My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  In an old war, everybody has an ax to grind. So how do you pick your way through these claims and counterclaims? How do you decide whose estimate is more reliable? One way is to take a look at the track record of Indian dams.

  The Bargi Dam near Jabalpur was the first dam on the Narmada to be completed (in 1990). It cost ten times more than was budgeted and submerged three times more land than the engineers said it would. About seventy thousand people from 101 villages were supposed to be displaced, but when they filled the reservoir (without warning anybody), 162 villages were submerged. Some of the resettlement sites built by the government were submerged as well. People were flushed out like rats from the land they had lived on for centuries. They salvaged what they could and watched their houses being washed away. One hundred fourteen thousand people were displaced.42 There was no rehabilitation policy. Some were given meager cash compensation. Many got absolutely nothing. A few were moved to government rehabilitation sites. The site at Gorakhpur is, according to government publicity, an “ideal village.” Between 1990 and 1992, five people died of starvation there. The rest either returned to live illegally in the forests near the reservoir or moved to slums in Jabalpur.

  The Bargi dam irrigates only as much land as it submerged in the first place—and only 5 percent of the area that its planners claimed it would irrigate.43 Even that is waterlogged.

  Time and again, it’s the same story. The Andhra Pradesh Irrigation II scheme claimed it would displace 63,000 people. When completed, it displaced 150,000 people.44 The Gujarat Medium Irrigation II scheme displaced 140,000 people instead of 63,600.45 The revised estimate of the number of people to be displaced by the Upper Krishna irrigation project in Karnataka is 240,000, against its initial claims of displacing only 20,000.46

  These are World Bank figures. Not the NBA’s. Imagine what this does to our conservative estimate of thirty-three million.

  Construction work on the Sardar Sarovar Dam site, which had continued sporadically since 1961, began in earnest in 1988. At the time, nobody, not the government, nor the World Bank, was aware that a woman called Medha Patkar had been wandering through the villages slated to be submerged, asking people whether they had any idea of the plans that the government had in store for them. When she arrived in the valley all those years ago, opposing the construction of the dam was the furthest thing from her mind. Her chief concern was that displaced villagers should be resettled in an equitable, humane way. It gradually became clear to her that the government’s intentions toward them were far from honorable. By 1986 word had spread, and each state had a people’s organization that questioned the promises about resettlement and rehabilitation that were being bandied about by government officials. It was only some years later that the full extent of the horror—the impact that the dams would have, both on the people who were to be displaced and the people who were supposed to benefit—began to surface. The Narmada Valley Development Projects came to be known as India’s Greatest Planned Environmental Disaster. The various people’s organizations massed into a single organization, and the Narmada Bachao Andolan—the extraordinary NBA—was born.

  In 1988 the NBA formally called for all work on the Narmada Valley Development Projects to be stopped. People declared that they would drown if they had to but would not move from their homes. Within two years the struggle had burgeoned and had support from other resistance movements. In September 1989, more than fifty thousand people gathered in the valley from all over India to pledge to fight “destructive development.” The dam site and its adjacent areas, already under the Indian Official Secrets Act, were clamped under Section 144, which prohibits the gathering of groups of more than five people. The whole area was turned into a police camp. Despite the barricades, one year later, on September 28, 1990, thousands of villagers made their way on foot and by boat to a little town called Badwani, in Madhya Pradesh, to reiterate their pledge to drown rather than agree to move from their homes.

  News of the people’s opposition to the projects spread to other countries. The Japanese arm of Friends of the Earth mounted a campaign in Japan that succeeded in getting the government of Japan to withdraw its ¥27 billion loan to finance the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (The contract for the turbines still holds.) Once the Japanese withdrew, international pressure from various environmental activist groups who supported the struggle began to mount on the World Bank.

  This, of course, led to an escalation of repression in the valley. Government policy, described by a particularly articulate minister, was to “flood the valley with khaki.”

  On Christmas Day 1990, six thousand men and women walked more than a hundred kilometers, carrying their provisions and their bedding, accompanying a seven-member sacrificial squad that had resolved to lay down its lives for the river. They were stopped at Ferkuwa on the Gujarat border by battalions of armed police and crowds of people from the city of Baroda, many of whom were hired, some of whom perhaps genuinely believed that the Sardar Sarovar was “Gujarat’s lifeline.” It was a telling confrontation. Middle-class urban India versus a rural, predominantly Adivasi army. The marching people demanded they be allowed to cross the border and walk to the dam site. The police refused them passage. To stress their commitment to nonviolence, each villager had his or her hands bound together. One by one, they defied the battalions of police. They were beaten, arrested, and dragged into waiting trucks in which they were driven off and dumped some miles away, in the wilderness. They just walked back and began all over again.

  The faceoff continued for almost two weeks. Finally, on January 7, 1991, the seven members of the sacrificial squad announced that they were going on an indefinite hunger strike. Tension rose to dangerous levels. The Indian and international press, TV camera crews, and documentary filmmakers were present in force. Reports appeared in the papers almost every day. Environmental activists stepped up the pressure in Washington. Eventually, acutely embarrassed by the glare of unfavorable media, the World Bank announced that it would commission an independent review of the Sardar Sarovar Projects—unprecedented in the history of Bank behavior. When the news reached the valley, it was received with distrust and uncertainty. The people had no reason to trust the World Bank. But still, it was a victory of sorts. The villagers, understandably upset by the frightening deterioration in the condition of their comrades, who had not eaten for twenty-two days, pleaded with them to call off the fast. On January 28 the fast at Ferkuwa was called off and the brave, ragged army returned to their homes shouting “Hamara gaon mein hamara raj!” (Our rule in our villages!).

  There has been no army quite like this one anywhere else in the world. In other countries—China (Chairman Mao got a Big Dam for his seventy-seventh birthday), Malaysia, Guatemala, Paraguay—every sign of revolt has been snuffed out almost before it began. Here in India, it goes on and on. Of course, the state would like to take credit for this, too. It would like us to be grateful to it for not crushing the movement completely, for allowing it to exist. After all, what is all this, if not a sign of a healthy, functioning democracy in which the state has to intervene when its people have differences of opinion?

  I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. (Is this my cue to cringe and say “Thank you, thank you, for allowing me to write the things I write”?)

  We don’t need to be grateful to the state for permitting us to protest. We can thank ourselves for that. It is we who have insisted on these rights. It is we who have refused to surrender them. If we have anything to be truly proud of as a people, it is this.

  The struggle in the Narmada valley lives, despite the state.

  The Indian State makes war in devious ways. Apart from its apparent benevolence, its other big weapon is its ability to wait. To roll with the punches. To wear out the opposition. The state never tires, never ages, never needs a rest. It runs an endless relay.

  But fighting people tire. They fall ill, they grow old. Even the young age prematurely. For twenty years now, since the Tribunal’s award, the r
agged army in the valley has lived with the fear of eviction. For twenty years, in most areas there has been no sign of “development”—no roads, no schools, no wells, no medical help. For twenty years, it has borne the stigma “slated for submergence”—so it’s isolated from the rest of society (no marriage proposals, no land transactions). They’re a bit like the Hibakusha in Japan (the victims and their descendants of the bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The “fruits of modern development,” when they finally came, brought only horror. Roads brought surveyors. Surveyors brought trucks. Trucks brought policemen. Policemen brought bullets and beatings and rape and arrest, and in one case murder. The only genuine “fruit” of modern development that reached them, reached them inadvertently—the right to raise their voices, the right to be heard. But they have fought for twenty years now. How much longer will they last?

  The struggle in the valley is tiring. It’s no longer as fashionable as it used to be. The international camera crews and the radical reporters have moved (like the World Bank) to newer pastures. The documentary films have been screened and appreciated. Everybody’s sympathy is all used up. But the dam goes on. It’s getting higher and higher …

  Now, more than ever before, the ragged army needs reinforcements. If we let it die, if we allow the struggle to be crushed, if we allow the people to be brutalized, we will lose the most precious thing we have: our spirit, or what’s left of it.

  “India will go on,” they’ll tell you, the sage philosophers who don’t want to be troubled by piddling current affairs. As though “India” is somehow more valuable than her people.

  Old Nazis probably soothe themselves in similar ways.

  It’s too late, some people say. Too much time and money has gone into the project to revoke it now.

  So far, the Sardar Sarovar reservoir has submerged only a fourth of the area that it will when (if) the dam reaches its full height. If we stop it now, we would save 325,000 people from certain destitution. As for the economics of it—it’s true that the government has already spent Rs 7,500 crore ($1.5 billion), but continuing with the project would mean throwing good money after bad. We would save something like Rs 35,000 crore ($7 billion) of public money, probably enough to fund local water-harvesting projects in every village in all of Gujarat. What could possibly be a more worthwhile war?

  The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war, or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. It’s a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlist, will be honored and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers … The borders are open, folks! Come on in.

  Anyway, back to the story.

  In June 1991 the World Bank appointed Bradford Morse, a former head of the United Nations Development Program, as chairman of the Independent Review. His brief was to make a thorough assessment of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. He was guaranteed free access to all secret World Bank documents relating to the projects.

  Morse and his team arrived in India in September 1991. The NBA, convinced that this was yet another setup, at first refused to meet them. The Gujarat government welcomed the team with a red carpet (and a nod and a wink) as covert allies.

  A year later, in June 1992, the historic Independent Review (known also as the Morse Report) was published.

  The Independent Review unpeels the project delicately, layer by layer, like an onion. Nothing was too big and nothing too small for the members of the Morse Committee to inquire into. They met ministers and bureaucrats, they met NGOs working in the area, went from village to village, from resettlement site to resettlement site. They visited the good ones. The bad ones. The temporary ones, the permanent ones. They spoke to hundreds of people. They traveled extensively in the submergence area and the command area. They went to Kutch and other drought-hit areas in Gujarat. They commissioned their own studies. They examined every aspect of the project: hydrology and water management, the upstream environment, sedimentation, catchment-area treatment, the downstream environment, the anticipation of likely problems in the command area—water logging, salinity, drainage, health, the impact on wildlife.

  What the Independent Review reveals, in temperate, measured tones (which I admire but cannot achieve), is scandalous. It is the most balanced, unbiased, yet damning indictment of the relationship between the Indian State and the World Bank. Without appearing to, perhaps even without intending to, the report cuts through to the cozy core, to the space where they live together and love each other (somewhere between what they say and what they do).

  The core recommendation of the 357-page Independent Review was unequivocal and wholly unexpected:

  We think the Sardar Sarovar Projects as they stand are flawed, that resettlement and rehabilitation of all those displaced by the Projects is not possible under prevailing circumstances, and that environmental impacts of the Projects have not been properly considered or adequately addressed. Moreover we believe that the Bank shares responsibility with the borrower for the situation that has developed…. It seems clear that engineering and economic imperatives have driven the Projects to the exclusion of human and environmental concerns…. India and the states involved … have spent a great deal of money. No one wants to see this money wasted. But we caution that it may be more wasteful to proceed without full knowledge of the human and environmental costs…. As a result, we think that the wisest course would be for the Bank to step back from the Projects and consider them afresh.47

  Four committed, knowledgeable, truly independent men— they do a lot to make up for the faith eroded by hundreds of other venal ones who are paid to do similar jobs.

  The World Bank, however, was still not prepared to give up. It continued to fund the project. Two months after the Independent Review, it sent out the Pamela Cox Committee, which did exactly what the Morse Review had cautioned against (“it would be irresponsible for us to patch together a series of recommendations on implementation when the flaws in the Projects are as obvious as they seem to us”)48 and suggested a sort of patchwork remedy to try and salvage the operation. In October 1992, on the recommendation of the Pamela Cox Committee, the Bank asked the Indian government to meet some minimum primary conditions within a period of six months.49 Even that much the government couldn’t do. Finally, on March 30, 1993, the World Bank pulled out of the Sardar Sarovar Projects. (Actually, technically, on March 29, one day before the deadline, the government of India asked the World Bank to withdraw.)50 Details. Details.

  No one has ever managed to make the World Bank step back from a project before. Least of all a ragtag army of the poorest people in one of the world’s poorest countries. A group of people whom Lewis Preston, then president of the Bank, never managed to fit into his busy schedule when he visited India.51 Sacking the Bank was and is a huge moral victory for the people in the valley.

  The euphoria didn’t last. The government of Gujarat announced that it was going to raise the $200 million shortfall on its own and push ahead with the project.

  During the period of the Independent Review and after it was published, confrontation between people and the authorities continued unabated in the valley—humiliation, arrests, baton charges. Indefinite fasts terminated by temporary promises and permanent betrayals. People who had agreed to leave the valley and be resettled had begun returning to their villages from their resettlement sites. In Manibeli, a village in Maharashtra and one of the nerve centers of the resistance, hundreds of villagers participated in a Monsoon Satyagraha. In 1993, families in Manibeli remained in their homes as the waters rose. They clung to wooden posts with their children in their arms and refused to move. Eventually, policemen prized them loose and dragged them away. The NBA declared that if the government did not agree to review the project, on August 6, 1993, a band of activists would drown themselves in the rising waters of the r
eservoir. On August 5 the Union government constituted yet another committee called the Five Member Group (FMG) to review the Sardar Sarovar Projects.

  The government of Gujarat refused it entry into Gujarat.52

  The FMG report53 (a “desk report”) was submitted the following year. It tacitly endorsed the grave concerns of the Independent Review. But it made no difference. Nothing changed. This is another of the state’s tested strategies. It kills you with committees.

  In February 1994 the government of Gujarat ordered the permanent closure of the sluice gates of the dam.

  In May 1994 the NBA filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court questioning the whole basis of the Sardar Sarovar Dam and seeking a stay on its construction.54

  During the monsoon of that year, when the level in the reservoir rose and water smashed down on the other side of the dam, 65,000 cubic meters of concrete and 35,000 cubic meters of rock were torn out of a stilling basin, leaving a crater 65 meters wide. The riverbed powerhouse was flooded. The damage was kept secret for months.55 Reports started appearing about it in the press only in January 1995.

  In early 1995, on the grounds that the rehabilitation of displaced people had not been adequate, the Supreme Court ordered work on the dam to be suspended until further notice.56 The height of the dam was 80 meters above mean sea level.