South Asia’s Most Reliable Natural Disaster
In Nepal, nearly eight hundred are dead, thirty-thousand still unaccounted for, because the Bagmati River rose past every danger mark the state painted on its banks. The roads into Kathmandu were erased so thoroughly that the capital was, for a few days, an island reachable only by helicopter. Assam drowned as it has for sixty years, until one July night a hundred died in the Sivasagar district. A ninety-seven-year-old woman was carried out of her home on a raft made of banana trunks in the Charing village because there was nothing else in the house that would float. But most importantly between these two floods, we must remember to applaud their respective governments for the manner by which they turned an inevitability into an act of God.
Nepal’s flood was not a rainfall event at all, or not only. The flash flood that tore down the Bhotekoshi river toward Rasuwa and Nuwakot began with a rupture in the high mountains near the Tibet border. It was an ice-rock avalanche that exceeded the moraine dam’s capacity, releasing in minutes a volume of water and debris that would ordinarily take a season to arrive. Glacial lakes form behind walls of loose rock and ice debris left by retreating glaciers, and as the climate warms, they retreat faster, feeding the lakes. When one gives way, the result is a wall of water and boulders moving with enough kinetic energy to carry away a hydropower station, a bridge, a village, in the time it takes to read this sentence. Many glaciologists will tell you that a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) can go from trigger to devastation in under an hour. But there is no meaningful time for a disaster such as this.
Assam’s flood was not a surprise, never has been. The Brahmaputra is one of the greatest riverine systems of Asia. It rises in Tibet as the Yarlung Tsangpo, cuts through some of the most tectonically active terrain on the planet as it curls around the eastern Himalayan syntaxis, and arrives in Assam already swollen as the Dikhow. By that point, it is already carrying an unimaginable sediment load scoured from mountains that are young and eroding. This is a river system that has always flooded, every monsoon, for as long as there has been a monsoon to feed it.
This July, a cloudburst over its neighbouring state Nagaland sent water gushing down into Nazira, Bihubor, Nepali Khuti, Sivasagar, Charaideo, and Jorhat with a violence they had not seen in sixty years, according to the state’s own minister. But sixty years confesses that a basin capable of producing a once-in-sixty-years flood should have been built for the eventuality. Kaziranga’s rhinos and tigers, driven onto the last strips of high ground inside a floodplain, know this every year even when the government professes not to. Their Parliamentary Affairs Minister told the Assembly, “It is not merely a natural flood, but is on the scale of a natural calamity.” The problem is that it inflates the disaster to something almost sublime, beyond the reach of urban planning, and shrinks the government’s culpability to nothing.
Days into the deadliest disaster the country had suffered since the 2015 earthquake, the Nepali Prime Minister offered the public one message, that is, a call to “stand together”, and then largely vanished from view. He reappeared days later in the same sharp black suit and sunglasses that had already, before this flood, become a kind of visual shorthand among his critics. So, if you require a guide, if in the future you plan on running a country, to survive the first ninety-six hours of a disaster without having to answer in public the only questions that matters: “who allowed this to be built here?”, and “why wasn’t anyone warned in time?”, you have your answer.
It is Bornali Baruah and her husband who worked out how to lift a bedridden ninety-seven-year-old Lokada Baruah onto a raft of banana trunks because the water outside was rising faster than either of them could think, who said, “We will have to learn to coexist with the floods”, who do not intend on leaving Charing, because moving away, she says, requires economic and social circumstances that her family simply does not have. It is Prakash Aryal, a week after the Nepal flood, still moving from morgue to morgue in Kathmandu, looking for his sister and her family among the unclaimed dead, who told a reporter with a kind of exhausted, almost apologetic generosity, “the government may be inexperienced, but it has done its best.” The dead in Nepal and Assam are someone’s Bornali, someone’s Prakash, someone who is not being interviewed because there was no one left to carry them out.
Warmer air over the Bay of Bengal holds more moisture and feeds a monsoon trough that this year sat further north than usual. Glaciers across the Himalaya are retreating at a pace that is filling their attendant lakes much faster than intended. Extreme rainfall events are becoming more frequent across South Asia as the region warms. Climate change does not explain why the water was harmful, and why do hydropower stations keep being licensed into landslide-prone valleys in Nepal, and why are Assam’s embankments that fail every monsoon treated as a line item to be renewed rather than corrected, and why have the wetlands and floodplains around Kaziranga been encroached upon, year after year, until the water that used to spread harmlessly across them now has nowhere left to go but a village? A government cannot ignore a disaster like that in Nepal, so it manages it through visible spectacle with the helicopters, and army deployment. Assam is annual, absorbed so completely into the rhythm of the calendar that even a once-in-sixty-years flood struggles to break through as anything more than an unusually bad instance of something everyone already expected. Maybe floods have become a disaster that is almost boring. It protects the government. A government is never punished, in any durable way, for something the public has already been trained to consider inevitable.
We can only hope that the government in Nepal will be judged eventually, but not Assam. No, Assam’s government will not be judged on this flood at all. It will simply flood again next July, and whoever holds that same ministerial chair will likely reach for the same word, unprecedented, and find it exactly as useful as it was this time, because the public that might otherwise demand something else has been asked to absorb this same emergency, in some form, every single monsoon of their lives. None of this will produce the only thing that would actually lower next year’s death toll: a scrutiny of who approved construction in a floodplain that has always flooded, or where the disaster relief allocated after the last flood of this scale actually went. Until one of these governments is forced to answer that question in public, rather than invoking the mountains or the monsoon as if either were capable of signing a construction permit, the flood will keep doing the only thing it has ever reliably done: arrive as a natural disaster, and leave, months later, as a closed file, its number of dead quietly folded into the ledger of the ordinary, waiting for the next glacier to give way, or the next cloudburst to fall, on schedule.
In my English mid-term examination, we had a two-marker from the poem, The Trees by Adrienne Rich, that stated, “Why does the poet not mention the departure of the forest from the house in her letters? Could it be that we are often silent about important happenings that are so unexpected that they embarrass us?” And my answer to you today, in the context of the unprecedented floods: Yes. Asia and Monsoons are not soulmates. This was not divine intervention. And it certainly wasn’t fate. This has been willed.
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