Fifth, even in the (100 percent) unlikely event that water gets there, it has to be piped and distributed to those eight thousand waiting villages.
It’s worth knowing that of the one billion people in the world who have no access to safe drinking water, 855 million live in rural areas.86 This is because the cost of installing an energy-intensive network of thousands of kilometers of pipelines, aqueducts, pumps, and treatment plants that would be needed to provide drinking water to scattered rural populations is prohibitive. Nobody builds Big Dams to provide drinking water to rural people. Nobody can afford to.
When the Morse Committee first arrived in Gujarat, it was impressed by the Gujarat government’s commitment to taking drinking water to such distant rural districts.87 The members of the committee asked to see the detailed drinking-water plans. There weren’t any. (There still aren’t any.)
They asked if any costs had been worked out. “A few thousand crores” was the breezy answer.88 A billion dollars is an expert’s calculated guess. It’s not included as part of the project cost. So where is the money going to come from?
Never mind. Jus’ askin’.
It’s interesting that the Farakka Barrage that diverts water from the Ganga to Calcutta Port has reduced the drinking water availability for forty million people who live downstream in Bangladesh.89
At times there’s something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.
Build a dam to take water away from forty million people. Build a dam to pretend to bring water to forty million people.
Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?
The last person I met in the valley was Bhaiji Bhai. He is a Tadvi Adivasi from Undava, one of the first villages where the government began to acquire land for the Wonder Canal and its 75,000-kilometer network. Bhaiji Bhai lost seventeen of his nineteen acres to the Wonder Canal. It crashes through his land, 700 feet wide including its walkways and steep, sloping embankments, like a velodrome for giant bicyclists.
The canal network affects more than 200,000 families. People have lost wells and trees, people have had their houses separated from their farms by the canal, forcing them to walk 2 or 3 kilometers to the nearest bridge and then 2 or 3 kilometers back along the other side. Twenty-three thousand families, let’s say 100,000 people, will be, like Bhaiji Bhai, seriously affected. They don’t count as “Project Affected” and are not entitled to rehabilitation.
Like his neighbors in Kevadia Colony, Bhaiji Bhai became a pauper overnight.
Bhaiji Bhai and his people, forced to smile for photographs on government calendars. Bhaiji Bhai and his people, denied the grace of rage. Bhaiji Bhai and his people, squashed like bugs by this country they’re supposed to call their own.
It was late evening when I arrived at his house. We sat down on the floor and drank oversweet tea in the dying light. As he spoke, a memory stirred in me, a sense of déjà vu. I couldn’t imagine why. I knew I hadn’t met him before. Then I realized what it was. I didn’t recognize him, but I remembered his story. I’d seen him in an old documentary film, shot more than ten years ago in the valley. He was frailer now, his beard softened with age. But his story hadn’t aged. It was still young and full of passion. It broke my heart, the patience with which he told it. I could tell he had told it over and over and over again, hoping, praying, that one day, one of the strangers passing through Undava would turn out to be Good Luck. Or God.
Bhaiji Bhai, Bhaiji Bhai, when will you get angry? When will you stop waiting? When will you say “That’s enough!” and reach for your weapons, whatever they may be? When will you show us the whole of your resonant, terrifying, invincible strength? When will you break the faith? Will you break the faith? Or will you let it break you?
To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them of volition. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers, who doesn’t. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it. How easily you could press a button and annihilate the earth. How you can start a war or sue for peace. How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another. How you can green a desert, or fell a forest and plant one somewhere else. You use caprice to fracture a people’s faith in ancient things—earth, forest, water, air.
Once that’s done, what do they have left? Only you. They will turn to you because you’re all they have. They will love you even while they despise you. They will trust you even though they know you well. They will vote for you even as you squeeze the very breath from their bodies. They will drink what you give them to drink. They will breathe what you give them to breathe. They will live where you dump their belongings. They have to. What else can they do? There’s no higher court of redress. You are their mother and their father. You are the judge and the jury. You are the World. You are God.
Power is fortified not just by what it destroys but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained.
This cold contemporary cast of power is couched between the lines of noble-sounding clauses in democratic-sounding constitutions. It’s wielded by the elected representatives of an ostensibly free people. Yet no monarch, no despot, no dictator in any other century in the history of human civilization has had access to weapons like these.
Day by day, river by river, forest by forest, mountain by mountain, missile by missile, bomb by bomb—almost without our knowing it—we are being broken.
Big Dams are to a nation’s “development” what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They’re both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link—the understanding—between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.
Can we unscramble it?
Maybe. Inch by inch. Bomb by bomb. Dam by dam. Maybe by fighting specific wars in specific ways. We could begin in the Narmada valley.
This July will bring the last monsoon of the twentieth century. The ragged army in the Narmada valley has declared that it will not move when the waters of the Sardar Sarovar reservoir rise to claim its lands and homes. Whether you love the dam or hate it, whether you want it or you don’t, it is in the fitness of things that you understand the price that’s being paid for it. That you have the courage to watch while the dues are cleared and the books are squared.
Our dues. Our books. Not theirs.
Be there.
First published in Outlook and Frontline, June 4, 1999.
POWER POLITICS: THE REINCARNATION OF RUMPELSTILTSKIN
Remember him? the gnome who could turn straw into gold? Well, he’s back now, but you wouldn’t recognize him. To begin with, he’s not an individual gnome anymore. I’m not sure how best to describe him. Let’s just say he’s metamorphosed into an accretion, a cabal, an assemblage, a malevolent, incorporeal, transnational multi-gnome. Rumpelstiltskin is a notion (gnotion), a piece of deviant, insidious white logic that will eventually self-annihilate. But for now, he’s more than okay. He’s cock of the walk. King of All That Really Counts (Cash). He’s decimated the competition, killed all the other kings, the other kinds of kings. He’s persuaded us that he’s all we have left. Our only salvation.
What kind of potentate is Rumpelstiltskin? Powerful, pitiless, and armed to the teeth. He’s a kind of king the world has never known before. His realm is raw capital, his conquests em
erging markets, his prayers profits, his borders limitless, his weapons nuclear. To even try and imagine him, to hold the whole of him in your field of vision, is to situate yourself at the very edge of sanity, to offer yourself up for ridicule. King Rumpel reveals only part of himself at a time. He has a bank account heart. He has television eyes and a newspaper nose in which you see only what he wants you to see and read only what he wants you to read. (See what I mean about the edge of sanity?) There’s more: a Surround Sound stereo mouth that amplifies his voice and filters out the sound of the rest of the world, so that you can’t hear it even when it’s shouting (or starving, or dying), and King Rumpel is only whispering, rolling his r’s in his North American way.
Listen carefully. This is most of the rest of his story. (It hasn’t ended yet, but it will. It must.) It ranges across seas and continents, sometimes majestic and universal, sometimes confining and local. Now and then I’ll peg it down with disparate bits of history and geography that could mar the gentle art of storytelling. So please bear with me.
In March this year (AD 2000), the president of the United States (H.E., the most exalted plenipotentiary of Rumpeldom) visited India. He brought his own bed, the feather pillow he hugs at night, and a merry band of businessmen. He was courted and fawned over by the genuflecting representatives of this ancient civilization with a fervor that can only be described as indecent. Whole cities were superficially spruced up. The poor were herded away, hidden from the presidential gaze. Streets were soaped and scrubbed and festooned with balloons and welcome banners. In Delhi’s dirty sky, vindicated nuclear hawks banked and whistled: Dekho ji dekho! (Look, sir! Look!) Bill is here because we have the Bomb.
Those Indian citizens with even a modicum of self-respect were so ashamed they stayed in bed for days. Some of us had puzzled furrows on our brows. Since everybody behaved like a craven, happy slave when Master visited, we wondered why we hadn’t gone the whole distance. Why hadn’t we just crawled under Master’s nuclear umbrella in the first place? Then we could spend our pocket money on other things (instead of bombs) and still be all safe and slavey. No?
Just before The Visit, the Government of India lifted import restrictions on fourteen hundred commodities, including milk, grain, sugar, and cotton (even though there was a glut of sugar and cotton in the market, even though 42 million tons of grain were rotting in government storehouses). During The Visit, contracts worth about three (some say four) billion US dollars were signed.1
For reasons of my own, I was particularly interested in a Memorandum of Intent signed by the Ogden Energy Group, a company that specializes in operating garbage incinerators in the United States, and S. Kumars, an Indian textile company that manufactures what it calls “suiting blends.”2
Now what might garbage incineration and suiting blends possibly have in common? Suit-incineration? Guess again. Garbage-blends? Nope. A big hydroelectric dam on the River Narmada in central India. Neither Ogden nor S. Kumars has ever built or operated a large dam before.
The 400-megawatt Shri Maheshwar Hydel Project being promoted by S. Kumars is part of the Narmada Valley Development Project, which boasts of being the most ambitious river valley project in the world. It envisages building 3,200 dams (30 big dams, 135 medium dams, and the rest small) that will reconstitute the Narmada and her forty-one tributaries into a series of step reservoirs. It will alter the ecology of an entire river basin, affect the lives of about twenty-five million people who live in the valley, and submerge 4,000 square kilometers of old-growth deciduous forest and hundreds of temples, as well as archaeological sites dating back to the Lower Paleolithic Age.3
The dams that have been built on the river so far are all government projects. The Maheshwar Dam is slated to be India’s first major private hydel power project.
What is interesting about this is not only that it’s part of the most bitterly opposed river valley project in India, but also that it is a strand in the skein of a mammoth global enterprise. Understanding what is happening in Maheshwar, decoding the nature of the deals that are being struck between two of the world’s great democracies, will go a long way toward gaining a rudimentary grasp of what is being done to us, while we, poor fools, stand by and clap and cheer and hasten things along. (When I say “us,” I mean people, human beings. Not countries, not governments.)
Personally, I took the first step toward arriving at this understanding when, over a few days in March this year (AD 2000), I lived through a writer’s bad dream. I witnessed the ritualistic slaughter of language as I know and understand it. Let me explain.
On the very days that President Clinton was in India, in faraway Holland the World Water Forum was convened.4 Four thousand five hundred bankers, businessmen, government ministers, policy writers, engineers, economists—and, in order to pretend that the “other side” was also represented, a handful of activists, indigenous dance troupes, impoverished street theater groups, and half a dozen young girls dressed as inflatable silver faucets—gathered at The Hague to discuss the future of the world’s water. Every speech was generously peppered with phrases like “women’s empowerment,” “people’s participation,” and “deepening democracy.” Yet it turned out that the whole purpose of the forum was to press for the privatization of the world’s water. There was pious talk of having access to drinking water declared a Basic Human Right. How would this be implemented, you might ask. Simple. By putting a market value on water. By selling it at its “true price.” (It’s common knowledge that water is becoming a scarce resource. One billion people in the world have no access to safe drinking water.)5 The “market” decrees that the scarcer something is, the more expensive it becomes. But there is a difference between valuing water and putting a market value on water. No one values water more than a village woman who has to walk miles to fetch it. No one values it less than urban folk who pay for it to flow endlessly at the turn of a tap.
So the talk of connecting human rights to a “true price” was more than a little baffling. At first I didn’t quite get their drift. Did they believe in human rights for the rich, that only the rich are human, or that all humans are rich? But I see it now. A shiny, climate-controlled human rights supermarket with a clearance sale on Christmas Day.
One marrowy American panelist put it rather nicely: “God gave us the rivers,” he drawled, “but he didn’t put in the delivery systems. That’s why we need private enterprise.” No doubt with a little Structural Adjustment to the rest of the things God gave us, we could all live in a simpler world. (If all the seas were one sea, what a big sea it would be … Evian could own the water, Rand the earth, Enron the air. Old Rumpelstiltskin could be the handsomely paid supreme CEO.)
When all the rivers and valleys and forests and hills of the world have been priced, packaged, bar-coded, and stacked in the local supermarket, when all the hay and coal and earth and wood and water have been turned to gold, what then shall we do with all the gold? Make nuclear bombs to obliterate what’s left of the ravaged landscapes and the notional nations in our ruined world?
As a writer, one spends a lifetime journeying into the heart of language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the distance between language and thought. “Language is the skin on my thought,” I remember saying to someone who once asked what language meant to me. At The Hague I stumbled on a denomination, a sub-world, whose life’s endeavor was entirely the opposite of mine. For them the whole purpose of language is to mask intent. They earn their abundant livings by converting bar graphs that plot their companies’ profits into consummately written, politically exemplary, socially just policy documents that are impossible to implement and designed to remain forever on paper, secret even (especially) from the people they’re written for. They breed and prosper in the space that lies between what they say and what they sell. What they’re lobbying for is not simply the privatization of natural resources and essential infrastructure, but the privatization of policy making itself. Dam builders want to control public water policies.
Power utility companies want to draft power policies, and financial institutions want to supervise government disinvestment.
Let’s begin at the beginning. What does privatization really mean? Essentially, it is the transfer of productive public assets from the state to private companies. Productive assets include natural resources. Earth, forest, water, air. These are assets that the state holds in trust for the people it represents. In a country like India, 70 percent of the population lives in rural areas.6 That’s seven hundred million people. Their lives depend directly on access to natural resources. To snatch these away and sell them as stock to private companies is a process of barbaric dispossession on a scale that has no parallel in history.
What happens when you “privatize” something as essential to human survival as water? What happens when you commodify water and say that only those who can come up with the cash to pay the “market price” can have it?
In 1999, the government of Bolivia privatized the public water supply system in the city of Cochabamba and signed a forty-year lease with a consortium headed by Bechtel, a giant US engineering firm. The first thing Bechtel did was to raise the price of water. Hundreds of thousands of people simply couldn’t afford it anymore. Citizens came out on the streets to protest. A transport strike brought the entire city to a standstill. Hugo Banzer, the former Bolivian dictator (then the president), ordered the police to confront the crowds. One person was killed, and many more were injured. The protest continued because people had no options—what’s the option to thirst? In April 2000, Banzer declared martial law. The protest continued. Eventually Bechtel was forced to flee its offices. Many people expect Bechtel will try to extort a $12 million exit payment from the Bolivian government for loss of future profits.7
My Seditious Heart Page 10