The paper for which I worked in Gandhinagar, The Times of India, would remain closed on Republic Day -- one of the very few days in a year when its offices would shut. Holi, Diwali, Gujarati New Year, Bhai Beej, and August 15 were the other few days when we had the privilege of not hunting for news. And the only reason for this, ironically, was that on these days the newspaper vendors wouldn't pick up any newspaper for distribution in Gujarat.
I don't know if that "privilege" of a few days off continues even now, when print journalists are also required to file stories for the online edition. I'm sure they must be on their toes even on these days, since the online job doesn't depend on vendors.
Even as I was sipping my tea, the huge row house allotted to me by the Gujarat government as the Times of India representative in Gandhinagar began shaking. The earth was shaking, and we rushed out.
Telephone lines were nearly non-functional, and the only call I received was from then editor Kingshuk Nag, asking how the situation was in Gandhinagar. I told him there had been an earthquake, that our row house had cracked a little, but that it didn't seem devastating. "In Ahmedabad, multistorey buildings have fallen like a house of cards," he said, and the line got jammed.
We had a flat in Ahmedabad, and on hearing what Nag had told us, we rushed there, about 35 km away, on our sidecar scooter, to see if it was intact. On reaching the flat on Satellite Road, I found panic everywhere -- nobody was staying inside the building; everyone had moved out of fear. But the building itself was safe, so we sighed in relief and decided to head back to Gandhinagar.
On our way back, we stopped for lunch at an open-air restaurant between Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar. Since people had already panicked, nobody was cooking at home, so the restaurant was packed. We returned home. At that point I still had no sense of the extent of the damage -- Ahmedabad had plenty of reporters, I assumed they'd already be on the job.
I decided to go straight to the Sachivalaya, where officials were sitting out on the open lawn with tables, chairs and walkie-talkies, trying to assess the damage and organise disaster relief. It was here that I saw the real scale of the panic. Maheshwar Sahu, a senior IAS officer, was already at work. I caught hold of him and asked him to tell me the extent of the damage across the state.
It was Sahu who told me the epicentre was near Rapar, a town in Kutch district, and that it had measured 7.9 on the Richter scale. He was reluctant to reveal the extent of the devastation, but eventually told me that most houses in several towns of Kutch district, including Bhuj, Rapar and Anjar, had been reduced to rubble. "At least 10,000 people must have died," he said.
Since telephones were down and there was no point heading to my office just a kilometre away, I asked Sahu -- who had a mobile phone, a rarity then -- to let me call Kingshuk, who was at the Ahmedabad office frantically trying to piece together what had happened. He agreed. After several attempts I got through, told him what Sahu had said, and then handed the phone to Sahu so he could speak to Kingshuk directly. It was big news.
The Times of India swung into action, and I learned later that a two-page special was printed within a couple of hours, with the headline reporting that at least 10,000 had died in Kutch, along with reports from local correspondents on the deaths in Ahmedabad caused by the collapse of several multistorey buildings.
Keshubhai Patel was Gujarat's chief minister at the time, and panic among the middle class was all-pervasive. For several days, people in Ahmedabad slept outside their homes, braving the winter cold. Those with cars slept in them; others simply squatted outside.
Rumours of more tremors to come were widespread, and Gujarat was already gripped by trauma and aftershocks. It was in this climate that Ambalal Patel -- a class 2 government official known in Gujarat for predicting weather and monsoons using traditional astrological methods -- publicly predicted that another massive earthquake would strike the state on February 3, 2001.
His "prediction" spread rapidly through the media and by word of mouth, triggering mass panic. Tens of thousands of terrified citizens across Gujarat evacuated their homes, slept in open fields, and shut down businesses and offices in fear of a second catastrophe.
The Keshubhai Patel government, already under intense pressure over its handling of the earthquake relief operations, took a hard line against rumour-mongering that it felt was compromising public peace. To halt the spreading hysteria, the Gujarat police arrested Patel for making baseless, unscientific predictions and deliberately creating panic amid the prevailing emergency.
Such was the scale of the panic that even the Los Angeles Times ran a story on Patel on February 4, headlined "Rumor Mill Rattles Quake-Torn India." Datelined Gandhinagar, the report by John-Thor Dahlburg described how, spooked by a soothsayer's forecast, hundreds of thousands of Indians had slept outdoors, fearing a second quake would kill them in their homes.
The report noted that police had arrested Ambalal Patel, the amateur astrologer whose predictions had caused such anxiety, and charged him under Section 505 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalises spreading rumours that cause panic -- an offence carrying a possible three-year sentence.
A senior police officer in Gandhinagar was quoted describing the scale of disruption Patel's forecast had caused, noting that hundreds of thousands of people were sleeping outdoors because of it, and that the law did not recognise astrology or superstition as grounds for public alarm.
The report also noted that in Ahmedabad, where an estimated 1,500 people had been killed eight days earlier by collapsing buildings, hundreds of merchants pulled down their shutters that Saturday on the chance that Patel's prediction might come true. It traced how a Gujarati newspaper report had first given Patel his enormous credibility, noting that on December 30 he had "foretold an earthquake in west-central India" on one of several dates in January.
It's not without reason that the recent news of Patel stepping back from weather forecasting brought back memories of that 2001 episode -- one that remains a striking example of the legal and social consequences of public disaster prediction in India.
Pandya and Vigyan Jatha have challenged the scientific validity of Patel's methods. Troubled by how the vernacular press was giving Patel's weather "predictions" such prominence, they questioned his reliance on Vedic astrology rather than meteorological science, and accused him of sowing unnecessary panic and confusion among farmers and the wider public.
The Gujarati media I routinely follow online still runs Ambalal Patel's weather predictions alongside those of the Indian Meteorological Department. Worse, Google News app's algorithm continues to surface stories that appear to validate his predictions.
Deeply hurt by the criticism -- which he said was an attack not just on him but on India's traditional Vedic knowledge and the wisdom of its ancient sages -- Ambalal Patel has now publicly announced his decision to stop making weather forecasts altogether.
What bewilders me most is that no other rationalist groups or individuals, at least among those I know, have come forward to support Pandya. As for the Gujarat government, the ruling BJP, and the virtually defunct opposition parties, especially the Congress, the less said the better -- they care little for such unscientific claims until they start to embarrass them.
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