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IN A country as large as ours, and with a railway network as extensive as that of the Indian Railways, it is not surprising that there are regular accidents, some being attended by the deaths of scores of unsuspecting travellers. Indeed, it may be argued with some force that, given the state of the country's governance, in general, and Railway administration, in particular, such accidents are inevitable.

To say this is not to ignore in any way the entirely legitimate expectation of the average citizen that rail travel should be as safe as possible, more particularly that the thought of an accident occurring during a journey should not figure at all in the calculations made prior to a journey.

But, as we all know, reality is different, and living in a country where the state of general security is not very high (despite regular protestations to the contrary by politicians in the seat of power at any given point of time), it would only be sensible to spare a thought for the unthinkable, no matter what mode of travel one is availing.

Consequently, since accidents will necessarily occur despite all the promises made on the subject of "safe rail travel" by the authorities concerned, one will also have to live with the grief and anguish that is always the result of lives being lost in such mishaps. (At a personal level, at the moment of writing, one still does not know the fate of a friend of long-standing who was in coach AS-4 of the Rajdhani Express, which met with the accident in Aurangabad district in Bihar late on Monday night, the provisional death toll in which has been officially put at more than 100.)

If one believes in the "hand of Fate", such a death cannot be avoided, and to that extent human "free will" becomes subordinated to the designs of the supernatural, or the Almighty. But this is certainly not the case with those in charge of the Railways and the nation's security who, as has been shown so very clearly by the recent tragedy, have not hesitated to engage in the game of "passing the buck" even before the dust had, literally, settled on the scene of the disaster.

Thus, since the Railways were directly involved, they could not be accused of being lax in safety procedures, the result being that the Union Railway Minister was extremely fast off the mark in putting the blame on alleged sabotage.

Since the Bihar Chief Minister and her husband had a direct interest in politically running down the Railway Minister, also from Bihar (where, incidentally, Assembly elections are not very far off), they accused the Railways of being wholly responsible for the accident.

To cap it all, since national security was the responsibility of the Union Home Ministry, the Minister concerned came out with the statement that the accident was most likely the result of an accident not engineered by saboteurs. And all this before any in-depth inquiry was made into the accident by any responsible agency.

In this situation, to expect the top man in the Railway Ministry to resign is no better than a distant dream. The point of serious concern for the nation is that it was not so in the past.

Ranabir Ray Choudhury

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