Flooding out the facts

The horrors of last year's June 16-17 deluge in Uttarakhand, particularly in the Char Dham area, are hard to forget. That disaster claimed over 5,000 lives with the authorities pressing helicopters into action to rescue over 150,000 people. But several local lawmakers appeared to have not only forgotten the exact dates but also the year, and the state government fully capitalised on this. In a question in the Vidhan Sabha, Vijaya Barthwal, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA from Yamkeshwar, wanted to know the number of helicopters used in the rescue operations in Char Dham area. Instead of 2013, she mentioned the year as 2014. Naturally, Chief Minister Harish Rawat replied with alacrity, saying there was no such disaster in the Char Dham area in 2014. In yet another question, Harbhajan Singh Cheema, a BJP MLA from Kashipur, wanted to know the number of casualties in the June 15-16 disaster in 2013. The government cynically obfuscated the answer: only 184 people were killed or went missing, it replied perhaps referring to the June 16 numbers only. Significantly in September last year, the government had told the House that 4,247 people were killed/missing in the two-day deluge of June 16-17, 2013.