Drishtipat Blog

My feeling is that Rezwan bhai has hit the nail on the head. He has hinted at a link between democracy and disaster response/management in the case of Cyclone Nargis. Democracies thrive in open societies with free flow of information. A person’s right to know and people’s right to speak are fundamental to democracies. While some have tried to portray this flow of information and the different media through which they flow as “wastes of time”/ “distractions” that keep people from going about their daily lives, that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire situation.

From his blog post, we learn that Nargis was a category-3 storm, whereas SIDR was a category-4. Question to readers: what are other physical factors that make a cyclone more or less devastating? I am assuming that the topography of the land also plays a part in how devastating a cyclone is, and would love to hear from readers about the differences in the two cases.

The flow of information is precisely what keeps people functioning in their daily lives.
When they don’t get information – e.g. when the media is not free – that is when their lives are hampered and made less bearable.

That is what – among other things, I stress – is what we saw unfold so tragically in Burma.
The free flow of information is what ensures good governance. At this point in time, we are not sure if the people of Burma were warned about the disaster or not. It is pretty unlikely we will be any surer in the future. Worse, the Burmese people themselves will not know if their own countrymen were warned or not. Without such knowledge, there are no demands on their government to improve governance.

Contrast this with the Bush Administration’s worst governance failure inside America, the response to Katrina. First up, note that in a society that is used to free flows of information, no one doubted whether the people were warned or not. With media completely privatized in America, the people have multiple channels to know. The Burmese junta with its monopoly on the media might be envying the Bush Administration right about now.

Or maybe not. Because it also means that there is no Anderson Cooper questioning their governance with extreme disgust, no Spike Lee making documentaries about the lovely New Orleans and no black community leaders rebuking America’s inherent racism on screen. Without the media enabling people to criticize government performance, you do not get good governance. As we all know now, the head of FEMA resigned and there are still questions lingering over the rest of the Bush Administration’s handling of this disaster.

Good luck finding a similar dynamic in Burma.

I am not an utopian and I do not think that democracy is a magic bullet. If we have democracy tomorrow, prices would not be down. If we have democracy tomorrow, governance would still be bad. But there will always be the hope that we can fix things, that people can be made accountable.

If Burma had democracy tomorrow, maybe 22,000 (and counting) would still have died tragically. I am arguing though that when the next storm comes, one thing will be certain: Burma will not have learnt anything from this and thousands will suffer again, if the military junta does not step down in the intervening time.

Let this be a warning to us Bangladeshis. The system in place for SIDR worked because it was part of the democratic norm to keep people informed and let information flow without impediments. That it worked under the current military regime can be attributed to systemic inertia. The only way to ensure that the reconstruction phase of the system is working is through open flow of information. Somehow, my mind remains uneasy on this score.

The only way to improve this system is to embrace those norms even closer.

The way to dismantle this system is through promoting the kind of secrecy, censorship, opaque government and intolerance to criticism that this government has displayed on numerous occasions.

Which way do you want to go?

Only after I finished writing this piece did I notice Mahtab Haider’s excellent piece on the same topic in Friday’s New Age. Well worth the read, makes the same points as Rezwan bhai.