Kollam Temple Fire: 3 Lessons India Must Learn

The horrific disaster at the Puttingal Devi temple in Peravur town in Kerala's Kollam district has extracted a terrible toll - some 120 dead at last count, and over 350 people injured, many in critical condition.

Despite widespread speculation as to the causes of the tragedy, we don't really know what happened, with some claiming it was a simple accident (fireworks igniting a store of fireworks) and others alleging a murderous terror attack (though no one has stepped forward to claim responsibility).

Kerala's government has ordered a judicial probe into the temple fire and it is best to await its findings, which we all hope will be conclusive, in order to give some closure to the bereaved families. It has also asked the crime branch of the Kerala Police, headed by an Additional Director General of Police, to investigate the tragedy, which should appease the conspiracy theorists.

The judicial probe has been given a time of six months to conclude its work. Still, it is not too premature to reflect aloud on some of the larger trends in our society that have been brought to our attention by the accident.

First is the increasing phenomenon of religion as public spectacle: I grew up to believe in Hinduism as an intensely private faith, one in which what mattered was your personal relationship to divinity. Yes, the Christians believed in Sunday services and the Muslims prayed en masse (calling the faithful to prayer on loudspeakers that could be heard everywhere), and even the Sikh gurudwara in my Calcutta neighbourhood broadcast readings from the Granth Sahib to passersby on the street, but Hinduism was, I was taught, about quiet worship. Both by upbringing and temperament, I tended to steer clear of the crowded temple festivals that were the exception to what I assumed was the Hindu norm.
 Today that seems no longer possible. Hindu temples now compete with mosques and churches in the public demonstration of their piety. Almost everywhere now, temples blare out high-decibel music in the forms of bhajans, shlokas and lectures, very often at highly unsocial hours, as if one is somehow rendered holier by waking to the raucous screech of devotional songs at the crack of dawn or even earlier. Where most Hindus went to the temple to be alone with their favourite deity, today attendance is highest when the temple is the site of some public spectacle, ranging from assorted processions and rituals to the fireworks display that ignited the tragedy at the Puttingal Devi temple.

Is this really necessary? I have never been a great fan of fireworks because of the dangerous way in which ordinary people handle them, and the wide array of burns, singes and unintended explosions that seem to occur every time they are used, even at Diwali. But I am utterly puzzled by their role in temples. What on earth does a sparkler or a rocket have to do with a human being's worship of her Maker? If temples feel they have to dazzle the faithful by fireworks to retain their belief in God, then our religion has indeed come to a sorry pass.

By all means have fireworks on specific occasions - Diwali, New Year's day, Independence Day, a list can be drawn up - but have them managed, as in the West, by the local authorities, or by authorized non-governmental bodies with a license, insurance, and competent handling procedures. Nothing with such lethal potential should be left to ordinary people, without safety equipment or official sanction, to play with.

Yet, when the inevitable calls arose after the Puttingal Devi temple tragedy for fireworks ceremonies in temples to be banned, Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, understandably deferring to the powerful hold of religion on the public imagination, said it would not be practical to ban events associated with religious institutions.
 "Many see these events emotionally as it is part of their culture and traditions. I don't think a ban is a practical way out," he was quoted in the media as saying. "Instead, the best way is to bring about very strict guidelines and control events like this to see that safety is not compromised." The Chief Minister added: "This incident should open the eyes of all of us and everyone should cooperate with the guidelines to be worked out".

All very well, but the guidelines will come too late for the victims and survivors of the Puttingal Devi temple tragedy. Tradition is always the irrefutable argument in India, since it requires political courage - always a scarce commodity in an election season - to buck it. (Any government that seems to be bucking tradition can be sure that its opponents, even if they are godless Communists, will whip up the traditionalists into a frenzy with cries of "religion in danger!") But sometimes it is necessary to change tradition. Sati, after all, was also sanctified by tradition once: would our democratic politics have allowed for its abolition?

My second concern is the laxity of procedure and respect for law: the shocking news that permission was denied for the fireworks display and that the fireworks were set off anyway (on the grounds, of course, of tradition) points to a cavalier attitude to the law that bodes ill for us as a society. The best-organized and safest places in the world to live in are those where the smallest things compel public adherence - where people don't litter on the street, spit or urinate on the walls, run red lights at traffic junctions. India, of course, is a country where people do all of these things, with impunity. From such small violations, it is but a short step to setting off fireworks in defiance of the rules.

Our attitude has become that it is always easier to obtain forgiveness than permission. You do your fireworks display, it goes off without incident, everyone is happy, you try and get a retrospective waiver for your transgression, and the authorities say, what the heck, who's bothered, let it go. This happens time and again, until the one time when things don't go smoothly, a horrible tragedy happens, and then the finger-pointing begins. The only way we will be able to prevent such tragedies in the future is if we start punishing violators of rules even when everything goes well and they do no harm to anyone. Instilling a culture of compliance is much harder when there are influential and powerful politicians pressing the authorities to excuse violations. Politics in our country is too often a case of "support the public even when they're wrong". Unless this attitude changes, we will never become a truly developed modern society.
 Third is the politicization of tragedy: not only did every politician worth his salt rush to the site of the tragedy, they consumed a huge amount of public resources and diverted the attention of the people in charge from the urgent business of saving lives and attending to the survivors. But these leaders had no choice: their not going would have been held against them. Some accuse them of exploiting a tragedy by their ambulance-chasing, but that's unfair, because if they hadn't gone, more people would have accused them of callous indifference to the sufferings of the poor.

Why have we reduced disaster management to the politics of public displays of concern? Those of us who chose to stay away were upbraided on social media because our faces were not seen on TV. I didn't rush to Kollam because, after long years at the UN, I don't believe in disaster tourism. I am neither the constituency MP nor the Chief Minister; nor am I a doctor. I would simply have got in the way without adding anything useful to the relief efforts. Instead, I repeatedly tweeted appeals for blood and useful phone numbers for those handling the disaster response. Once the emergency phase has subsided, I will go quietly to visit the survivors. But to rush there now, just to make sure that my presence is noted by the public, would, in my view, be cynical in the extreme.

Yet the blame-game has already started, with RSS workers blaming the Congress government of Kerala for the disaster before the bodies have even been returned to their families, and a brawl breaking out between the two groups just outside the Trivandrum Medical College Hospital, where many of the victims were transported. This is appalling. Yes, elections to the Kerala State Assembly are only five weeks away, but let us not make politics out of the loss of human lives. The trends I have identified are societal ones: we are all complicit, whether Congress, Communist or BJP. The fault lies in ourselves, and it is in ourselves that we must find expiation, not by blaming each other for flaws from which we are not ourselves exempt.

The accident at the Puttingal Devi temple, if accident it is determined to be, will haunt us for a long time to come. But it is time to examine - and rectify - the trends in our society that have helped shape the contours of this tragedy, if we want to ensure it never happens again.

(Dr Shashi Tharoor is a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development and the former UN Under-Secretary-General. He has written 15 books, including, most recently, India Shastra: Reflections On the Nation in Our Time.)

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