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dam-l LS: UK Independent on Maheshwar Protests
This email contains 3 stories from the Independent (London) on the protests
at Maheshwar.
1) Farcical Scenes as Dam Protesters 'Imprison' Jailers, 1/13/00
2) Arundhati Roy Damns the God of Large Things, 1/12/00
3) Arundhati and the Dam, 1/12/00
************************
Farcical Scenes as Dam Protesters 'Imprison' Jailers
by Peter Popham, in the Narmada valley
Independent (London)
13 January 2000
The long-running struggle by villagers in central India to halt a dam that
would submerge 40,000 homes entered the realm of farce yesterday, one day
after police arrested about 1,000 protesters, including the prize-winning
novelist Arundhati Roy.
The arrested demonstrators were taken to a disused prison building in a
small town near the dam site and locked up. The jail has neither
electricity water nor any other facilities.
When the handful of jailers made preparations to leave, the protesters
physically prevented them from going. The prisoners, all of whom have been
charged with unlawful assembly, spent the night inside the prison. They
have now refused to leave until they receive written answers to their
objections to the dam.
The Maheshwar Dam, on the Narmada river in the state of Madhya Pradesh in
central India, is halfway to completion The state authorities are casting
around in increasing desperation for foreign finance to complete the
scheme, after the departure of German and American backers who were alarmed
by its financial and environmental implications.
The site of the dam was occupied by 3,000 villagers from the affected area
as well as by Ms Roy and local and foreign journalists at dawn on Tuesday.
After abortive negotiations between the demonstrators, the District
Collector and several desultory attempts to make arrests, the police moved
in in force during the afternoon and hauled the protesters away.
One witness described seeing Ms Roy pulled and pummelled and dragged across
the rocks in the building site by women police officers before being taken
away in a car.
After being charged she was later released.
Ms Roy, who won the Booker Prize in 1997 with her novel The God of Small
Things, which went on to sell several million copies, put the Narmada
valley campaign back on the map last summer with an extended pamphlet, The
Greater Common Good, which detailed the human cost of big dams in India
such as those being constructed on the Narmada river.
The crux of her argument is that no real provision has been made for the
resettlement of the dam's victims, despite elaborate claims to the
contrary.
In the case of the Maheshwar Dam, nearly 40,000 farmers, fishermen, sand
miners and boatmen and their families stand to lose their homes and
livelihood if the dam is completed. A recent investigation by a
state-nominated task force found that no land had been set aside for those
who will be displaced by the dam.
**************************************
Arundhati Roy Damns the God of Large Things
Independent (London)
12 January 2000
By Peter Popham on the Narmada river in Madhya Pradesh
In a sudden increase of tension between the Indian govern-ment and
environmentalists over the construction of a river dam, Arundhati Roy, the
Indian Booker Prize-winning author of The God of Small Things, was dragged
away to prison yesterday after she tried to halt work on the scheme.
In the company of some 3,000 villagers, most of them women from communities
that will be submerged by the dam, Ms Roy walked several miles in the dead
of night to occupy the site before the authorities could stop them.
It was the third attempt in two years to halt work on the Maheshwar Dam on
the Narmada river in Madhya Pradesh. The protest was banned in advance by
the local authority, and riot police armed with staves and tear-gas
grenades arrived at the site in force soon after dawn. During the standoff,
the protesters' leader, Sylvie Palit of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a
long-running campaign to stop the dam, traded accusations with the District
Collector, Bhopul Singh, who argued that some local people were in favour
of the dam. The riot police eventually drew back and the protesters relaxed
and ate breakfast. But later in the day they returned to take 400
protesters to prison.
Maheshwar is one of 30 large and 135 medium-sized dams planned or already
built on the Narmada, which constitute the biggest water resource
development project in the world. But the project has been bitterly
resisted from the outset.
More than 10,000 farmers and fishermen captured the dam site two years ago
and held it for 21 days. As a result, the state authority set up a task
force to examine the project. It reported that no land was available for
resettling the people - up to 40,000 in number - whose villages will be
submerged, and recommended that work on the dam be stopped until such land
is identified. But work has continued up to the present.
Arundhati Roy, who followed her novel with a pamphlet denouncing India's
nuclear weapons, turned her attention to the Narmada valley last February
when India's Supreme Court lifted a four-year stay on construction of the
biggest dam in the scheme, the Sardar Sarovar.
She joined the controversy by writing an essay, "The Greater Common Good",
which focused on the failure of the authorities to resettle the
dispossessed, many of whom end up in city slums. She has taken the campaign
around the world: last year in Oxford she delivered the Nehru Memorial
Lecture on the subject.
**********************************
Arundhati and the Dam
Independent (London)
12 January 2000
The best-selling author of The God of Small Things was arrested yesterday
for her part in demonstrations against the giant Narmada Valley dam
project. It's a world away from the cosy milieu of the Booker Prize - so
what made Arundhati Roy risk life and liberty for a remote Indian village?
By Peter Popham
Last night, Arundhati Roy spent her first night in jail after police
arrested her and 400 other activists protesting against the construction of
a dam - part of the largest water-resource project in the world - in the
Narmada Valley in central India. The best-selling author of The God of
Small Things was among several thousand protesters who arrived at the dam
site early on Tuesday morning. Arrest was a clear possibility from the
outset: not least because to deter the protest the local authorities had
clamped a "Section 144" order on the area - a ban on more than five people
assembling.
After an early confrontation with the District Collector, flanked by riot
police, the mood at the site eased when police pulled back. Roy herself had
arrived in company with the villagers and with her partner, film-maker
Pradip Krishen, and several friends. "The last thing they want to do is
arrest me," she told me. "They know it would go around the world and raise
the profile of the action enormously. But also they don't want me to get
hurt, as that would make news, too - so if they do plan to go in hard, they
might arrest me first, to get me out of the way."
In the event, Arundhati Roy was arrested, and the Maheshwar Dam protest
will duly "go around the world". And the name of the village of Sulgaon, on
the banks of the Narmada River, and the fate that has been prepared for it,
will spread far and wide.
Sulgaon is one of the most prosperous and industrious Indian villages I
have seen. It looks much like any other Indian village, narrow rutted lanes
threading down to the river between simple, whitewashed houses squeezed
together. The women all have bindi on their foreheads, wear saris, and
cover their heads when men come into view. Dropping by parachute from
Europe, you would instantly judge: poor, traditional India. But note the
small girls in frocks hanging out by the stall of the man selling
hair-slides, bands and other girlish accessories: they have pocket money to
spend. Look up: electricity and telephone wires. In the bigger houses,
which are plain inside but spick and span, there are televisions: people
are glued to them deep into the night.
Above all, look at the fields outside the village: it is like an Indian
remake of Oklahoma! with tractors pulling ploughs (no buffaloes staggering
through the clods here). The sugar cane is as high as an elephant's eye,
and now it's being harvested, and the farmer boys and girls are sucking
greedily on the sweet stalks. The cotton's coming in, too, the
rusty-looking brown bushes dotted with white, like Christmas trees, cut and
dumped in the trailers, hauled home with all the workers uproarious in the
back. Then there are the banana palms, the chillies, the melons, the
sorghum, the rice: God's plenty.
What a pity it all has to go. Can't we find stronger language? What
insanity, what criminality, that Sulgaon, and 60 other villages equally
prosperous, face the pretty imminent prospect of being drowned. They are in
the line of fire of a big dam under construction in this valley, the new
Maheshwar dam. But that's not the end of the criminality. When the dam is
completed and the area is flooded and the happy, rich village of Sulgaon
disappears for ever, where will the villagers go?
Of course, being India, famously "the world's largest democracy" and a
country where the rule of law holds good, there are elaborate provisions
for the Resettlement and Rehabilitation (R&R) of the villagers -
independently estimated to number nearly 40,000 - who will lose their homes
and livelihoods. There must be such provision. It's the law. You couldn't
build a dam in India without it.
But unfortunately for Sulgaon, the R&R plan for the Maheshwar dam is a
fiction. There is no land of equivalent value for the people to move to. In
fact there is no land for them to move to, full stop. India is not like
Britain, where farmland lies fallow and most farmers have long since fled
to the cities. All good land in India is zealously tended, jealously
defended. There is no land. A report in 1998 by India's top social research
institute, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, said as much. There is no
place for the villagers to go. When the water rises, they must merely
disappear.
And the work on the dam that will spell their ruin proceeds day by day,
despite official report after official report casting doubt on the
viability of different aspects of the project. It is said, for example,
that the hydro-electricity it will produce will be far too expensive for
the state to buy.
So this is why the women of Sulgaon are furious. "We don't want the dam,"
says Punibhai, a housewife and a fiery leader in the movement to save the
village. "In the past 10 years there has been a transformation in us, and
we won't let it happen. Our homes and our land would disappear. We don't
want other land or money. We will stay here, even if we die - we will go on
fighting."
Punibhai, who is about 50, has rings on her toes, bangles on her wrists and
three caste marks on her brow. She is a veteran in the struggle: in April
1998, she and her farmer's-wife friends formed human barricades to stop
building materials getting to the dam site, even lying down and sleeping on
the road at night. They were beaten and arrested, and those who were not
hospitalised with their injuries were forced into a half-built jail - 722
of them crammed into cells meant for 80, and penned up for six days before
they were released without charge.
Yesterday, Punibhai and her friends went back to the dam site and risked
the same things all over again. They were joined by another woman in the
long line of vigorous, determined women (and some men) who have kept the
Narmada Valley and the Indian government's plans to build 30 large and 135
medium-size dams along it in India's and the world's eye for the last 20
years.
But this woman, the writer Arund-hati Roy, comes new to the issue. Her
claim to fame is The God of Small Things, the most successful Indian novel
in history, which not only won the Booker Prize in 1997 but has also sold
several million copies around the world. Roy, like all aware Indians, knew
about the Narmada River and the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), the Narmada
People's Movement, which has been fighting the dams here ever since the
plans were made public. But her involvement in the movement is only 11
months old. In February last year, the NBA had a setback: after a stay of
four years, the Supreme Court lifted its ban on construction of one of the
monsters of the valley, the Sardar Sarovar dam. She pricked up her ears.
Roy, who in 1998 polarised Indian opinion with her polemic against India's
nuclear weapons, The End of Imagination, plunged into the turbid,
controversy-rich waters of the Narmada. "I grew interested in what was
happening in the Narmada Valley because almost everyone I spoke to had a
passionate opinion based on what seemed to me to be very little
information," she says. "What I learned changed me and fascinated me. It
revealed in relentless detail the govern-ment's highly evolved, intricate
way of pulverising a people behind the genial mask of democracy. What goes
on in the name of 'national interest' is monstrous."
In four months she produced an extended pamphlet, The Greater Common Good,
encapsulating her views. On the coat-tails of The God of Small Things, it
has been around the world; Roy has done a modified replay of The God's
mighty book tour to thump the tub on behalf of Punibhai and all like her.
In the process she has given a massive shot in the arm to the movement. And
yesterday, as Punibhai and thousands of other locals prepared to occupy the
dam site for an indefinite period again, Roy was there too.
The state (Madhya Pradesh) declared the assembly unlawful in advance. So we
crept out of Sulgaon village at 3.30 on Tuesday morning to take the site by
stealth. Using the accumulated folk wisdom of the villages, we tramped
lanes and stubble fields and forded streams under a sky full of stars for
three hours, to thwart any imaginable plan to stop us in our tracks. We
finally came at the site from behind. At least 3,000 people - including a
BBC team and The Independent - spilled down into the huge excavation pit in
the lee of the towering concrete wall of the dam, before the few police in
khaki even knew we were there.
They were not slow to recover: by 8.40, half a dozen buses carrying Black
Cat riot police were banked up on the ridge above us. At 8.50, Arundhati
Roy, her head draped in a high-fashion silk shawl in shimmering saffron,
her peasant disguise not fully successful, signed an autograph. And by 9.30
the police, including female officers carrying staves (only women police
are allowed to beat women in India), were thronging around the
demonstrators. "Where's Arundhati Roy?" a plainclothes spook on the
sidelines asked me. I played dumb. But later Roy insisted that she was not
worried. "The last thing they want to do is arrest me," she said.
By 10.30 the police had pulled back, and the thousands of protestors
settled down to a breakfast of cold chapattis. They began to dig in for the
long haul. This is the third occupation of the site in two years: the first
lasted 21 days (and jolted the state government into taking another look at
the dam), the second 58 days.
The latest has yet to last more than one day. Yet in their impatience to
shut it down, the authorities have ensured that this occupation will be the
most famous yet.