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Not social service, but community work - http://members.theglobe.com/athreya/ie081298.htm

S. Gurumurthy ()
Dec 8, 1998.

Title: Not social service, but community work
Author: S. Gurumurthy
Publication: http://members.theglobe.com/athreya/ie081298.htm
Date: Dec 8, 1998.

A Gurudwara, a few hundred villagers, and some two hundred disciplined
RSS workers-- they made all the difference between life and death for
over two hundred of injured passengers in one of the most disastrous
rail smash in recent times.

It was chill night. And pitch dark. The fateful scene was in a village,
Khanna, 50 miles away from the industrial town of Ludhiana in Punjab.
This was where the ghastly rail accident reported in newspapers took
place on November 26.

It was 3.15 am. The Frontier Express had derailed just two minutes
earlier and the derailed bogies had spilled on to the adjoining railway
line. The speeding Sealdah mail from the opposite side rammed into the
derailed train. The result of the explosion--instant death, mutilation
of the bodies, severed limbs and bodies hanging from the mangled train,
wailing children, women and men. All in a matter of seconds.

Within minutes the loud speaker of the Khanna Gurudwara began announcing
the gravity of the disaster, calling upon able-bodied men and women to
come out to help the victims. The loudspeakers woke up the residents of
five nearby villages. And hundreds of them poured in a matter of
minutes.

For the young Mahendra Pandey, who was trying to get out of his second
class bogie in the derailed train even as the smash took place, it first
looked like an explosion engineered by terrorists. He thought he would
have a few seconds of life left as he was being tossed like a football
from one place to the other in S-2 compartment. In the end he found
himself alive. With a head injury and broken ribs, he asked one of the
villagers not for medical assistance, but, whether telephone facility
was available nearby. He managed to walk to the house of a villager who
had a telephone.

Pandey is the General Secretary of the largest student organisation in
India, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. Being a swayamsewak of
the RSS, he knew whom to contact in the organisation. News of the
disaster reached the Ludhiana and Ferozepur units of the RSS at 4.25 am.
By 5.45 am the senior RSS officials of Ludhiana had reached and in the
next two hours over 200 trained RSS volunteers were already on the
scene. By 4.45 the local police reached the place, but, the Railway
relief team reached well past 5.30 am

Thus, the combination of the Gurudwara, villagers, and the RSS
volunteers had, in stages, assumed charge of the relief operations even
as the official relief measures joined later.

But the first to arrive were the villagers. Since it was dark
everywhere, what was needed was light. (The Railway searchlight came
only at 6 am even though Ludhiana was only 50 kms away.) But the
solution was ready on hand. The villagers lined up their tractors,
started their engines and switched on their headlights to provide the
needed light for the relief work.

The next task was to extricate the survivors who were trapped between
the broken bogies and overturned compartments. The strong hands of the
sturdy sikhs were themselves adequate to break open the doors and iron
grills of the bogies. This was supplemented by axes and saws brought
later to facilitate the work of extricating the trapped dead and injured
passengers.

The next hurdle was the bitter cold which was freezing the dead and
alive. The healthy Punjabi women repeatedly ferried bundles of paddy
straw from the nearest fields which they set afire to warm up the
atmosphere to save the suffering from biting cold.

When the villagers found the bodies of many injured and dead women
passengers exposed, they untied their turbans and placed the cloth on
them.

The local Gurudwara turned into a medical camp and the famous Langer of
the Gurudwara-- which serves food for all those who go to the
temple--began preparing and serving refreshments to the hundreds who
were injured. And when the official relief arrived, the villagers began
to provide refreshments to a huge turnout of 30000 people--the victims,
their near and dear, relief workers and officials--who came everyday to
the accident site.

The villagers formed a 16 member Rail Durghatana Prabhandhak Committee
(Rail disaster management committee) to oversee the operations, raise
resources, and issue printed passes for the volunteers to go past the
police lines for relief work. Contributions in cash and kind kept
pouring in and kept the relief going for a week. The committee ended the
relief mission with a surplus of a whole truckload of food grains.

The RSS volunteers who converged from Ludhiana swung in to medical
relief at the accident spot and in the three Ludhiana hospitals. Their
level of involvement with the victims lying in the hospitals was
intense. Ramjidas Kaitara, the RSS seva pramukh of Ludhiana today knows
each of the 139 patients-- who belong to all communities-- by name and
the extent and type of their injury, by heart. He visits the hospital
twice a day and monitors the need for medicine, funds, blood and keeps
liaison with the administration to fulfil them. The local RSS organised
a blood donation camp to take care of the blood transfusion needs of the
patients. The organisational skill of the RSS volunteers won the praise
of all.

The SDM of Khanna town S.S Gill says, "on the third day, when even the
relatives of the victims were reluctant to go near the dead bodies, I
had to rely on the RSS volunteers to lift the bodies. They did without a
moment of thought." The local chief of the RSS says," we will adopt the
three teen aged brothers who lost their parents in the accident in case
no relative of them comes forward to own them."

Not a Rupee of the accident victims, dead or alive, was misappropriated
or lost. Jaswant Singh, resident of the Bhatiyan village, handed over to
the authorities a bag containing Rs 3 lakhs in cash and jewellery valued
at Rs 2 lakhs to the SDM

This is what a living community does. This is from where we are moving
towards high-voltage individualism of the Anglo-Saxon tradition.
Community fosters sharing. There is no substitute for shared living.
Community living in India ensures that people share their suffering and
happiness-- the first one is shared without invitation and the second
one mandates invitation to share. That is why, in the Indian tradition,
people visit the bereaved without invitation and go to marriages or
other functions only if invited.

It is not social service, which is a western virtue. Social service is
not sharing, while a functioning community shares. While social service
demands indirect returns like recognition, fame and even religious
conversion induced by gratefulness, community sharing which is part of
the Indian tradition mandates sharing as dharma. This is what is
declining in modern times and what needs reinstatement. And this is
precisely what the Punjabi villagers have demonstrated.

And yet except a small English daily in Delhi, no other major newspaper,
no English newspaper published what the five villagers of Punjab and the
selfless volunteers of RSS have done.


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