Monsoon
Risings
By Chittaroopa Palit and
Achin Vanaik
New Left Review
11 June, 2003
What were your family
origins and early influences?
I was born in 1964, to a
middle-class Bengali family. My father was an engineer in the Indian
Railways and my mother was a college lecturer. My fathers work
took us all over India, so I learnt early on about the countrys
extraordinary ecological and geographical variety, and how different
communities, tribals and poor farmers, lived and worked. As a child
I developed a strong sense of identification with the underprivilegedwith
the people who worked in our house and the children I played with in
the railway colonies. Growing up, I also began to chafe against the
confines of the typical feminine role. Love of literatureprose
and poetryopened my mind and made me something of a romantic;
a streak that eventually pushed me towards work in the villages. But
at Delhi UniversityI studied at Indraprastha College, a womens
college there, from 1981 to 84I read economics.
At the time I was a strong
China fan, full of admiration for the Long March and Maos dictums
of going to the countryside and living with the people.
I wasnt attracted to any of the left-affiliated student organizations
though, because of their insistence on following the party line, which
seemed to me antithetical to the freedom to think things through for
oneself. So I stayed away from the Students Federation of Indiathe
student wing of the cpi(m), the largest left partyalthough many
of my friends were in it. But my incipient Maoism was undermined by
1989. I was deeply shocked at the Tiananmen Square massacre. It taught
me to be a lot more cautious and reinforced my determination to work
things through for myself. Mine was a rough-and-ready Marxism, more
inspired by humanistic values and Marxs historical and early,
idealistic writings than by his economic analysis, even though I was
studying economics. Feminism had a more direct impact on me, partly
because it is something you get involved in not individually but collectively,
with other women. Groups like Saheli and the Boston Womens Collective,
who held a workshop in Delhi, made me far more aware of my body and
of sexual politics in general. It became an everyday question for me.
Issues of human dignityand the systems that deny itseem
even more important than questions of wages and material wellbeing.
But it was the student environmentalist group, Kalpraviksh, which means
the Tree of Imagination, that first exposed me to the Narmada Valleys
concerns. In 1984 they produced a path-breaking report on the dam projects
there.
After college I did a postgraduate
course at the Institute of Rural Management in Anand, Gujarat, where
there is a strong tradition of rural cooperatives. Then, with an ngo
called Professional Assistance to Development Action, I worked for two
years with women and children in the slums of Jabalpur, in Madhya Pradesh.
I soon rejected the irma/ pradan approach, however. They believed the
only reason development was not working was the lack of professional
input: if we provided this, poverty would magically vanish. It was an
analysis that utterly failed to address questions of social structure
or history. In 1988, I left to join a group called Khedut Mazdoor Chetna
Sangat, the Organization for Awareness among Peasants and Workers, operating
in the Narmada Valley tribal district of Jhabua, in Madhya Pradesh.
The kmcs had been set up in 1982 and was mainly composed of young activistsarchitects,
engineers and so onwho had rejected professional careers and were
trying, in some small way, to contribute to social transformation.
Could you tell us about
the Narmada Valley Development Project, and how the opposition to it
started?
The Narmada River itself
flows westwards across Central India over a course of some 800 miles,
rising in the Maikal hills, near Amarkantak, and cutting down between
the Vindhya and Satpura ranges to reach the Arabian Sea at Baruch, 200
miles or so north of Mumbai. It is regarded as a goddess by many of
those who live along its banksthe mere sight of its waters is
supposed to wash one clean of sins. The Valley dwellers are adjured,
once in their lifetime, to perform a parikrama along its coursewalking
up one side of the river to its source, and back down the other. The
Narmada runs through three different statesMadhya Pradesh, Maharashtra,
Gujaratand its social and physical geography is incredibly diverse.
From the eastern hills it broadens out over wide alluvial plains between
Jabalpur and Harda, where the villages are quite highly stratified and
occupied by farming communities and fishermen. Between Harda and Omkareshwar,
and again between Badwani and Tanchala, steep, forested hills close
in once more, mainly inhabited by tribal or adivasi peoplesthe
Kols, Gonds, Korkus, Bhils and Bhilalas. On the plains, there are Gujars,
Patidars, Bharuds and Sirwis, as well as Dalits and boat peoplethe
Kewats, Kahars, Dhimars and others.
Although over 3,300 big dams
have been built in India since Independence, the Narmada Valley Development
is one of the largest projects of all, involving two multipurpose mega-damsSardar
Sarovar, in Gujarat, and the Narmada Sagar, in Madhya Pradeshthat
combine irrigation, power and flood-control functions; plus another
30 big dams and 135 medium-sized ones. The four state governments involvedthe
non-riparian Rajasthan as well as the other threehave seen the
Narmadas waters simply as loot, to be divided among themselves.
In 1979, the Dispute Tribunal that had been adjudicating between them
announced its Award18.25 million acre feet to Madhya Pradesh,
9 to Gujarat, 0.5 to Rajasthan and 0.25 to Maharashtraand prescribed
how high the dams must be to ensure this distribution. There was no
question of discussing the matter with the communities that had lived
along the river for centuries, let alone respecting their riparian rights.
Even before this, in the
seventies, a Save the Soil campaign Mitti Bachao Abhiyanhad
arisen in the Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh, in response to
the large-scale water-logging and salinization of the rich black earth
around the Tawa dam, part of the nvdp. The protest was Gandhian and
environmentalist in character but rooted in the farming communities
of the area. In 1979 a huge though short-lived popular movement arose
against the Narmada Award, led by mainstream politicians, many from
the Madhya Pradesh Congress Partyincluding Shankar Dayal Sharma,
a future president of India, who was jailed for protesting against the
height of the dam. But when they got into office, these leaders compromised
completely, which led to much bitterness among the Valley communities
and made it harder to start organizing from scratch again.
Nevertheless, by the mid-eighties
there were several groups working in the Valley. In 1985, Medha Patkar
and others formed the Narmada Ghati Dharangrast Samiti in Maharashtra,
working with some thirty-three tribal villages at risk from the Sardar
Sarovar dam. They demanded proper rehabilitation and the right to be
informed about which areas were to be submerged. It was natural for
them to link up with us in the kmcs, on the north bank of the river.
There was also a Gandhian group called the Narmada Ghati Nav Nirman
Samiti that worked in the villages of the Nimad plains in Madhya Pradesh.
Their leader was a former state finance minister, Kashinath Trivedi.
They undertook numerous long treks, or padyatras, to inform
the villagers about the impact of the Sardar Sarovar dam, advocating
an alternative small is beautiful approach. The Jesuit fathers
had also been doing ongoing work in the Gujarat area. The nbathe
Save Narmada Movement, or Narmada Bachao Andolanemerged from the
confluence of all these protests, though the name was only officially
adopted after 1989. Medha Patkar played a central role in uniting these
initiatives, across the three different states.
But though the Narmada movement
started with protests around rehabilitation for the villagers affected
by the Sardar Sarovar project, within three years it had become plain
that they were facing a much greater problem. The Narmada Tribunal Award
had specified that those displaced by the dams should be recompensed
with land of equal extent and quality, preferably in the newly irrigated
areathe command zonebefore any submergence took place. By
1988, the villagers had learnt from their own bitter experience that
there was no such land available. As the mass mobilization spread eastwards
from Maharashtra to the tribal and plains villages of Madhya Pradesh,
it became clear that this was going to be an even worse problem further
upstream. There was growing anger at the complete denial of the villagers
right to information by the state and central governments, combined
with a deepening awareness of the environmental destruction that was
being plannedand of the existence of viable alternatives. During
the summer of 1988 there was a tremendous churning of resistance, with
a series of meetings and mass consultations. In August 1988 the nba
called a series of simultaneous rallies in villages throughout the Valley,
where the villagers proclaimed that they were no longer merely demanding
proper rehabilitationthat they would fight the Sardar Sarovar
dam itself.
Could you elaborate on
the alternatives to the big-dam project, and the NBAs critique
of the development paradigm?
We found that there were
perfectly viable, decentralized methods of water-harvesting that could
be used in the area. Tarun Bharat Sangh and Rajendra Singh of Rajasthan
were able to revive long dried-up rivers in almost desert-like conditions
by mobilizing local villagers collective efforts to build tanks
on a large scale. In Gujarat, remarkable pioneering work inspired by
Prem Bhatia, Pandurang Athwale and Shyamji Antale has recharged thousands
of wells and small water-harvesting structures using low-cost techniques.
For a maximum cost of Rs. 10 million eachless than $220,000the
problems of Gujarats 9,000 water-scarce villages could largely
be solved, with a total outlay of Rs. 90 billion, or $1.9 billion. Whereas
the official figure for the Sardar Sarovar dam alonealmost certainly
an underestimateis at least Rs. 200 billion, over $4 billion.
Contrary to the Gujarat governments
promises that Sardar Sarovar would provide for the states two
most drought-prone regions, Kutch and Saurashtra, we found that only
1.5 per cent of Kutchs total cultivable area was slated for the
water, and only 7 per cent in Saurashtra. Most of it would go to the
politically influential, water-rich areas of central Gujarat. Yet sugar
mills were already being constructed in anticipation of water-guzzling
sugarcane crops. Aqua parks and tourist resorts had also been planned;
they and the urban centres would take the lions share of the Narmada
waters. The entire political economy of the dam project was beginning
to unravel in front of us.
Huge multipurpose dams are
full of contradictions. Their flood-control function demands that the
reservoir be kept empty during the monsoon; yet irrigation requires
stored water and, in turn, drains off the vast amounts required by hydroelectricity.
Newly irrigated lands are often used to grow thirsty cash crops instead
of traditional staples for direct consumption, leaving farming families
at the mercy of the global market. There is also a huge ecological price
to pay. In India, land irrigated by well water is twice as productive
as that fed by canalsthese raise the water table excessively,
causing water-logging and salinization. Up to a fifth of the worlds
irrigated land is salt-affected. Dams have also eliminated or endangered
a fifth of the worlds freshwater fish. The Land Acquisition Act
of 1894, originally passed by the British, allows for the confiscation
of properties on grounds of public interest. The nba challenges
the Narmada land expropriations on the basis that the public interest
clearly isnt served.
If you look at the various
Narmada projects its obvious that these arent based on any
real assessment of needs, nor even on an integrated view of the river
valley. I doubt that the government has a consolidated map of all the
command and submergence zones that have been planned. The entire approach
has been fragmentary, based on a concept of impoundment. This is true
not only of the Narmada dams but of many other such developments, including
the Linking of Rivers Project that the bjp government is now pushingan
insane proposal, both socially and ecologically. It represents an intensification
of the neoliberal programme of enclosing the commons: appropriating
the rivers from the common people as a precursor to their takeover by
global corporations for large-scale trade in water and energy markets.
The nba has opposed this destruction of forests and rivers, and the
communities who have lived along their banks for centuries, in the name
of development. At village meetings sometimes 30,000 strong
weve highlighted the role of the Indian state and private capital,
domestic and foreign, in this process of commodifying public goodsasking
who pays and who benefits. This won us new friends but also new enemies,
since the elites who stood to gain from the dam began to target the
nba as anti-development.
The NBA campaign famously
forced the World Bank to withdraw from the Sardar Sarovar project. Can
you describe how this momentum was built?
In 1985, when the central
bureaucracy in Delhi began to raise questions about Sardar Sarovar,
the World Bank stepped in with a $450 million loan for the dam. The
intervention made a nonsense of the Banks customary defence for
its funding of environmentally dubious projectsthat these were
matters upon which national governments must decide. The truth is that
the Bank itself pushes for such projects and, in this instance, merely
proposed better rehabilitation policies. Though some ngos
worked with them to develop such practices for the oustees in Gujarat,
the nba refused to collaborate. The people of the Valley suffered terribly
under the terms of the World Bank loan. Before each installment was
disbursed, the Bank demanded that certain conditions be metspecific
villages evacuated, surveys completed, data gatheredand the state
governments of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat translated this
timetable into a series of brutal assaults, with police opening fire
on nba protesters, making numerous arrests and even attacking pregnant
women. Every time a World Bank deadline loomed, we knew repression in
the Valley would intensify.
By the late eighties the
Bank was facing growing criticism over its support for dam constructionfrom
the southern-based International Rivers Network, Brazilian protest groups
and northern ngos such as Friends of the Earth. Northern environmentalists
lobbied their governments, questioning what the public money going to
the World Bank was being used for. As the international movement developed,
our resistance strengthened too. In 1990, a huge rally in Manibeli,
Maharashtrathe first village due to be inundated by the Sardar
Sarovar projectpassed an international declaration
against the World Bank. The turning point came in 1991, when we launched
a mass struggle trek, or sangharsh yatra, to Gujarat, to
protest against the dam. Nearly 7,000 people walked in the bitter cold
of winter. We were stopped at the state border, a place called Ferkuwa.
The trekkers set up camp there and seven people, including Medha, went
on an indefinite fast. It was at this point that the World Bank gave
way, and agreed to an independent review on the Sardar Sarovar projectthe
first in its history.
The Reviews research
teamled by Bradford Morse, a former un Development Project headspent
a year and a half in India, travelling through the Valley and meeting
everyone from bureaucrats to ngos and villagers. Sometimes we resented
their pointed questions, their whiteness, the fact that a team from
the West could pass judgement on what was happening here. But the Morse
Report, when it came out, was excellent. It argued that, given the lack
of available agricultural land and political will, proper rehabilitation
would be impossible; and that to push the project through in these circumstances
would lead to an unmitigated disaster. Plans for Sardar Sarovar were
fundamentally flawed on environmental and hydrological grounds, and
its benefits had been greatly exaggerated. The World Bank was indicted
for its self-deluding incrementalist approachpresuming that things
would improve if it simply exerted more pressure. The Reports
level of scholarship was outstanding, on a par with some of the treatises
that early British scholars in India had written on forestry, tribes
and so on.
The World Bank management
responded by bringing out a document called The Next Steps.
This gave the Indian state six months to normalize the situation,
after which the Bank would take a final decision. We all knew this meant
the repression would intensify. We were at a meeting in the tribal village
of Kakrana, in Madhya Pradesh, when the news came through. The villagers
laughedthey said that if they had been able to withstand the last
ten years of brutality, the government was not going to succeed in the
next six months. Sure enough, the officials and police we were supposed
to be meeting with arrived within fifteen minutes of this discussion.
They beat up and arrested several key activists from the area, myself
included, and for the next four days subjected many of us to third-degree
torture, with threats of electrocution. Over the next few months the
repression escalated. There were mass arrests. Entire tribal villages,
such as Anjanwada, were demolished. Homes and basic utensils were destroyed,
seeds confiscated and so on. Their strategy failed. The villagers refused
to relent and there were international protests against the treatment
being meted out to the people of the Valleywhich put even more
pressure on the World Bank. In 1993 they announced they were withdrawing
from the Sardar Sarovar project. The Morse Report had broken the back
of the nvdps legitimacy, though this did not stop the domestic
repression. In reaction to the scrapping of the loan, the Maharashtra
police opened fire on the protesters, killing a 16-year-old tribal boy,
Rehmal Puniya.
A new phase began, with the
nba now face to face with the Indian state. In December 1994 we held
yet another fast and month-long sit-in at Bhopal, the capital of Madhya
Pradesh. The government there at last agreed to stop construction and,
since all three states had to operate consensually, work came to a halt
in Gujarat and Maharashtra as well. We had also submitted a comprehensive
petition on the Narmada issue to the Indian Supreme Court earlier that
year. In May 1995, the Court called for an interim stay on any further
construction at Sardar Sarovar, pending its final judgement. When that
came, in 2000, it was a bad blow to the movement, but there is no doubt
that the temporary respite offered much-needed relief to the Narmada
Valley people, who were facing enormous repression at that time.
The NBA has also succeeded
in forcing foreign capital to withdraw from another dam project, at
Maheshwar. How did you achieve this? What general lessons would you
draw?
When construction stopped
on the Sardar Sarovar site, people came to seek the nbas help
against other dam projects in the Narmada Valley. By June 1997, we were
organizing people against six or seven damspeople began to connect
up and share their experiences, on a pan-Valley basis. One key battle
was over the Maheshwar dam in Madhya Pradesh. In 1992, this had been
the first hydro-power project to be privatizedhanded over to S.
Kumars, an Indian textile company with no record in energy production.
In line with the neoliberal policies introduced by the Indian government
in the early nineties, the company was guaranteed payment by Madhya
Pradesh of Rs. 600 crores, or nearly $130 million, over the next thirty-five
years, whether any power was generated or not. Estimates for the project
had increased five-fold by 1999, and the electricity it was set to produce
had become prohibitively expensiveat least three times the cost
of existing power. Meanwhile, the dam was slated to submerge or adversely
affect the livelihoods of over 50,000 people in sixty-one villages.
Again, the nba argued that the project was flatly against the public
interest.
Construction on the dam began
in earnest in November 1997. On 11 January 1998, 24,000 people took
over the Maheshwar site; thousands squatted there for the next 21 days,
demanding a comprehensive review of the project, and five people went
on a fast. With state elections looming, the Madhya Pradesh government
agreed to halt building work and set up a Task Force to report on the
dam; but as soon as the elections were over, they restarted construction.
Thousands of people then re-occupied the site on two consecutive days
in April 1998. We were tear-gassed and badly beaten up. More than a
thousand were jailed. As we got to know the terrain better, we managed
to take over the dam and stop work there eleven times over the next
three years. S. Kumars and the state government responded by drafting
in some 2,000 police, including paramilitaries.
In May 1998, we started another
form of agitation, setting up 24-hour human barricades on the roads
leading to the dam site, to stop the trucks that were delivering construction
materials. Of course, we let through those with food for the workers,
mostly bonded labourers from Andhra Pradesh and Orissa and themselves
brutally exploited. The government, initially non-plussed, responded
by a cat-and-mouse strategyevery ten days they would send in a
large police force to carry out mass arrests, often with a great deal
of violence, and then push through a whole convoy of trucks while we
were being held in custody. Though we could not stop all the material
reaching the site, the barricades helped a lot to slow the pace of construction
down. The protest also mobilized large numbers of people for months
on end. The leading role of women in these actionsthey braved
hot summers and monsoons, kept vigil in the darkest of nights, suffered
violent police beatings and brutal arrestselectrified the surrounding
areas and put enormous pressure on the Madhya Pradesh government. But
it was clear we were getting close to the limits of human endurance,
so we shifted to another strategy: barricading the finances of the dam.
There were hugely lucrative
opportunities for global capital when Indias energy sector was
thrown open for privatization in 1991. The initial plan for the Maheshwar
dam project envisaged as much as 78 per cent of the finance coming from
foreign sources. After failing to clinch deals with Bechtel and PacGen,
S. Kumars found two German power utilities, vew Energie and Bayernwerk,
to take 49 per cent of the equity; they were supposed to bring in tied
loans to purchase, among other things, $134.15 millions worth
of electro-mechanical equipment from Siemens, with an export guarantee
backed by the German governmentunderwritten, in other words, by
public money. On the Indian side, again, this would be counter-guaranteed
by more state funds. This is a weak point in the privatization strategies
of global capital, the chink that leaves them open to popular intervention
and interrogationnot only because the use of public money creates
a potential space for democratic control, but because it exposes the
contradictions of corporate globalization: the absence of the free-market
competition and risk-taking that are supposed to be
the virtues of private entrepreneurship.
In April 1999, the villagers
affected by the Maheshwar dam set out on a month-long demonstration
and indefinite fast at Bhopal. After twenty-one days of this, Bayernwerk
and vew withdrew from the project, with Bayernwerk citing the lack of
land-based rehabilitation as a major concern. In March 2000, Ogden Energya
us power company, part of the corporate entourage of President Clinton
when he visited India that springagreed to take over the Germans
49 per cent stake. Over the next few months, we mounted a struggle on
all fronts, involving public actions in both Germany and the us. In
Germany, the campaign was led by the ngo Urgewald, run by Heffa Schücking,
who succeeded in making the export guarantee for Maheshwar a major issue
for the spdGreen government. In the us, protests were mounted
by the Indian diaspora, particularly students, and by groups like the
International Rivers Network. We also held big demonstrations outside
the German and American embassies in New Delhi. The result was that,
after carrying out their own field survey, the German government refused
an export guarantee for Siemens, who subsequently withdrew. In a parallel
move, the Portuguese government vetoed a guarantee for Alstom
abbs power equipment. The Maharashtra government, meanwhile, had
reneged on an earlier agreement with Enron and, in light of all this,
in 2001 Ogden Energy pulled out of the Maheshwar project too.
After the foreign corporations
withdrew, S. Kumars tried to carry on with funds from state institutionseven
though privatization had been justified in the first place on the grounds
that insufficient public money was available. So in May 2002, the nba
took the struggle to the glass-fronted banks and financial corporations
in Mumbai, combining dialogue with coordinated mass protests. We compiled
a list of serious financial irregularities in S. Kumars use of
public money. The company got an ex-parte gagging order against the
nba, preventing us from organizing mass protests or putting out defamatory
press releases. But the publicity stopped the dribble of public funding
that was keeping the Maheshwar project alive. All construction work
came to a halt and, on 20 December 2002, the projects movable
and immovable properties were impounded by one of the state financial
institutions that had been backing it.
We learnt a lot about the
structures and processes of globalization through these strugglesand
about the need for global alliances from below, to confront it. But
though international political factorsthe character of the governments
involved, the existence of able support groups in the Northplay
an important part, they cannot supplant the role of a mass movement
struggling on the ground. Soon after the spd government in Berlin refused
a guarantee to Siemens for Maheshwar, it agreed to underwrite the companys
involvement in the Tehri dam in the Himalayas and the catastrophic Three
Gorges Dam in Chinaboth just as destructive as the Narmada project;
but in neither instance were there strong mass struggles on the ground.
We never thought, when we began the struggle against the Maheshwar project,
that it would become such a full-fledged battle against corporate globalization
and privatization. One important outcome was that we found allies in
other womens groups, trade unions and left parties, who had not
participated as vigorously in our earlier protests.
What role have women played
in the struggle?
On 8 March 1998 we set up
a separate womens organization within the nbathe Narmada
Shakti Dal. Some two thirds of those on the dam barricades and occupations
at Maheshwar were peasant women, and they also played an important role
in the core decision-making group. In fact, we found that the choices
that had to be made in order to sustain such a relentless struggle,
in the face of growing exhaustion and terrible odds, could only be made
because of the participation of women. They proved far more radical
and militant than the men, and capable of more imaginative protests.
Peasant women were to the
Maheshwar struggle what tribals were to Sardar Sarovar. They could give
a moral leadership, firstly because their distance from the market meant
that they never saw the land and the riverwhich they worshipped
as a motheras commodities that could be sold for cash. S. Kumars
and the central government offered high levels of compensation when
critical reports went against them, and that naturally attracted some
of the families. But the majority refused to accept the compensation,
basically because the women did not want to swap their lands for money
and were prepared to fight for that position in their communities, and
often in their own households. Villages like Behgaon saw the emergence
of a strong womens leadership, and standoffs within families as
women pitted themselves against the mens willingness to take the
money. The women prevailed and the unity of the village was preserved,
at some small cost.
Secondly, the womens
relative exclusion from the political system meant that their minds
had not been colonized by mainstream party ideologiesthey hadnt
been deluded into construing their own destruction as development.
Nor did the power of the state leave them cynical or demoralized. Their
imaginative approach kept opening up unexpected forms of struggle. For
example, in January 2000, several thousand of us once again occupied
the dam site. We were arrested and taken to Maheshwar jail. The authorities
wanted to release us immediately but the women spontaneously refused
to leave the prison until our questions had been answered. How much
would the electricity from the new dam cost, compared to existing power
sources? Where was the alternative agricultural land for the affected
people? How much water-logging would there be in the surrounding region?
How could the state government justify its huge buy-back guarantees,
which protected private promoters with public funds regardless of whether
any power was produced? For the next three days we locked ourselves
in, while the prison wardens fled. So although we had no illusions about
negotiating with the Madhya Pradesh government, we were able to establish
a much broader critical consciousness about the Maheshwar project through
our repeated protests and pointed questionseven among those who
were in favour of more electricity.
What lessons would you
draw from the NBAs experience with the Indian Supreme Court? In
retrospect, do you think it was a mistake to adopt a legal approach?
Firstly, the nba never relied
entirely on a legal strategy. We always kept up a process of direct
action too. For example, every year since 1991 weve organized
a monsoon satyagrahaurging the truth, in the Gandhian
sensein which people bodily confront the rising waters of the
reservoirs, standing waist deep. Secondly, in answer to your question:
no, I dont believe we made a mistake in taking the issue to the
courts in 1994. We cant completely dismiss the judiciary as a
ruling-class institutionit represents a contested space and, like
every other space in a democracy, people have to fight to retrieve it
from the elites.
Nevertheless, when we submitted
our petition on the Narmada Valley project in 1994, it was to a Supreme
Court substantially different from the one that delivered the final
verdict in 2000. Personnel apart, the shifting political climate of
the nineties has been reflected in the higher echelons of the Indian
legal system. The more activist judiciary of the previous decadeswhich
allowed for a tradition of public-interest litigation that gave access
to the poor and dispossessedhas reinvented itself, and produced
a string of notorious judgements over the last two years. We have seriously
underestimated the extent to which our democratic institutionsthe
judiciary includedhave been reshaped, over the past two decades,
by the processes of neoliberal globalization. If these have worked,
at the micro-level, by a system of incentives and rewards, they have
also succeeded in imposing a larger ideological framework in which any
obstacle to capitals search for super-profitswhether popular
movements, environmental considerations or concerns about peoples
livelihoodis seen as a constraint that has to be removed. What
better way to do this than through the judiciary, whose verdicts are
presumed to be just and impartial, and therefore beyond criticism?
Still, the final Supreme
Court ruling on our petition in 2000 came as a shock. The majority judgement
argued specifically that large dams served the public interest, at the
expense of only a small minority; it completely dismissed the environmental
issues. In a step back from the 1979 Narmada Award, it permitted construction
to proceed before people had been rehabilitated. The judges made a few
trivial recommendations for improvements to existing rehabilitation
sitesmore swings for the children, for instanceand then
ruled that the height of the Sardar Sarovar dam wall could be raised
first by two metres and then by five.
For the few of us who had
stayed on in Delhi to hear the Supreme Court decision, those five metres
were far more than an abstract figure. The reservoir would now engulf
the adivasi area that had lain just above the submergence level for
a number of years and whose people had not been rehabilitated. We were
really shocked that the judiciarythat pillar of democracyhad
betrayed us. The press called us repeatedly in the evening for our comments
and all we could say was that the people of the Valley would meet to
decide on what to do next. Then, almost immediately, there was a TV
report saying that 4,000 people had already gathered in the Narmada
Valley to condemn the judgement and to decide on its implications in
a united manner, from Jalsindhi to Jalkothi. We couldnt
understand how they could have mobilized so quickly, but it turned out
that the Maheshwar project villagers had occupied the dam site that
afternoon anyway, in one of their many guerrilla actions. As soon as
they heard about the Sardar Sarovar decision they sent out a press release,
pledging their solidarity with the people there.
Two days later we had a meeting
at Anjanwada, where the tribals of Alirajpur had assembled, as they
were gathering elsewhere in the Valley. I was in such a deep depression
I could hardly speakit was like announcing a death sentence. Someone
broke the ice by saying what we all already knew: that the Supreme Court
had permitted a five-metre increase, on the basis of claims by the Gujarat,
Madhya Pradesh and Central governments that adequate alternative land
was available. Everyone began talking at once and within a few minutes
the meeting had made its decision, without any disagreement: firstly,
we would show those in power that we werent mice, to be flooded
out; and secondly, that we would expose the governments land claims
as false. Late that night, one of the tribal activists woke me up, one
who had shared our faith in democratic structures. What happened, he
asked, how could they give such a judgement? Was the fact that there
was no land for our rehabilitation not clear to them? But the adivasis
were up early the next morning, as always, laughing their inexplicable
early morning laughter, displaying their characteristic mixture of stoicism
and balance.
How are decisions of this
sort normally taken within the NBA? How would you describe the movements
internal structures?
In the Valley itself there
are two independent centres where decision-making takes place, one in
the Sardar Sarovar region and another for the Maan and Maheshwar struggles;
both bring together the organic village leaderships in those areas,
plus a few urban activists. Also, because the nba is spread across three
different states, a loose network is necessary, coordinated by meetings
at several levels. Resistance to the dams project is predicated as a
matter of survivalof life or deathfor the communities of
the Narmada Valley. One of the first slogans was Nobody will move,
the dam will not be built koi nahi hatega, bandh nahi banega.
When the waters began to rise, the people came up with another chant,
We will drown, but we will not move doobenge, par
hatenge nahi. Such positions have to be based on mass support and participation,
rather than minority activist structures.
The rhythm of activism is
also dictated by the pattern of the seasons. Every monsoon, as the people
of the Valley face the rising waters, we hold a mass meeting. People
from the various villages affected will come together for a whole day,
sometimes two, to discuss the situation. How much submergence will take
place, and how might it best be confronted? If the dam wall has been
increased over the last year, what are the implications? What forms
of resistance are most appropriate for each satyagraha? How should the
logistics of wood, water, grain and transport be managed, in the context
of the rising reservoir? Most of the time, we are fighting with our
backs against the wall and we often have only a certain number of options
to choose fromstate officials to confront, buildings to occupy,
sympathetic supporters to call on, and so forth. So the range of disagreement
is limited and, in practice, there is a great deal of consensus about
these decisions.
After each set of meetings
we hold a collective consultation, in which representatives from the
different regions come together to work out broader strategies for calling
attention to the distress and struggle of the Valley people. Further
discussion takes place on the Coordination Committee, the samanvaya
samiti, comprised of intellectuals and activists from outside the movement
who contribute to forging wider links. Ground-level resistance needs
to be supported by legal initiatives and media campaigns, and by alliances
at national and international levels. The nbas attempt to question
the development paradigm, for example, has involved taking the debate
to the Indian middle classes, who are among the strongest supporters
of the Narmada Valley project. We currently have some sixty urban support
centres, in cities all over India. There have been periods over the
last decade when these structures have broken down or fallen into disuse;
but it is clear to us that, without widespread consultation at many
levels, both inside and outside the movement, sustained collective action
would be impossible.
Often, as on the question
of what general course to take after the Supreme Court judgement, decisions
are swift, consensual and to the pointreactions in other tribal
areas were very similar, in that instance. But sometimes we cannot reach
a consensus. For example, one senior activist wanted to respond to that
crushing final verdict by immersion, or jal samarpanwhere
one remains motionless in the face of the incoming waters, up to death.
This was hotly debated and opposed among the Valley people and their
supportersa stance that has so far prevented such a tactic from
being deployed. In good times, we dont require formal structures,
elected representatives, articulated organizational principles. But
in times of crisis or vacuum, when everything else has collapsed, we
see the need for them.
Can you describe some
of your methods of struggle? How central is non-violence to NBA philosophyand
how frustrating has this been, in the face of state repression?
The main forms of mass struggle
in the Valley have been non-violent direct actionsmarches, satyagraha
and civil disobedience. In Sardar Sarovar, for example, in the aftermath
of Ferkuwa, hundreds of villages refused to allow any government official
to enter. In Maheshwar those affected by the dam have repeatedly occupied
the site in the face of police repression. Other forms of satyagraha
have involved people staying in their villages despite imminent submergence,
or indefinite fasting to arouse the public conscience. State repression
and indifference have often left us feeling frustrated and helpless,
but I dont see that as a failure of our tactics. In an increasingly
globalized world, we have to search for richer and more compelling strategies;
but that does not mean compromising on the principle of non-violence,
which remains fundamental for the nba. If we fight for the inalienable
right to life, and insist that such concerns should form the basis for
assessing any development paradigm, how can we resort to violence? There
have been a few unplanned incidents involving self-defence that cannot
count as non-violent; situations where people have been pushed beyond
the edge. But as a strategy, how could physical violence on our part
ever match the armed might of the Indian state, or of imperialist globalization?
Most importantly, only a non-violent struggle can provide the silence
in which the questions we are asking can be heard. A strategy of violence
results in a very different kind of political discourse.
But dont activists
put their own lives at risk, through fasting and submergence?
The monsoon satyagrahaswhere
people in their hundreds stand ready to face the waters that enter their
homes and fieldshave to be distinguished from the practice of
immersion, or jal samarpan. Satyagraha means more than putting pressure
on the stateit is also a way of bearing witness to what the state
is doing to the people. It affirms the existence of the Valley inhabitants
and shows our solidarity. It makes a moral point, contrasting the violence
of the development project with the determination of those who stand
in its path. In most of the monsoon satyagrahas where the waters have
actually flooded the housesas in Domkhedi over the last two or
three yearsthe police have physically dragged people out of the
areas being inundated, in an attempt to rob the agitation of its symbolic
power. As I have said, many of us are very critical of such methods
as jal samarpan. We need to be alive to fight. We also need to assess
whether the state can twist the issue to its own advantage by claiming
that, since we are not willing to be rehabilitated, it is the protesters
own fault if we drown. Fasting is more gradual and allows us time to
awaken the public conscience. But if you use the same weapons again
and again they become blunt and ineffective.
Many in the Valley now advocate
seizing federal land in Madhya Pradesh for self-settlement, and as a
way to expose the government. Two and a half thousand acres belong to
a state farm, which the Asian Development Bank has recommended should
be hived offit may go to one of Indias biggest conglomerates.
So there seems to be land for corporations but none for the millions
whose homes have been taken away from them in the name of the public
interest. Not a single person in Madhya Pradesh has been given
the legally required equivalent for his land. The record is also very
poor in the other two states. They say 4,000 families are being rehabilitated
in Gujarat and 6,000 in Maharashtra. But there are 25 million in the
Valley whose lives will be adversely affected in some way and at least
500,000 displaced by direct submergence.
How does the NBA raise
its money?
Almost 40 per cent of nba
funds come from the farmers of Nimadthe relatively wealthy plains
area of the Narmada Valley. After the wheat harvest, each farmer contributes
a kilogram per quintal produced and there are small cash donations after
the cotton harvest, too; though their prosperity is now seriously threatened
by the wto. The other 60 per cent comes from our urban supporters. Several
prominent Indian artists have contributed their works to the movement,
and Arundhati Roy has consistently supported us through her writings;
she donated her entire Booker Prize winnings to us, three years back,
and has contributed generously every year since.
We decided very early on
that we would take neither government grantswhy should they pay
for direct opposition to their policies?nor foreign money, save
for travel costs and local hospitality when were invited to speak.
Foreign donations would expose us to all kinds of questions about the
autonomy of the movement; it would also allow the Indian government
to exercise some control over us, since such finance has to be routed
through the External Affairs Ministry. Of course, we defend our right
to call for international solidarity; but we also believe that it is
possible for the resources of Indian civil society to sustain popular
strugglesand that to do so builds and affirms support for the
movement.
Gujarat has been the most
communally polarized of Indian statesthe laboratory of Hindutva
forces where, in the wake of the most brutal and deliberate anti-Muslim
pogrom since Independence, the BJP has been returned to power with its
greatest ever majority, over two-thirds of the vote. Is there a connexion
between Gujarati communalization and the opposition of large sections
of the population, especially its upper-caste, middle-class layers,
to the NBA?
This is a real problem in
Gujarat. A change took place in the political complexion of the state
during the eighties. Middle and upper castes came to power after the
break-up of the lower-caste alliance of kham, which had previously held
sway in electoral politicscomposed of kshatriyas, who are not
upper castes in Gujarat, harijans, adivasis and Muslims. This new elite
is far more communalized and lumpen than other sections of society.
There is a lesson here for peoples movements like the nba. In
spite of our work among tribals, we failed to take as seriously as we
should have the issue of communalism, and the grassroots influence of
the Right. The Sangh Parivars continuous mobilization among tribals
over the last two decades has yielded them a richfor the others,
a bitterharvest of hate. This was happening all around us, but
we never fully assessed the Sanghs destructive potential and failed
to counter them. Why? I feel the problem lies in a seeming inability
to offer our own holistic political philosophy as a consistent alternative.
At a certain point in
the nineties, the NBA sought to move in the direction of developing
such a holistic agenda, connecting issues of communalism, militarization,
neoliberal globalization. Was there a gap between intentions and outcomes?
Where does the NBA go from here?
I must confess that the nba
as a collective entity has not yet sat down and thrashed these matters
out. We have taken some initiatives on these issuesinternational
questions, anti-globalization strugglesbut we urgently require
a more concrete and coherent agenda, a collectively evolved action plan.
In any case, there is no possibility of addressing these points on our
own, without a wider alliance of movements. Since 1994, the nba has
been working with the National Alliance of Peoples Movements,
of which Medha Patkar is the national convenor. The napm has three broad
currents: Gandhians, Indian Social Democratsto the left of Euro-socialism,
but unsympathetic to the official Communist partiesand peoples
organizations from various backgrounds, including Marxist. In Madhya
Pradesh, the nba is also part of the broad front of the Jan Sangarsh
Morcha, which brings together numerous progressive organizations to
challenge the World Bank and Asian Development Bank on issues such as
energy, forestry and the dismantling of the public sector. But both
the napm and jsm are at the embryonic stageit remains to be seen
whether they can combat the bankruptcy of the countrys existing
political structures or solve the social and ideological crisis it confronts.
Yet the real challenge is
to begin from where we are, with our own constituencies. If we work
only at the state or national levels, there is a real danger of losing
the organic leaders who have emerged from the Narmada movement and form
our real strength. There are hundreds of capable tribals, women, fisherfolk,
with high levels of consciousnessthe outcome of sixteen years
of collective resistance. The real success of our struggle lies not
only in stopping dams but in enabling such leaders to play a guiding
role in broader struggles, not just against displacement, but against
corporate globalization and communalism: to lead the defence of democracy
in this country, and shape its economic and political future. It is
the marginalized people of the Narmada Valley who know the system at
its worst, and have some of the richest experiences in struggling against
it. Their lives and tragedies have made them both sensitive to what
is needed in the long term and courageous in their willingness to undergo
whatever sacrifices prove necessary for prolonged resistance.
(Chittaroopa Palit was interviewed
for NLR by Achin Vanaik, visiting professor of political science at
Delhi University, author of The Furies of Indian Communalism (1997)
and co-author of South Asia on a Short Fuse (1999). He would like to
thank Arundhati Roy and Sanjay Kak for their help. )