Night was falling on the skyline of Silchar. The mighty Barak had by then made its detour through the second-largest urban conglomeration of Assam. Turbid waters were gushing through the breached portion of an important embankment. Three-fourths of the 27 square-kilometre landmass that makes Silchar had been completely submerged. The Barak was flowing with gusto at more than 1.5 meters above the danger level. And waters were rising thick and fast to make things even more horrific in the engulfing doom and despair.
In the heart of the town, euphemistically known as the “posh” enclave, where the real estate prices are perhaps some of the highest in the country, 18 families including ours were huddled in a five-storey housing complex to see before our disbelieving eyes how ravaging the river could be. But the day started on an otherwise normal note for us, even as reports of waters sneaking into the low-lying areas of the town had been pouring in since the previous evening. There were incessant rains over the past few days. Old-timers of the town were trying to recall if they had ever experienced downpours of such lethal intensity in the Barak Valley.
Weather offices confirmed that Assam and Meghalaya had by then recorded the highest June rainfall in 121 years with 858.1 mm, breaking the earlier record of 789.5 mm in 1966. Not to miss the matter of fact statistics, flash flood had lashed Silchar in 1966 as well. To put things in perspective, the government initiative to build embankments along the Barak to save Silchar from frequent floods was first seen in the aftermath of the devastating inundation of 1966. Various dykes along the town-side of the course of the river continued to be constructed in intervals from the Sixties till the Eighties.
The entire Barak Valley in general and its headquarters, Silchar, have always been vulnerable to recurring floods due to the Barak going in spate resulting from heavy rains upstream, around Manipur and Mizoram. The recorded history provides information on the mammoth flooding in 1916, 1929, 1966, 1985, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 and 2004. On other occasions too, the Valley went through minor floods. Partial accounts of the deluge of 1929 are available in two important individual memoirs. Both from the Silcharer Kadcha (Silchar Diary) by Kaliprasanna Bhattacharjee (ed. Amitabha Dev Choudhury, 2008) and a report on the great floods of 1929 by Sundari Mohan Das, published in the renowned Bengali periodical from the then Calcutta, Prabasi, edited by Ramananda Chatterjee in the same year, we come to know of the degree of devastation caused by the river systems of the Barak-Surma twin Valley. The similarity between the two great floods, separated by seven-years-less-than-a-century, mainly lies in the fact that both the Surma and the Kushiyara rivers in Sylhet were equally in spate as the Barak. Also, both the natural disasters happened in June. Some archival photographs reproduced in the memoirs by Bhattacharjee along with his narration tell us how waters were flowing at the first-storey height along the Central Road of Silchar. There are ghastly stories of corpses floating on the water. There was death, squalor and devastation all along. That was 1929. That was India under British rule. That was the time when the Barak had no dykes to stop surging waters
But more than nine decades on, in the third week of June 2022, we, the residents of a middle-class housing society, were experiencing a chill down the spine when waters were inching up, one after another of the staircase leading up to the first floor of the building. The ground floor of our housing complex, Sukumari Apartment, a 15-year-old building located in the lane that ends at the south Assam headquarters of the indomitable Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was already submerged. Marauding waters had filled the lift shaft of the building and five steps of the staircase went under the water. The central power panel of the housing society was just four inches above the water level. The whole area had plunged into darkness as the APDCL office had disconnected supply fearing short circuits.
That was the beginning of the travail for survival for us, like at least four lakh other Silcharites. The town, which started municipal administration as far back as 1882, and which was recently declared as a municipal corporation by the Government of Assam, saw the fury of nature at its worst. The people of the town were yet to recover from the fear and losses inflicted by the first round of floods just a month back. Communication and connectivity systems went haywire. The May floods from torrential rains and the resultant heavy landslides in the Dima Hasao district had already thrown life out of gear. Rail communication in the Lumding-Badarpur section of the North East Frontier Railway remained snapped since the May mayhem. Severe landslides on the national highway in Meghalaya closed the surface transport as well. When the Valley was under siege and its hapless dwellers in a beleaguered spot, in came the second round of floods.
The stock of water in the overhead tank of our building was fast depleting. Inverter batteries were being dried in the flats. Mobile towers were not working. Internet connectivity got a beating as there was no power to supply electricity to the modems. The middle-class has long forgotten the use of lanterns and candles. Kerosene is no more a lighting fuel. Nights in the marooned Silchar were getting asphyxiating. With the sky loaded with dark and heavy clouds overhead, the meteorological department forecasting more rains and babbling waters underneath, we were hearing stories about people getting drowned. With an uncanny resemblance to the anecdotes of 1929, we saw the visuals of abandoned dead bodies looking for a piece of dry land.
The government machinery got activated to look for the “miscreants” who had dug the dyke. A credible segment of the local media reported that a canal had been cut through the embankment on May 22, in the aftermath of the first round of floods to allow the stagnant waters in the Mahisha Beel (a natural reservoir where the town canals offload their water flow back to the river as there was no sluice gate to do so). That the locals had breached the dyke was no state secret. It was already in the public domain and the line agencies were very much in the loop. The good 20-odd days in the interregnum could easily be used to refill the canal and mend the dyke. But that was not to be. Those who pierced the protection of the town and those who almost oversaw the deed were equally convinced that the problem of regular inundation of the catchment area had a solution. The ruling political class in the district knew of the development. And none of them, it appears, had any idea as to what was in store for Silchar. But the disaster was a “manmade one”, they began to say, when the deluge set in.
The name of an otherwise obscure location — “Bethukandi” where the dyke had been breached — suddenly became a global cynosure as the people who did the damage to the dyke and the majority of the townsfolk swept by the floods belong to two different communities. Flood waters will recede, life will reboot losses and pains will remain mere accounts in the annals of history. But elections will surely arrive. And, unfortunately, they will usher in a new tagline — flood jihad. Hopefully, the state that failed to guard the river will succeed in saving the social fabric.
Written by Joydeep Biswas
Source: Indian Express, 11/07/22
