Coincidences are perfectly normal things. Twenty-two babies dying in less than 72 hours in the B.C. Roy Memorial Hospital for Children is one of those. Life — or death — is stranger than fiction, for it would have needed far more creative muscle than a Booker-Prize winner could summon up to get her readers swallow that one. But the citizens of West Bengal have a stronger stomach than wishy-washy readers of fiction. They accept, and have gone on accepting, that it may happen, not once but repeatedly, that a large number of almost dead babies — “in a serious condition” — are admitted to the hospital in rapid succession and, therefore, die in rapid succession too. After all, the B.C. Roy Hospital is a referral hospital: that single English word, correctly used for a change, can frighten all doubts into shamed silence.

No questions need be raised about the serious condition of the 22 babies. They would have died anyway — it is enough to look at the infant mortality rate, comforting, accepted numbers, to take it in one’s stride. It happens… like rapes, starvation deaths, child marriages, female foeticide. It’s part of life in West Bengal, take it or leave it. No one can be blamed for any of these. Women, children and the poor are just unfortunate. So it cannot be too surprising that the referral hospital does not bother to equip itself with ventilators, pulse- and heart-rate monitors, and certain other essential intensive-care equipment or with adequately trained nurses. It is, after all, a question of priorities. Exactly how much value can be placed, how much energy, time and thought be expended, on the children of parents desperate enough, helpless enough, to bring their babies to the government’s paediatric hospital? They know, don’t they, in November 2006, that 18 babies had died there within three days in August-September 2002, and 10 babies within 24 hours alone? It’s their decision.

One cannot, for even a moment, doubt the concern of the government. The chief minister rushed to the spot, reportedly full of reassurances that the problem — he actually realized it was a “problem”, unless the media has misconstrued as usual — will be sorted out when the annexe is ready in January. January 2007? That would be nice, since coincidental serial deaths made news back in 2002. His health minister has been more eloquent than the last few times. He has said that an inquiry has been ordered into the deaths. This is reassuring; at least the health minister is doing his job.

It is his job to say this, nothing more. According to hallowed Indian tradition, only the Union railways minister is expected to quit his chair everytime there is a train accident. The state health minister, on the other hand, is not to blame when faulty blood-testing kits endanger thalassemic children and, it can be assumed, when a certain hospital makes a habit of serial baby deaths. The details of this latest episode will be “revealed”, the minister has said. Bengal waits with bated breath for the revealing details.

But some details have remained curiously unforthcoming. As, for example, what happened to the Rs 1.8 crore reportedly sanctioned for the revamping and modernizing of the hospital by the government after the 2002 deaths. And to the Rs 71 lakh that Sourav Ganguly helped raise for new units. These questions err on the side of politeness, for they do not take into account the decades before 2002 when the same government was ruling. It is not much use asking, of course: no one in West Bengal, even a Left-Front partner inquiring about the business deals of the government it is part of, has any right to any information. What is good for the rest of the country is simply not good enough for West Bengal. Its rulers know better. That is why the machinery for providing citizens with the information they want has simply not been put in place. And the state information commission rendered inaccessible by the display of the wrong address and wrong telephone number.

The people’s government has, doubtless, its own definition of its own people. Those who do not ask questions. Those who believe in their leaders’ priorities but never put them into words. Put into words, they would have to say, for example, that the children of the poor, like the poor themselves, do not really matter. They, if they manage to survive, will vote anyway. Wide roads, fast cars, flyovers with a shadowy, faceless profusion of life underneath, shopping malls with slippery-shiny floors, a pretty city, are necessary to interest investors. Development is not the issue of contention, neither is the need for it. But the veneer of development that breeds forgetfulness of those who cannot pay for it, a ruthlessness towards those who have nowhere to go, a forgiveness of those who do away with funds drawn from the trusting taxpayer, when the money is intended to improve the infrastructure for the less privileged, is an indicator of priorities. It is acceptable, again, to return to the Centre the crores granted for Sarvashiksha Abhijan. There is really no time to waste in setting up education opportunities for the children of the less fortunate. Or to make sure that a few of the rural poor get some benefit out of the employment guarantee scheme. But it is not politically correct to put such priorities into words. Actions speak for themselves. The people of West Bengal, that is, the people whose government this is, know how to catch on.

West Bengal is a proud state, proud in its burgeoning prosperity, proud in its traditionally famous culture. The place is splitting at the seams with intellectuals, academics, global greats who were at least born here, artists, sensitive-souled poets, progressive “telefilm” makers, with music, clever conversation, film, graffiti, almost avant-garde theatre and acute political consciousness. Its chief city is bustling, charming, dirty, noisy, rapaciously and seductively full of life. Every foreigner says so. It is amazing how this many-splendoured range of talented, loquacious, persuasive, culturally powerful human beings agree on their crucial silences. Babies may die, and the essential ventilator in the premier hospital may be forever lacking, but there is never a peep of protest. Or the squeak of an unbelieving question. Accountability is an embarrassing principle — to ask it of anyone is to be accountable oneself.

Silence breeds a golden time for those who know how to take advantage of it. In front of a popular restaurant in south Calcutta, the pavement is taken up by illegal settlers, for whom eviction and return are a routine cycle. Among them, a young woman who picks rags for a living and her rickshaw-puller husband have just lost a few-months-old baby to abductors. They came, expressing concern at the poor clothes of the children sleeping on the pavement, and promised the mother Rs 200 if she would lend them her last-born for a “shooting”. The mother and aunt, unable to let go of so much money, were led by the two women and the man into the vast and bewildering grounds of the famous university in south Calcutta. They were taken around and about spaces they had never seen before. Then they were asked to wait while they wrapped the baby in a towel, presumably to get him ready for the “shoot”. That is the last they saw of the baby, or its abductors. “There are so many gates,” said the women. That was just about a week ago. Maybe it is an additional twist that the extraordinary girl Jamuna Kapadia, a recipient of an excellence award from The Telegraph, conducts her crowded life of work and study on the pavement just a few metres away.

Does the rickshaw-puller’s baby matter? Do the dead babies in the hospital matter? Is it time we asked this question?