the kuccha houses have be razed, rendering nearly 50 percent of the people in these districts homeless, electricity and water supplies have been hit, most of the standing paddy crop is lost and sources of livelihood, including coconut orchards and fish boats, have been destroyed.
Like in its efforts to warn people about the cyclone, the Odhisha government has involved the civil society in the rehabilitation effort. It has launched a web portal for crowd funding projects for this purpose. Women’s self-help groups have been roped into the endeavour. The state government has also announced subsidies to restore agrarian livelihoods and assistance to fisher people to buy new boats and fishing nets. However, to restore the fishing economy, the government needs to look beyond the boat owners. Those who do not own boats will not have work till the vessels destroyed by the calamity are respaired or replaced. Landless agricultural laborers will, similarly, need employment before work on the fields resumes. As it reaches out to the people whose lives and livelihoods have been ravaged, the Odisha government’s priority should also be to ensure that social inequalities are not aggravated in the cyclone’s aftermath. It should act immediately on reports that post-Fani stress has found expression in the deepening of caste fault-lines and conflict.
Odisha is no stranger at severe cyclone. However, these storms usually occur in the last quarter of the year. Cyclones in April-May are much weaker than those that are formed in October-December. Fani has been ascribed to globally warming by some experts. These are still early days for the science that links unseasonal high intensity storms to the very warm sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean. But, Increasingly, climate scientists are coming around to a consensus that global warming will precipitate extreme weather events – like Fani – in the Indian Ocean. Odisha’s response to the cyclone shows that the country has the scientific acumen to assess the intensity of such events – and the administrative resolve to minimize loss of lives. The challenges of Odisha, and other coastal administrative resolve to minimize loss of lives. The challenges of Odihsa, and other coastal states, is to ensure that peoples’ suffering because of the vagaries of nature is minimized.
While the Mahagathbandhan in Uttar Pradesh spearheads the electoral push of the Opposition, it is Mamata Banerjee who has emerged as the voice of the fightback to the ruling party in West Bengal. She has repeatedly engaged with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rhetoric, and whatever the outcome of the election, she has made the electoral battle more lively, more riveting. She has also caught the ear of those who are uneasy about a single party becoming the axis of power. But those who watch her stake out the oppositional space are unlikely to be comfortable about Banerjee herself exhibiting intolerant and authoritarian behavior in her own state. Priyanaka Sharma of eh Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) in West Bengal was arrested on Friday for posting a morphed image of actor Priyanka Chopra at the red carpet of the recent Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume institute Gala in New York. Banerjee’s face had replaced Chopra’s who was dressed for the occasion in bizarre outfit and hair-do. There is nothing obscene about the image, and guests at the gala traditionally choose their outfits from the shelf over the top. Both the original and the morphed image have travelled widely on social media, and have been received in good (though perplexed) humor. Certainly, the picture shared by Sharma does not appear to constitute sufficient grounds for inviting stringent provisions of criminal law, which have been slapped on her.
Even earlier, though, Banerjee has show a disinclination to be amused when the joke is on her. In 2012, she had reacted sharply to a completely harmless cartoon based on a scene in a children’s film by Satyajit Ray, which she interpreted as a death threat and an attempt to outrage the modesty of a woman. Jadavapur University chemistry teacher Ambikesh Mohapatra had not originated the cartoon, he merely shared it. But he was beaten up by political goons and arrested under serious provisions of the law, including in infamous Section 66A(b) of the Information Technology Act, which was later struck seen outside the state was shared by millions of people, and an online movement courting arrest with humor began in West Bengal.