The Social Edifice

When a building at Laxmi Nagar in East Delhi collapsed on 15th November, killing at least 70 people, the media did not generally permit the grievous loss of so many lives to speak for itself. Before the dust from the fallen masonry had settled, before the broken bodies had been identified and cremated or buried, new horror stories were spun out of the tragic incident. A new kind of ‘tragedy tourism’ had been discovered, knots of onlookers, bystanders who had forfeited their title to innocence, ghouls who had come to be close to the site of the macabre happenings. Once the owner had been made known, tales of his unique rapacity and exploitation were heard. He was charging more than 2500 rupees a month for a room that was little more than a cupboard, and was even renting space under the staircases for 350 rupees a month. The police failed to appear on the scene until more than an hour and a half after the collapse. Later, false relatives appeared, claiming corpses to whom they were not kin, in order to avail themselves of the compensation hastily promised by politicians. There were even tales – quite untrue – that local people had been less charitable than they might have been in their response to the loss of life, while some people were reported to have been looting the scanty belongings of the deceased. Rumours that children had been working in an illicit factory in the basement, a conviction that the numbers of dead was higher than the official count, that officials had begun filling in the improvised mass grave even before all the bodies had been retrieved – everything added to an impression of grisly festival. Even the opportunistic sellers of snacks had, in some versions of the story, made their appearance on the scene, while airlines were charging 10,000 rupees to ‘repatriate’ the exiled bodies to their home in Bihar and West Bengal.

Meanwhile, the Cyclops lens of the ubiquitous cameras stared into the faces of the injured and the bereaved, requiring that they give some account of themselves in misfortune. What benign fate had led a mother to go the market to buy vegetables at the very moment when her children’s lives were forfeit? Who had been working late, and had returned home to find his loved ones buried beneath the rubble? Survivors, their heads covered in bandages, hands still trembling with fear, spoke into the furry batons of microphones, informing those who had a right to know of the last words of their terminally injured husbands and children.

Of course, the principal object of hatred was the malefactor who owned the building. He was found to have had many cases against him, from selling illegal liquor to trading in adulterated cement. He had added at least two floors beyond the maximum permitted height of ground floor plus two. Close to the ruined building is another of his properties, which was evacuated the following day: unplastered, the raw red bricks with their layers of uneven cement, looked exactly what it was - a place for the vertical stacking of the unwanted poor, those whose hutments had been destroyed in the interests of ‘beautifying’ Delhi, a task that now surely exceeds the skill of the most accomplished architectural cosmetic surgeons in the world.

Why had so many harsh untruths been told in this context? Perhaps it is not sufficiently newsworthy that poor migrants have come from distant states for the privilege of pulling rickshaws, serving as maids and washerwomen, sellers of vegetables and other daily amenities for the middle class, only to find that their appointment with a better life turns out to be a date with premature and grisly death. The poor, whose negligible purchasing power scarcely registers on the monitors of progress and development, are a majority in India whose largely submerged labour is indispensable to the country’s supposed ‘emergence.’ The continuing scams, scandals and corruption of elites throw into stark relief the self-denial, sacrifice and largely unrewarded virtue of the urban poor. Such a contrast cannot be. The poor, too, must be sullied by the grim ideology of a fallen human nature, whose redemption is to be attained only through the savage mysteries of wealth-creation.

The truth is, no sooner had the disaster occurred than the people from the neighbourhood rushed to the scene, not to treat it as some kind of real-life horror movie, but to tear with their bare hands at the rubble in order to reach the maimed and injured. Baldev Singh, who owns a small repair-shop for cycles and motorbikes, was one of the first to arrive. He rescued five people before any official agents of the state had put in an appearance. He pulled three children and two adults out of the wreckage, although the man he rescued had lost part of his leg. The rescuers found themselves in a sea of blood, which, one small shopkeeper said, would take a lifetime to wash from his memory. ‘There was a sound like thunder, and all the buildings shook. People did not wait to be told what had happened on the evening news. Common humanity drove them to offer such assistance as they could.’

Nor were the spectators drawn by the lure of free, if gruesome, entertainment. Shila and Urmila had gone to the spot out of solidarity and a salutary fear; for they live in just such a building, and in the photographs of the unclaimed dead pinned to the wall outside the community center, they could see themselves and their own husbands and children, the only thing that stands between them and destitution. Both are maidservants from Murshidabad in West Bengal, earning 3,000 rupees a month to supplement their rickshaw-driving husbands’ earnings of about 5,000 a month. This will not drive them home: economic necessity means they risk death every day of their lives. In any case, they would not be allowed to work in the villages: here the status of servant is cloaked in a welcome anonymity. 

Inside the community centre, where the unwinking media maintain their soulless vigil, people are returning from the funeral pyres: a boy of about fourteen, in white, his eyes glazed with fear and grief at the terrifying ordeal of bidding farewell to his entire family, goes to cleanse himself in the communal bath-house; the tears of a young woman, supported by her relatives, have made channels in her sleepless cheeks as though she had been weeping for generations.

Before the disfigured pictures of the still unidentified dead, knots of people cover their eyes, dreading to recognize a familiar face. A woman sheds tears for the many unknown families in Bihar and West Bengal who have not yet received news that they are now widowed or childless.

The media swiftly shifted into more familiar territory - a gleeful attribution of blame; while politicians, eager to distance themselves from moral responsibility, nevertheless identified 38 buildings in the vicinity that would also have to be evacuated. Inquiries will be set up. A former High Court Judge will conduct a judicial inquiry to determine ‘the immediate and proximate causes for the building collapse, and the circumstances and sequence of events leading to the collapse…and the administrative, procedural and statutory lapses, if any, leading to the cave-in.’

The language of compassion, scarcely heard even in the midst of intolerable suffering, flew off into an empyrean of officialese, where, just as has happened after the half dozen or so previous building collapses in Delhi over recent years, it will rest, no longer in dusty files but in unaccessed cyberspace. The economics of human sacrifice will remain a largely unstudied discipline, and the breakneck speed of development will remain unimpeded by the breaking of a few more necks in Laxmi Nagar.

In the park at Geeta Colony, where, only yesterday, the dead had been laid out awaiting the last rites, a shamiana of purple and pale yellow is being erected for a forthcoming marriage ceremony. Life goes on, say the people; believing in that most fateful of modern superstitions, that although buildings may collapse, the social edifice remains in the safe hands of faulty constructers, supine officials and venal politicians.

Jeremy Seabrook is an author and journalist specialising in social, environmental and development issues. His latest book is People Without History