I come from a small town in Hooghly, which is one of the five districts worst affected by Amphan. Till late afternoon of Wednesday, I had little reason to worry. Despite the strong winds and heavy rains, it was not something the people of Bengal have not witnessed before—Kalbaishakhis with wind speeds that frequently reach 110km/h are a yearly (and often welcome) occurrence. We have withstood cyclones like Aila and Fani despite forecasts that predicted massive damages, most of it owing to the Sunderbans that have stood guard and borne the brunt of past cyclonic storms.
Having spoken to my parents and being reassured of everything being okay, nothing out of the ordinary, I went about my work for the day as per usual. There was nothing alarming reported in the national news either to make me think otherwise.
It was only at night when I went on social media that I was made to reckon with how bad the situation actually was: friends and acquaintances who were quite literally in the eye of the storm posting about city-wide power outages, electric poles falling, trees being uprooted, transformers exploding, tin roofs flying into their houses, windows shattering and homes getting flooded. The fear and helplessness were more than apparent, given that the worst of the storm was yet to pass.
Efforts at calling home went in vain since phone lines were down, so there was no way of knowing whether my family was safe. One could only speculate and hope for the best.
Checking the news did little to ease my worry. The little information I could gather was from local Bengali news channels and a press conference that the chief minister gave late at night. A visibly exhausted and defeated Mamata Banerjee kept reiterating how everything was ruined and nothing in the state remained; how homes, farmlands, rural and urban infrastructures, and coastal embankments were all lost; how despite evacuating 5 lakh people from harm’s way, the number of people adversely affected would still be high.
I was struck by her vulnerability, openness and honesty, which are very rare to see in a political leader, especially in current times. Coupled with the fact that this was coming from a person who has hardly ever admitted defeat in unforgiving political situations, this made matters even more distressing.
The silence next morning on the national media front was deafening, to say the least. While social media remained my main source of information on the damages done, the only news coverage that reached me was from NDTV, CNN, BBC and The Independent, barring Bengali news channels, of course. Along with the lack of coverage and general apathy, the silence from political leaders justifiably mounted peoples’ anger.
It was only around 2:00 PM that our Prime Minister finally made a comment on his twitter account on the cyclone and the battering West Bengal took.
The photos and videos that did emerge were heartbreaking to say the least—farmlands completely submerged, entire orchards uprooted, electric poles and trees fallen in peoples’ homes, thousands displaced. It was unnerving to see pictures from the airport, with hangers flooded underwater, and buildings collapsed.
The fabric of Kolkata’s cultural identity has been torn. Iconic areas like Park Street are unrecognizable. It would not be an exaggeration to say that College Street, which houses the largest second-hand book market in the world, has been all but swept away.
For a state already under financial and economic duress and reeling from the effects of the pandemic, the road to recovery seems unbelievably long and difficult now. Given the losses faced by the more privileged sections of the state, one can only imagine how terribly this disaster must have affected the more marginalized communities of the state.
The city of Kolkata has been ravaged. Livelihoods completely lost. Precious ecosystems in the Sunderbans irreversibly damaged. It is as much an ecological crisis as it is a social, cultural and economic. And given that precautions around social distancing measures have been thrown out the window, one shudders to think just how bad the health crisis in the state is going to get.
Reports of the damage and loss of lives and livelihoods have only begun to creep in in the national media with Prime Minister Modi’s visit to some of the affected areas in West Bengal this morning. The damages being projected are of around ₹1 lakh crore. A ₹1000 crore fund has already been set up by the CM with another 1000 crores being promised by our PM today, along with assurances that this is to be treated as worse than a national disaster.
The reason a part of me is still not too hopeful about aid from the central level is from the precedents the government has set for itself with regard to responses to crises in non-BJP governed states. In 2018, when Kerala was swept away by the floods, the onus of recovering from the disaster fell on the Keralites themselves, with student communities and professionals living outside the state coordinating large scale relief efforts towards rebuilding and rehabilitation.
With the ongoing pandemic and lockdown, however, it will be much more difficult to mobilize and coordinate concerted relief efforts to even begin to get past the damage that one of the worst natural disasters to have hit West Bengal since 1999 has created.