Gujarat must remain on the front page

Gujarat must remain on the front page
Savita Varde-Naqvi

Having heard in England about the scale of the Gujarat catastrophe, Lord Bill Deedes had expected to find mothers in Gujarat weeping for their lost children.

"Instead I find an India dry-eyed, calm and resourceful. Of course, there are modest muddles. The miracle is that there are not bigger muddles," said the veteran British journalist, now UNICEF's Special Representative for the Media.

What he saw instead was both reassuring and comforting. For, standing tall amidst the dark ruins left by the earthquake in Gujarat, was the luminous spirit of the Indian relief workers, drawn both from the official corpus and the innumerable volunteer groups that had rushed there as if to fulfil a promise of some selfless vow.

``The task has only just begun. After the immediate rescue work, India is now left with the greater part of the burden -- recovery,'' said Lord Deedes, better known to his colleagues as Bill.

The 87-year-old journalist, probably the oldest working member in his profession, arrived in Gujarat within a week of the devastating earthquake. His brief was to collect a first hand account of the earthquake for The Daily Telegraph of London which he had edited from 1974 to '86 and where he is now a leader writer and columnist.

Lord Deedes waded through the rubble in the remote village of Bakutara, 40 km from Santalpur taluka on the border of Kutch and Patan districts. Not someone to accept the constraints of age, he insisted on meeting and talking to people who were still `unreached' by journalists. For instance, in a parched hamlet of 1,200 people, the mud and stone houses had been flattened or badly damaged and the village school where 150 children were registered up to class VII had all but vanished. Clusters of children of varying ages were roaming the ruins. Though fewer deaths had been reported than what might be expected, people had lost everything. Bright cotton garments that the women of this region embroider, their threads, needles and other sewing implements, were buried under the rubble. The men folk were already enduring another hardship imposed by three years of unending drought. Fields of millet, cumin and fennel were left scorched.

"They will need relief and assistance no doubt, but that is not everything," observed Lord Deedes. "The earlier we understand this, the better. We have to help create an enabling environment so that they can earn a livelihood again, children can go back to school again, routine immunisations are started again." He observed that while foreign rescue teams had done their crucial bit, India was left with the greater part of the burden.

"Recovery will be expensive, take a long time and need a lot of support," he said. All the more reason why aid agencies would be best advised to work hand in glove with the government and ask the Indian authorities how best they can help, he added. Lord Deedes who suffered a stroke during his gruelling Gujarat tour, insisted on completing his dispatch from the hospital in Ahmedabad in between an ECG examination and a CT brain scan.

As a veteran journalist Lord Deedes had a few sharp observations to make on the role of the media in Gujarat. He said his biggest fear was that theearthquake story was now slipping into the inner pages of Indian newspapers while international coverage had been relegated to its normal attention span of 15-second sound bites.

"To be honest, we (media) are not good at staying with a subject. We like to move from one thing to another," he said. "I would like to remind my fellow journalists that criticism is fine as long as it does not come in the way of continuing with the task."

The indefatigable octogenarian who was made Knight of the British Empire in 1986 for services to journalism and humane causes, has reported extensively on the conflicts in Angola, Sudan and Kosovo -- primarily their impact on children and women.

The writer works for UNICEF India