Minister takes refuge in divinity!

The scribes had put specific questions to the minister hoping he would answer them to the point so as to help bring the facts to light, and in the process, service the people's right to know about a human tragedy of a no mean scale. They tried to draw the minister's attention to the fact that the launch, with 200-passenger capacity, was actually overloaded by a couple of hundreds more; also, it was intrinsically accident-prone in a stormy weather, because its engineering design might well have been defective.

To these suggestions, the minister gallingly pointed out that generally speaking it is with the onset of the season for squalls and rains that the launches are checked on their loading capacity, life-supporting equipment, and all the rest about passenger safety. But the sudden storm caught them unawares, he argued. The question is, why the launches and terminals are not inspected all the year round to enforce the safety standards without any loopholes or cover for any contingency?

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No precautions were taken or enforced, and now one sees the attempt at explaining the tragedy away in terms of divine will in the hope perhaps that people would accept such fatalist message. This amounts to taking advantage of people's religiosity.

Pray, tell us what is not subject to divine will! Was it not God's will that we took all necessary measures to avert dangers to life? Despite frequent notices served on the ministry of shipping by major accidents galore in the last few years, the river safety standards remain as deplorable as ever. The minister's providence-centred pontification cannot but go down as a pathetic attempt to hide inefficiency and mismanagement under a pretence of divinity.