The Big Story: The holy rail

Almost any documentary about Gandhi shows him chugging around India in a third-class train compartment, meeting eager crowds at every station en route to his destination. That is one of the starker examples of how the colonial rail network nurtured Indian nationalism, allowing residents of the subcontinent to cement their common identity.

Yet for a network so vital, free India has mostly neglected it. Even though the rail network is acknowledged to be tbe backbone of the country, the population per kilometre of track in India is only 63% of China’s. Moreover, India has mostly neglected the quality of its tracks, updating the Raj-built network only infrequently. This means that Indian Railways can seem unnervingly unsafe, with accidents occurring with alarming regularity.

On Saturday, there was another. Thirty nine people were killed as a train went off the rails in Andhra Pradesh. This is the third major train derailment in two months. On November 10, the Indore-Patna Express derailed, killing 150 people. On December 26, the Sealdah-Ajmer Express went of the tracks, injuring 43.

Between 2009-’10 to 2015-’16, railway accidents in India killed 620 people. Yet this fails to cause an uproar. The people being mangled to death in bogeys are not very rich or urban, so they catch the attention of the English-language media only briefly. Flight delays make more of a splash on television news than do train accident deaths. But without pressure, politicians will do little to push towards any improvement.

In fact, India’s priorities are so misplaced that the Narendra Modi government has announced a fantastically expensive bullet train between Mumbai and Surat. It is estimated to cost nearly Rs 100,000 crore. The country’s middles classes have hailed this as a marker of development, the catch-all-term now in fashion. That development, as it is currently understood, focuses on an expensive train – for which the fare will be in the same ballpark as an aeroplane ticket – but not the deaths of citizens is a truly worrying portent for India’s future.

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Political Picks

  1. The police used force to clear Marina beach in Chennai on Monday. Earlier, with the Supreme Court judgment now overruled by a state ordinance, jallikattu was conducted in some places in Tamil Nadu. However, protestors are still firm on demanding a “permanent solution”, with the chief minister not being allowed to inaugurate a bout of the sport.
  2. It’s official: the Samajwadi Party will field 298 candidates and the Congress 105 in their alliance for the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections.
  3. Two Assam Rifles personnel were killed and two others were injured in an ambush engineered by a joint team of militants belonging to the United Liberation Front of Assam and Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland in Assam.

Punditry

  1. Now being seen more than ever as a “Hindi party”, the Bharatiya Janata Party has the most to lose from the jallikattu protests, says this edit in the Hindustan Times.
  2. Bihar government’s decision to put in place 50% reservations in judicial services is a step long overdue, argues Shaibal Gupta in the Indian Express.
  3. Pakistan is actually building more infrastructure than it requires, says the Economist.
  4. United States President Barrack Obama leaves a blood-stained legacy of using war to further the US’s foreign policy aims around the globe, argues Brahma Chellaney in the Japan Times.

Giggle

Don’t Miss

Bihar just put out the largest human chain – consisting mostly of women – ever in support of prohibition. But why did India’s English-language media ignore it and mostly report on the tiny #IWillGoOut protests in a few metros, asks Mridula Chari.

“That English media outside Bihar did not cover the chain is perhaps not surprising, given that newspapers in large urban areas are notorious for their elite bias in coverage, choosing to focus on events in cities than in states, even ones as large as Bihar and despite the government having organised it.

The #IWillGoOut marches, on the other hand, were largely spontaneous reactions to reported incidents of molestations in Bengaluru on New Year’s Eve, and were organised on social media by city-dwelling women.”