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DAM-L LS: A Foolish Dam and a Writer's Freedom (fwd)
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Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 10:43:14 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: LS: A Foolish Dam and a Writer's Freedom
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A Foolish Dam and a Writer's Freedom
By SALMAN RUSH DIE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/07/opinion/07RUSH.html?ex=998203851&ei=1&en=e
08644b94f021b8b
LOS ANGELES -- Nargis, the Indian movie star of the 1950's who later had a
career in politics, once denounced the great film director Satyajit Ray for
making films that offered too negative an image of India. In her own
movies, she said, she had always celebrated the positive. When asked for an
example, she replied, "Dams."
Big dams have long been an essential part of India's technological
iconography, and their role in providing water and power to the nation was
for a time unquestioned, even unquestionable. Lately, however, there has
been an increasingly confrontational debate about the role that large dams
have played in development. One of the biggest new dams under construction
is the Sardar Sarovar Project on the Narmada River in the State of Gujarat,
with a proposed final height of 447 feet. Among its most vocal opponents is
the novelist Arundhati Roy. She and other critics of the project object to
the displacement of more than 200,000 people by rising waters, to the
damage to the Narmada Valley's fragile ecosystem and to the failure of some
big dams to deliver what they promise. (India's Bargi Dam, for example,
irrigates only 5 percent of the area promised.) She points out that while
the rural poor are the ones who pay the price for a dam, it is the urban
rich who benefit: 80 percent of rural households in India have no
electricity; 200 million people have no access to safe drinking water.
The recent report of the World Commission on Dams, an international agency
established by the World Bank and World Conservation Union, largely
supports these conclusions in its review of 125 large dams. The report
blames big dams for increased flooding, damage to farmland and the
extinction of some freshwater fish.
Many dams fall short of their targets, and of the 40 million to 80 million
people displaced by worldwide dam building, few have received sufficient
compensation. Ms. Roy and the Narmada Valley campaigners have long argued
that alternative methods are capable of meeting Gujarat's water needs; the
world commission report echoes this view, stressing the need to focus on
renewable energy, recycling, better irrigation and reduction of water
losses.
The battle over the Narmada Dam has been long and bitter. However, there
has been a surreal new twist. Arundhati Roy and two leading members of the
protest movement, Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, were accused by five
lawyers of having attacked them during a Dec. 13, 2000, protest outside the
Supreme Court in Delhi against the court's decision to allow building work
on the Sardar Sarovar project to proceed. Ms. Roy and Ms. Patkar allegedly
called on the crowd to kill the lawyers, and Mr. Bhushan is accused of
having grabbed one of the lawyers and threatened him with death.
Yet all this happened, the accusers contend, under the noses of a large
detachment of policemen. Any threats passed unrecorded by the filmmaker
Sanjay Kak, who was covering the demonstration with a video camera. And it
was subsequently revealed that Mr. Bhushan had in fact been somewhere else
at the time of the protest.
In spite of the demonstrable absurdity of these charges, however, the
Supreme Court decided to entertain the lawyers' petition and served the
three activists with criminal contempt notices. In doing so it ignored its
own rules and procedures.
After being summoned to court, Ms. Roy delivered a characteristically
trenchant affidavit in which she said that the court's willingness to haul
her and her colleagues up before it on such flimsy charges "indicates a
disquieting inclination on the part of the court to silence criticism and
muzzle dissent, to harass and intimidate those who disagree with it." Last
week, the Supreme Court insisted that she withdraw this affidavit; she
refused, and the court is considering new contempt of court charges that
could send her to jail.
She is, as she told The Guardian of London, "now deeper in the soup." What
the Supreme Court of India should realize is that by pursuing Arundhati
Roy, Medha Patkar and Prasant Bhushan in this fashion, it places itself
before the court of world opinion.
Can it be that the Supreme Court of the world's largest democracy will
reveal itself to be biased against free speech and be prepared to act at
the bidding of a powerful interest group — the coalition of political and
financial interests behind the Narmada Dam? Only by abandoning its pursuit
of Arundhati Roy and the Narmada Valley campaigners can the Supreme Court
escape such a judgment.
Salman Rushdie is the author of the forthcoming novel, "Fury."
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