The End of Imagination (17 page)

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 ragged 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, but continuing with the project would mean throwing good money after bad. We would save something like Rs 35,000 crore 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 reservoir. 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 report
53
(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.

Meanwhile, work had begun on two more dams in Madhya Pradesh—the massive Narmada Sagar (without which the Sardar Sarovar loses 17 to 30 percent of its efficiency)
57
and the Maheshwar dam. The Maheshwar dam is next in line, upstream from the Sardar Sarovar. The government of Madhya Pradesh has signed a power purchase contract with a private company—S. Kumars, one of India’s leading textile magnates.

Tension in the Sardar Sarovar area abated temporarily, and the battle moved upstream, to Maheshwar, in the fertile plains of Nimad.

The case pending in the Supreme Court led to a palpable easing of repression in the valley. Construction work had stopped on the dam, but the rehabilitation charade continued. Forests (slated for submergence) continued to be cut and carted away in trucks, forcing people who depended on them for a livelihood to move out.

Even though the dam is nowhere near its eventual projected height, its impact on the environment and the people living along the river is already severe.

Around the dam site and the nearby villages, the number of cases of malaria has increased sixfold.
58

Several kilometers upstream from the Sardar Sarovar dam, huge deposits of silt, hip deep and over 200 meters wide, have cut off access to the river. Women carrying water pots now have to walk miles, literally
miles
, to find a negotiable entry point. Cows and goats get stranded in the mud and die. The little single-log boats that the Adivasis use have become unsafe on the irrational circular currents caused by the barricade downstream.