ENVIRONMENT

THE DELUGE AND ITS AFTERMATH

By: NASSER YOUSAF

The worst has struck again, and nearly seventy years sooner than feared. A fearsome flood had inundated a considerable part of what we now call Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 1829. Another flood of similar intensity struck in 2010.

It was then thought that the pattern would be something like 70 to 80 years in between two catastrophes. But Mother Nature, too irked by our eccentricities, had other plans for us in store. The August 2022, flood has battered Swat, the proverbial Switzerland of the politicians, bureaucrats and their subjects alike as if there were no other analogies in scenic beauty available in the world, beyond recognition.

The deluge literally came out of nowhere, and struck Swat with such vengeance that people on the social media are now busy posting videos showing the area in perspective before and after the waters came crashing down.

A somewhat insensitive person, but doubtlessly in love with the primitive landscape of Swat, would prefer the post deluge scenario as more acceptable than what the present-day merchants-turned-tourism experts had made of the mountainous hideout.

For instance, Bahrain bazaar as it appears in the pictures before the flood looked to have been turned into a tinseltown lit up with colourful lights at night. Hotels had been built literally on the riverbed with as many storeys as the capricious minds of the hoteliers could conceive.

Madness on such a scale appeared to have been unleashed in the area that the spectacular view of the mountains had been totally erased. Some accounts would have us believe that the ungainly sight of the hotels had been stretched right up to the very source whence the river originated.

But what did the voracious hoteliers and their brand of tourists care as long as they succeeded in creating a festival like aura in the mountains where people once ventured to seek solitude and indeed nirvana. 

Kalam, the farthest populated point in the Swat valley, wore a serene and tranquil look until about two decades ago. 

But Greed appeared to have intervened irretrievably in the last few years. Some of the recent pictures of Kalam show apparatuses like merry-go-round, giant-wheel and pirate boat which not only have disfigured the landscape but have also ruined the quietude of the area where once only the sound of the rapidly flowing water could be heard and enjoyed. 

Having been reduced to oblivion, poor water had no course left to retain its normal flow, and hence came down on its tormentors and violators with the full force of its heretofore unseen might. The entire mountainous belt in Swat now presents the spectre 👻 of a land visited by a Biblical calamity. 

After having suffered the worst, politicians, bureaucrats and the common folks could now be seen and heard talking total nonsense. They have also found some friends in the international community who are blaming global warming for Pakistan's ordeal. Global warming might be a factor in the case of Baluchistan and Sindh, but not in respect of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. 

Our own interference in the way Nature works contributed in large proportion to our undoing.

The Province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has a massive army of bureaucracy. There is at present an Authority either in the name of development or some other futile pursuit in addition to the existing bureaucratic structure. 

What, however, appears to be non existent is a semblance of governance. It would not be out of place to mention here that the administration of such a massive army of officers and officials of all hues and callings must in itself be such a strain on the shoulders of the provincial chief secretary that other mundane matters could only be imagined to have been rendered of little importance. 

If this had not been so, the sanctity of River Swat and water courses elsewhere in the province would not have been violated with such brutal sense of impunity. The commissioners, deputy commissioners and their minions right down to the patwaris (land record clerks) are to be blamed for the flood catastrophe in the first place, and then might come climate change.