Why did I laugh?
Because I suddenly remembered the tender concern with which the Supreme Court judges in Delhi (before vacating the legal stay on further construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam) had inquired whether Adivasi children in the resettlement colonies would have children’s parks to play in. The lawyers representing the government had hastened to assure them that indeed they would, and what’s more, that there were seesaws and slides and swings in every park. I looked up at the endless sky and down at the river rushing past, and for a brief, brief moment the absurdity of it all reversed my rage and I laughed. I meant no disrespect.
Let me say at the outset that I’m not a city-basher. I’ve done my time in a village. I’ve had firsthand experience of the isolation, the inequity, and the potential savagery of it. I’m not an antidevelopment junkie, nor a proselytizer for the eternal upholding of custom and tradition. What I am, however, is curious. Curiosity took me to the Narmada valley. Instinct told me that this was the big one. The one in which the battle lines were clearly drawn, the warring armies massed along them. The one in which it would be possible to wade through the congealed morass of hope, anger, information, disinformation, political artifice, engineering ambition, disingenuous socialism, radical activism, bureaucratic subterfuge, misinformed emotionalism, and, of course, the pervasive, invariably dubious, politics of International Aid.
Instinct led me to set aside Joyce and Nabokov, to postpone reading Don DeLillo’s big book and substitute for it reports on drainage and irrigation, with journals and books and documentary films about dams and why they’re built and what they do.
My first tentative questions revealed that few people know what is really going on in the Narmada valley. Those who know, know a lot. Most know nothing at all. And yet almost everyone has a passionate opinion. Nobody’s neutral. I realized very quickly that I was straying into mined territory.
In India over the last ten years the fight against the Sardar Sarovar dam has come to represent far more than the fight for one river. This has been its strength as well as its weakness. Some years ago it became a debate that captured the popular imagination. That’s what raised the stakes and changed the complexion of the battle. From being a fight over the fate of a river valley it began to raise doubts about an entire political system. What is at issue now is the very nature of our democracy. Who owns this land? Who owns its rivers? Its forests? Its fish? These are huge questions. They are being taken hugely seriously by the State. They are being answered in one voice by every institution at its command—the army, the police, the bureaucracy, the courts. And not just answered, but answered unambiguously, in bitter, brutal ways.
For the people of the valley, the fact that the stakes were raised to this degree has meant that their most effective weapon—specific facts about specific issues in this specific valley—has been blunted by the debate on the big issues. The basic premise of the argument has been inflated until it has burst into bits that have, over time, bobbed away. Occasionally a disconnected piece of the puzzle floats by—an emotionally charged account of the government’s callous treatment of displaced people; an outburst at how the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), “a handful of activists,” is holding the nation to ransom; a legal correspondent reporting on the progress of the NBA’s writ petition in the Supreme Court.
Though there has been a fair amount of writing on the subject, most of it is for a “special interest” readership. News reports tend to be about isolated aspects of the project. Government documents are classified as secret. I think it’s fair to say that public perception of the issue is pretty crude and is divided crudely, into two categories.
On the one hand, it is seen as a war between modern, rational, progressive forces of “Development” v. a sort of neo-Luddite impulse—an irrational, emotional “Anti-development” resistance, fueled by an arcadian, preindustrial dream.
On the other, as a Nehru v. Gandhi contest. This lifts the whole sorry business out of the bog of deceit, lies, false promises, and increasingly successful propaganda (which is what it’s really about) and confers on it a false legitimacy. It makes out that both sides have the Greater Good of the Nation in mind—but merely disagree about the means by which to achieve it.
Both interpretations put a tired spin on the dispute. Both stir up emotions that cloud the particular facts of this particular story. Both are indications of how urgently we need new heroes—new kinds of heroes—and how we’ve overused our old ones (like we overbowl our bowlers).
The Nehru v. Gandhi argument pushes this very contemporary issue back into an old bottle. Nehru and Gandhi were generous men. Their paradigms for development are based on assumptions of inherent morality. Nehru’s on the paternal, protective morality of the Soviet-style centralized State. Gandhi’s on the nurturing, maternal morality of romanticized village republics. Both would probably work, if only we were better human beings. If we all wore homespun khadi and suppressed our base urges. Fifty years down the line, it’s safe to say that we haven’t made the grade. We haven’t even come close. We need an updated insurance plan against our own basic natures.
It’s possible that as a nation we’ve exhausted our quota of heroes for this century, but while we wait for shiny new ones to come along, we have to limit the damage. We have to support our small heroes. (Of these we have many. Many.) We have to fight specific wars in specific ways. Who knows, perhaps that’s what the twenty-first century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Could it be? Could it possibly be? It sounds finger-licking good to me.
I was drawn to the valley because I sensed that the fight for the Narmada had entered a newer, sadder phase. I went because writers are drawn to stories the way vultures are drawn to kills. My motive was not compassion. It was sheer greed. I was right. I found a story there.
And what a story it is . . .
People say that the Sardar Sarovar dam is an expensive project. But it is bringing drinking water to millions. This is our lifeline. Can you put a price on this? Does the air we breathe have a price? We will live. We will drink. We will bring glory to the state of Gujarat.
—Urmilaben Patel, wife of Gujarat Chief Minister Chimanbhai Patel, speaking at a public rally in Delhi in 1993
We will request you to move from your houses after the dam comes up. If you move, it will be good. Otherwise we shall release the waters and drown you all.
—Morarji Desai, speaking at a public meeting in the submergence zone of the Pong dam in 19612
Why didn’t they just poison us? Then we wouldn’t have to live in this shithole and the government could have survived alone with its precious dam all to itself.
—Ram Bai, whose village was submerged when the Bargi dam was built on the Narmada; she now lives in a slum in Jabalpur3
In the fifty years since Independence, after Nehru’s famous “Dams Are the Temples of Modern India” speech (one that he grew to regret in his own lifetime),4 his foot soldiers threw themselves into the business of building dams with unnatural fervor. Dam-building grew to be equated with nation-building. Their enthusiasm alone should have been reason enough to make one suspicious. Not only did they build new dams and new irrigation systems, they took control of small traditional systems that had been managed by village communities for thousands of years, and allowed them to atrophy.5 To compensate the loss, the government built more and more dams. Big ones, little ones, tall ones, short ones. The result of its exertions is that India now boasts of being the world’s third largest dam-builder. According to the Central Water Commission, we have 3,600 dams that qualify as Big Dams, 3,300 of them built after Independence. One thousand more are under construction.6 Yet one-fifth of ou
r population—200 million people—does not have safe drinking water, and two-thirds—600 million—lack basic sanitation.7
Big Dams started well but have ended badly. There was a time when everybody loved them, everybody had them—the Communists, Capitalists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. There was a time when Big Dams moved men to poetry. Not any longer. All over the world there is a movement growing against Big Dams.
In the first world they’re being decommissioned, blown up.8 The fact that they do more harm than good is no longer just conjecture. Big Dams are obsolete. They’re uncool. They’re undemocratic. They’re a government’s way of accumulating authority (deciding who will get how much water and who will grow what where). They’re a guaranteed way of taking a farmer’s wisdom away from him. They’re a brazen means of taking water, land, and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich. Their reservoirs displace huge populations of people, leaving them homeless and destitute.
Ecologically, too, they’re in the doghouse.9 They lay the earth to waste. They cause floods, waterlogging, salinity, they spread disease. There is mounting evidence that links Big Dams to earthquakes.
Big Dams haven’t really lived up to their role as the monuments of Modern Civilization, emblems of Man’s ascendancy over Nature. Monuments are supposed to be timeless, but dams have an all too finite lifetime. They last only as long as it takes Nature to fill them with silt.10 It’s common knowledge now that Big Dams do the opposite of what their Publicity People say they do—the Local Pain for National Gain myth has been blown wide open.
For all these reasons, the dam-building industry in the first world is in trouble and out of work. So it’s exported to the third world in the name of Development Aid, along with their other waste, like old weapons, superannuated aircraft carriers, and banned pesticides.11
On the one hand the Indian government, every Indian government, rails self-righteously against the first world, and on the other, it actually pays to receive their gift-wrapped garbage. Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise. Like colonialism was. It has destroyed most of Africa. Bangladesh is reeling from its ministrations. We know all this, in numbing detail. Yet in India our leaders welcome it with slavish smiles (and make nuclear bombs to shore up their flagging self-esteem).
Over the last fifty years India has spent Rs 87,000 crore12 on the irrigation sector alone.13 Yet there are more drought-prone areas and more flood-prone areas today than there were in 1947. Despite the disturbing evidence of irrigation disasters, dam-induced floods, and rapid disenchantment with the Green Revolution14 (declining yields, degraded land), the government has not commissioned a post-project evaluation of a single one of its 3,600 dams to gauge whether or not it has achieved what it set out to achieve, whether or not the (always phenomenal) costs were justified, or even what the costs actually were.
The government of India has detailed figures for how many million tons of food grain or edible oils the country produces and how much more we produce now than we did in 1947. It can tell you how much bauxite is mined in a year or what the total surface area of the national highways adds up to. It’s possible to access minute-by-minute information about the stock exchange or the value of the rupee in the world market. We know how many cricket matches we’ve lost on a Friday in Sharjah. It’s not hard to find out how many graduates India produces, or how many men had vasectomies in any given year. But the government of India does not have a figure for the number of people who have been displaced by dams or sacrificed in other ways at the altars of “national progress.” Isn’t this astounding? How can you measure progress if you don’t know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the “market” put a price on things—food, clothes, electricity, running water—when it doesn’t take into account the real cost of production?
According to a detailed study of fifty-four Big Dams done by the Indian Institute of Public Administration,15 the average number of people displaced by a Big Dam in India is 44,182. Admittedly, 54 dams out of 3,300 is not a big enough sample. But since it’s all we have, let’s try and do some rough arithmetic. A first draft.
To err on the side of caution, let’s halve the number of people. Or let’s err on the side of abundant caution and take an average of just 10,000 people per Big Dam. It’s an improbably low figure, I know, but . . . never mind. Whip out your calculators. 3,300 × 10,000 = 33,000,000.
That’s what it works out to. Thirty-three million people. Displaced by Big Dams alone in the last fifty years. What about those who have been displaced by the thousands of other Development projects? In a private lecture N. C. Saxena, Secretary to the Planning Commission, said he thought the number was in the region of 50 million (of whom 40 million were displaced by dams).16 We daren’t say so, because it isn’t official. It isn’t official because we daren’t say so. You have to murmur it, for fear of being accused of hyperbole. You have to whisper it to yourself, because it really does sound unbelievable. It can’t be, I’ve been telling myself. I must have got the zeroes muddled. It can’t be true. I barely have the courage to say it aloud. To run the risk of sounding like a sixties hippie dropping acid (“It’s the System, man!”), or a paranoid schizophrenic with a persecution complex. But it is the System, man. What else can it be?
Fifty million people.
Go on, government, quibble. Bargain. Beat it down. Say something.
I feel like someone who’s just stumbled on a mass grave.
Fifty million is more than the population of Gujarat. Almost three times the population of Australia. More than three times the number of refugees that Partition created in India. Ten times the number of Palestinian refugees. The Western world today is convulsed over the future of one million people who have fled from Kosovo.
A huge percentage of the displaced are Adivasis (57.6 percent in the case of the Sardar Sarovar dam).17 Include Dalits and the figure becomes obscene. According to the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, it’s about 60 percent.18 If you consider that Adivasis account for only 8 percent, and Dalits another 15 percent, of India’s population, it opens up a whole other dimension to the story. The ethnic “otherness” of their victims takes some of the pressure off the nation-builders. It’s like having an expense account. Someone else pays the bills. People from another country. Another world. India’s poorest people are subsidizing the lifestyles of her richest.
Did I hear someone say something about the world’s biggest democracy?
What has happened to all these millions of people? Where are they now? How do they earn a living? Nobody really knows. (Recently the Indian Express had an account of how Adivasis displaced from the Nagarjunasagar Dam Project are selling their babies to foreign adoption agencies.19 The government intervened and put the babies in two public hospitals, where six infants died of neglect.) When it comes to rehabilitation, the government’s priorities are clear. India does not have a national rehabilitation policy. According to the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (amended in 1984) the government is not legally bound to provide a displaced person anything but a cash compensation. Imagine that. A cash compensation, to be paid by an Indian government official to an illiterate male Adivasi (the women get nothing) in a land where even the postman demands a tip for a delivery! Most Adivasis have no formal title to their land and therefore cannot claim compensation anyway. Most Adivasis—or let’s say most small farmers—have as much use for money as a Supreme Court judge has for a bag of fertilizer.
The millions of displaced people don’t exist anymore. When history is written they won’t be in it. Not even as statistics. Some of them have subsequently been displaced three and four times—a dam, an artillery-proof range, another dam, a uranium mine, a power project. Once they start rolling there’s no resting place. The great majority is eventually absorbed into slums on the periphery of our great cities, where it coalesces into an immense pool of cheap construction labor (that buil
ds more projects that displace more people). True, they’re not being annihilated or taken to gas chambers, but I can warrant that the quality of their accommodation is worse than in any concentration camp of the Third Reich. They’re not captive, but they redefine the meaning of liberty.
And still the nightmare doesn’t end. They continue to be uprooted even from their hellish hovels by government bulldozers that fan out on cleanup missions whenever elections are comfortingly far away and the urban rich get twitchy about hygiene. In cities like Delhi, they run the risk of being shot by the police for shitting in public places—like three slum dwellers were not more than two years ago.
In the French-Canadian wars of the 1770s, Lord Amherst exterminated most of Canada’s Native Indians by offering them blankets infested with the smallpox virus. Two centuries on, we of the Real India have found less obvious ways of achieving similar ends.
The millions of displaced people in India are nothing but refugees of an unacknowledged war. And we, like the citizens of White America and French Canada and Hitler’s Germany, are condoning it by looking away. Why? Because we’re told that it’s being done for the sake of the Greater Common Good. That it’s being done in the name of Progress, in the name of the National Interest (which, of course, is paramount). Therefore gladly, unquestioningly, almost gratefully, we believe what we’re told. We believe what it benefits us to believe.
Allow me to shake your faith. Put your hand in mine and let me lead you through the maze. Do this because it’s important that you understand. If you find reason to disagree, by all means take the other side. But please don’t ignore it, don’t look away. It isn’t an easy tale to tell. It’s full of numbers and explanations. Numbers used to make my eyes glaze over. Not anymore. Not since I began to follow the direction in which they point.