Views From Abroad | Odisha and Ohio: A tale of two train accidents

Every Indian knows that on 2 June, a horrific rail accident in Odisha claimed the lives of nearly 300 people. The accident seems to have been caused by a signalling error. It might not have happened if proper safety safeguards had been in place, and everyone agrees that India’s railways are in dire need of modernization. In the wake of the tragedy, at least this section of the track will surely see long-overdue signalling upgrades. In a developing country with a GDP per capita of less than $2,500, there are many calls on the public purse, and it is inevitable that somewhere some absolutely necessary safety measures will go unimplemented. That is an explanation, not an excuse. Democracy demands that governments respond to the needs of their citizens. That’s why India’s Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw rushed to the accident site the very night of the disaster, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi arriving the following day. Ostensibly, they came to oversee recovery work. In reality, no one needs a railway minister to pick through wreckage or supervise hospital evacuations. They came to be seen, and to be seen to be responding. They came because they wanted voters to know that they were on the job. Contrast their response to that of United States President Joe Biden and his Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to America’s most recent high-profile rail accident. On 3 February, a freight train carrying highly toxic chemicals derailed in the small town of East Palestine, Ohio. No one was injured in the accident itself, but public health was threatened by leaking chemicals. The enduring image of the disaster was a toxic mushroom cloud caused by the open-air incineration of chemicals by emergency management teams. For nearly three weeks following the derailment, neither Biden nor Buttigieg visited East Palestine. Instead, they went about their usual business. The president was heavily criticized for visiting Ukraine while Ohio was burning; his transportation secretary was even more vilified for travelling around the country to attend routine ribbon-cutting ceremonies while dodging reporters’ questions about East Palestine. Finally, former president Donald Trump visited the town on 22 February, giving out thousands of bottles of Trump-branded mineral water. That spurred the administration to act, and Buttigieg duly visited the town, only to criticize Trump for playing politics with the crisis. President Biden still has not shown up, and likely never will. Places like East Palestine in small-town Ohio are Trump country. Populated mainly by white working-class families, they tend to be poorer, less educated, and less cosmopolitan than the big coastal cities. President Biden probably wouldn’t have had a warm reception there, and so he didn’t go. Secretary Buttigieg, a Harvard and Oxford-educated former McKinsey consultant, was not well-received by the people of East Palestine when he did go. He toured the scene of the accident, tweeted a picture, and seemingly left as soon as he could. The truth is that railroad accidents are quite common. The United States experiences more than 1,000 train derailments a year, and if most of them don’t lead to toxic chemical spills in populated areas, that’s more down to luck than design. There don’t seem to be published statistics on the frequency of signalling errors on Indian Railways, but they are probably just as common. Again, it’s only bad luck that turns a routine mistake into a deadly disaster. Politicians can’t do anything to influence whether any particular adverse event will turn out to be an innocuous error that escapes public scrutiny or a catastrophic accident that captures the attention of a nation. All they can do is respond. It speaks well of Indian democracy that India’s top politicians dropped everything to appear on the scene of the Odisha tragedy. Their presence won’t have done anything practical to assist the emergency response, but it will have reassured a nervous nation that their leaders took the crisis seriously. Biden and Buttigieg, by contrast, clearly showed that they didn’t want to be associated with an industrial accident in a declining section of the country where few people voted for them in 2020—or are likely to vote for them in 2024. That indifference reflects poorly on American democracy. Indian democracy has been called many names in recent years, but one thing you can’t call it is indifference. Responsiveness is not the only indicator of the health of a democracy, nor the most important one. But it is an indicator all the same. When Indians are in trouble, Indian politicians at all levels (not only the incumbents in Delhi) are keen to get on the scene and want to be seen to be on the scene. That may not do much to address the challenges that face India’s railways. But it does go a long way toward addressing the challenges that face Indian democracy.

The author is an associate professor at the University of Sydney and the author of the new study ‘Unholy Alliance: Inside the Activist Campaign to Pry India from the West’. He earned his MS (mathematical sciences) and PhD (sociology) from Johns Hopkins University. Views expressed are personal. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .