The End of Imagination (18 page)

Farther upstream, where the silt deposits have not yet become a problem, there’s another tragedy. Landless people (predominantly Adivasis and Dalits) have traditionally cultivated rice, melons, cucumbers, and gourds on the rich, shallow silt banks the river leaves when it recedes in the dry months. Every now and then, the engineers manning the Bargi dam (way upstream, near Jabalpur) release water from the reservoir without warning. Downstream, the water level in the river suddenly rises. Hundreds of families have had their crops washed away several times, leaving them with no livelihood.

Suddenly they can’t trust their river anymore. It’s like a loved one who has developed symptoms of psychosis. Anyone who has loved a river can tell you that the loss of a river is a terrible, aching thing. But I’ll be rapped on the knuckles if I continue in this vein. When we’re discussing the Greater Common Good there’s no place for sentiment. One must stick to facts. Forgive me for letting my heart wander.

The state governments of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra continue to be completely cavalier in their dealings with displaced people. The government of Gujarat has a rehabilitation policy (on paper) that makes the other two states look medieval. It boasts of having the best rehabilitation package in the world.
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The program offers land for land to displaced people from Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh and recognizes the claims of “encroachers” (usually Adivasis with no papers). The deception, however, lies in its definition of who qualifies as “Project-Affected.”

In point of fact, the government of Gujarat hasn’t even managed to rehabilitate people from its own 19 villages slated for submergence, let alone the rest of the 226 villages in the other two states. The inhabitants of these 19 villages have been scattered to 175 separate rehabilitation sites. Social links have been smashed, communities broken up.

In practice, the resettlement story (with a few “ideal village” exceptions) continues to be one of callousness and broken promises. Some people have been given land, others haven’t. Some have land that is stony and uncultivable. Some have land that is irredeemably waterlogged. Some have been driven out by landowners who had sold their land to the government but hadn’t been paid.
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Some who were resettled on the periphery of other villages have been robbed, beaten, and chased away by their host villagers. There have been instances when displaced people from two different dam projects have been allotted contiguous lands. In one case, displaced people from
three
dams—the Ukai dam, the Sardar Sarovar dam, and the Karjan dam—were resettled in the
same
area.
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In addition to fighting among themselves for resources—water, grazing land, jobs—they had to fight a group of landless laborers who had been sharecropping the land for absentee landlords who had subsequently sold it to the government.

There’s another category of displaced people—people whose lands have been acquired by the government for resettlement sites. There’s a pecking order even among the wretched—Sardar Sarovar “oustees” are more glamorous than other “oustees” because they’re occasionally in the news and have a case in court. (In other development projects where there’s no press, no NBA, no court case, there are no records. The displaced leave no trail at all.)

In several resettlement sites, people have been dumped in rows of corrugated tin sheds that are furnaces in summer and fridges in winter. Some of them are located in dry riverbeds that during the monsoon turn into fast-flowing drifts. I’ve been to some of these “sites.” I’ve seen film footage
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of others: shivering children, perched like birds on the edges of cots, while swirling waters enter their tin homes. Frightened, fevered eyes watch pots and pans carried through the doorway by the current, floating out into the flooded fields, thin fathers swimming after them to retrieve what they can.

When the waters recede they leave ruin. Malaria, diarrhea, sick cattle stranded in the slush. The ancient teak beams dismantled from their previous homes, carefully stacked away like postponed dreams, now spongy, rotten, and unusable.

Forty households were moved from Manibeli to a resettlement site in Gujarat. In the first year, thirty-eight children died.
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In today’s paper (
Indian Express
, April 26, 1999) there’s a report about nine deaths in a single rehabilitation site in Gujarat. In the course of a single week. That’s 1.2875 PAPs a day, if you’re counting.

Many of those who have been resettled are people who have lived all their lives deep in the forest with virtually no contact with money and the modern world. Suddenly they find themselves left with the option of starving to death or walking several kilometers to the nearest town, sitting in the marketplace (both men and women), offering themselves as wage laborers like goods on sale.

Instead of a forest from which they gathered everything they needed—
food, fuel, fodder, rope, gum, tobacco, tooth powder, medicinal herbs, housing materials—they earn between ten and twenty rupees a day with which to feed and keep their families. Instead of a river, they have a hand pump. In their old villages they had no money, but they were insured. If the rains failed, they had the forests to turn to. The river to fish in. Their livestock was their fixed deposit. Without all this, they’re a heartbeat away from destitution.

In Vadaj, a resettlement site I visited near Baroda, the man who was talking to me rocked his sick baby in his arms, clumps of flies gathered on its sleeping eyelids. Children collected around us, taking care not to burn their bare skin on the scorching tin walls of the shed they call a home. The man’s mind was far away from the troubles of his sick baby. He was making me a list of the fruits he used to pick in the forest. He counted forty-eight kinds. He told me that he didn’t think he or his children would ever be able to afford to eat any fruit again. Not unless he stole it. I asked him what was wrong with his baby. He said it would be better for the baby to die than live like this. I asked what the baby’s mother thought about that. She didn’t reply. She just stared.

For the people who’ve been resettled, everything has to be relearned. Every little thing, every big thing: from shitting and pissing (where d’you do it when there’s no jungle to hide you?) to buying a bus ticket, to learning a new language, to understanding money. And worst of all, learning to be supplicants. Learning to take orders. Learning to have masters. Learning to answer only when you’re addressed.

In addition to all this, they have to learn how to make written representations (in triplicate) to the Grievance Redressal Committee or the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam for any particular problems they might have. Recently 3,000 people came to Delhi to protest their situation—traveling overnight by train, living on the blazing streets.
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The president wouldn’t meet them because he had an eye infection. Maneka Gandhi, the Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment, wouldn’t meet them but asked for a written representation (
Dear Maneka, Please don’t build the dam, Love, The People
). When the representation was handed to her, she scolded the little delegation for not having written it in English.

From being self-sufficient and free to being impoverished and yoked to the whims of a world you know nothing,
nothing
about—what d’you suppose it must feel like? Would you like to trade your beach house in Goa for a hovel in Paharganj? No? Not even for the sake of the nation?

Truly, it is just not possible for a state administration,
any
state administration, to carry out the rehabilitation of a people as fragile as this, on such an immense scale. It’s like using a pair of hedge clippers to trim an infant’s fingernails. You can’t do it without clipping its fingers off.

Land for land sounds like a reasonable swap, but how do you implement it? How do you uproot 200,000 people (the official blinkered estimate)—of whom 117,000 are Adivasi—and relocate them in a humane fashion? How do you keep their communities intact in a country where every inch of land is fought over, where almost all litigation pending in courts has to do with land disputes?

Where is all this fine, unoccupied, but arable land that is waiting to receive these intact communities?

The simple answer is that there isn’t any. Not even for the “officially” displaced of this one dam.

What about the rest of the 3,199 dams?

What about the remaining thousands of PAPs earmarked for annihilation? Shall we just put the Star of David on their doors and get it over with?

The reservoir of the Maheshwar dam will wholly or partially submerge sixty villages in the Nimad plains of Madhya Pradesh. A significant section of the population in these villages—roughly a third—are Kevats and Kahars, ancient communities of ferrymen, fisherfolk, sand quarriers, and cultivators of the riverbank when the waters recede in the dry season. Most of them own no land, but the river sustains them and means more to them than to anyone else. When the dam is built, thousands of Kevats and Kahars will lose their only source of livelihood. Yet simply because they are landless, they do not qualify as project-affected and will not be eligible for rehabilitation.

Jalud is the first of sixty villages that will be submerged by the reservoir of the Maheshwar dam. Jalud is not an Adivasi village and is therefore riven with the shameful caste divisions that are the scourge of every ordinary Hindu village. A majority of the landowning farmers (the ones who qualify as PAPs) are Rajputs. They farm some of the most fertile soil in India. Their houses are piled with sacks of wheat and lentils and rice. They boast so much about the things they grow on their land that if it weren’t so tragic, it could get on your nerves. Their houses have already begun to crack with the impact of the dynamiting on the dam site.

Twelve families who had small holdings in the vicinity of the dam site had their land acquired. They told me how, when they objected, cement was poured into their water pipes, their standing crops were bulldozed, and the police occupied the land by force. All twelve families are now landless and work as wage laborers.

The area that the Rajputs of Jalud are going to be moved to is a few kilometers inland, away from the river, adjoining a predominantly Dalit and Adivasi precinct in a village called Samraj. I saw the huge tract of land that had been marked off for them. It was a hard, stony hillock with stubbly grass and scrub, on which truckloads of silt were being unloaded and spread out in a thin layer to make it look like rich black humus.

The story goes like this: on behalf of the S. Kumars (textile tycoons turned nation-builders) the district magistrate acquired the hillock, which was actually village common grazing land that belonged to the people of Samraj. In addition to this, the land of eighty-four Dalit and Adivasi villagers was acquired. No compensation was paid.

The villagers, whose main source of income was their livestock, had to sell their goats and buffalo because they no longer had anywhere to graze them. Their only remaining source of income lies (lay) on the banks of a small lake on the edge of the village. In summer, when the water level recedes, it leaves a shallow ring of rich silt on which the villagers grow (grew) rice and melons and cucumber.

The S. Kumars have excavated this silt to cosmetically cover the stony grazing ground (which the Rajputs of Jalud don’t want). The banks of the lake are now steep and uncultivable.

The already impoverished people of Samraj have been left to starve, while this photo opportunity is being readied for German and Swiss funders, Indian courts, and anybody else who cares to pass that way.

This is how India works. This is the genesis of the Maheshwar dam. The story of the first village. What will happen to the other fifty-nine? May bad luck pursue this dam. May bulldozers turn upon the textile tycoons.

Nothing
can justify this kind of behavior.

In circumstances like these, to even entertain a debate about rehabilitation is to take the first step toward setting aside the principles of justice. Resettling 200,000 people in order to take (or pretend to take) drinking water to 40 million—there’s something very wrong with the
scale
of operations here. This is fascist math. It strangles stories. Bludgeons detail. And manages to blind perfectly reasonable people with its spurious, shining vision.

When I arrived on the banks of the Narmada in late March 1999, it was a month after the Supreme Court had suddenly vacated the stay on construction work of the Sardar Sarovar dam. I had read pretty much everything I could lay my hands on (all those “secret” government documents). I had a clear idea of the lay of the land—of what had happened where and when and to whom. The story played itself out before my eyes like a tragic film whose actors I’d already met. Had I not known its history, nothing would have made sense. Because in the valley there are stories within stories, and it’s easy to lose the clarity of rage in the sludge of other people’s sorrow.

I ended my journey in Kevadia Colony, where it all began.

Thirty-eight years ago, this is where the government of Gujarat decided to locate the infrastructure it would need for starting work on the dam: guesthouses, office blocks, accommodation for engineers and their staff, roads leading to the dam site, warehouses for construction material.

It is located on the cusp of what is now the Sardar Sarovar reservoir and the Wonder Canal, Gujarat’s “lifeline,” that is going to quench the thirst of millions.

Nobody knows this, but Kevadia Colony is the key to the world. Go there, and secrets will be revealed to you.

In the winter of 1961, a government officer arrived in a village called Kothie and told the villagers that some of their land would be needed to construct a helipad because someone terribly important was going to come visiting. In a few days a bulldozer arrived and flattened standing crops. The villagers were made to sign papers and were paid a sum of money, which they assumed was payment for their destroyed crops. When the helipad was ready, a helicopter landed on it, and out came Prime Minister Nehru. Most of the villagers couldn’t see him because he was surrounded by policemen. Nehru made a speech. Then he pressed a button and there was an explosion on the other side of the river. After the explosion he flew away.
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That was the genesis of what was to become the Sardar Sarovar dam.