Nation’s body,river’s pulse: Narratives of anti-dam politics in India

National development: Producer patriots and sacrificial victims

Dams, steel plants, fertiliser factories, nuclear reactors, and planned industrial cities were sites of development where citizens were invited to see themselves reflected in the mirror of technological change. This imagined community of ‘producer-patriots’ (Deshpande, 2003), whose hard work and frugality were geared to meeting the Five-Year Plan targets for economic growth, was central to Nehru’s vision of a self-reliant and prosperous nation, freed from a century of colonial exploitation. And to realise this vision, more than 50 million Indians were displaced and dispossessed to make way for development projects in the first 50 years of independence (Hemadri et al., 1999). Large dams alone took away the lands of at least 16.4 million people. And though adivasis constitute only 8 per cent of India’s population, they figure disproportionately among those displaced by development: an estimated 50 per cent of the dispossessed belong to the Scheduled Tribes, residents of forested hills where dams and mining projects were most often located. For people with a strong attachment to ancestral lands and near-absolute dependence on localised natural resources, displacement is virtually a death sentence (Xaxa, 2001). Until 2013, the government could forcibly evict people in the ‘public interest’ by using a convenient colonial-era law. This Land Acquisition Act of 1894 only compensated for privately-owned land. In many cases, adivasis did not have legal title to the land that they had lived on and farmed for generations. Failing to qualify as ‘Project-Affected Persons’ or PAPs, they were denied even the meagre monetary amount allowed by the law. The commons that were vital to their survival – forests, pastures, rivers and ponds – were not taken into account. Money received as compensation was not enough to buy land elsewhere and nor were small farmers knowledgeable in the ways of investing in a trade or running a business. Most were rendered destitute, wage-labourers scrabbling for a living at the very bottom of the economic heap, their close-knit communities scattered and shattered. These were not ‘producer-patriots’. They were sacrificial victims on the altar of national development.

But Budhni Mejhan, the young Santhal woman with whom we began this story, was a ‘producer patriot’. After all, she worked on the Panchet Dam. Surely she must have shared in the glory and success of India’s industrial growth? Not so. The journalist Chitra Padmanabhan, who traced Mejhan’s story (2012), describes a darker end. After the dazzle of flashbulbs as she was photographed switching on the power with Nehru at her side, her life took a bizarre turn. On returning home, Mejhan was told by village elders that since she had garlanded Nehru at the inauguration ceremony, she had in effect married him. ³ And since the Prime Minister was not a Santhal, she was no longer a part of the community. Mejhan was told to leave the village. Ex-communicated and isolated, Budhni Mejhan struggled along, only to lose her job with the Damodar Valley Corporation three years later. She surfaced again in the archives after more than 20 years when she travelled to Delhi to meet the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of the man she had garlanded, with the request that she be reinstated in her job. No more was heard of her in the media. Padmanabhan conjectures that she probably died around 2002, poor and alone. Meanwhile the reservoir of the Panchet Dam is now dry and produces no power. From its silt have now risen again the ruins of old Santhal villages and historic temples, while the people who lived and worshipped in them have sunk without a trace.

It bears repeating: 50 million people displaced by development projects between 1947 and 1997; 16 million dispossessed by large dams alone; 8 million of them adivasis, among the poorest and most vulnerable sections of Indian society. Yet, despite the scale of these evictions – project-specific as well as cumulative – there was little public attention to the fate of those affected. Such was the aura of the developmentalist vision, the power of the technological spectacle that was the large dam, the promise of the good things that gushed forth from it – irrigation for the Green Revolution that made India self-sufficient in food grains, electricity for industry and lighting up homes, relief from the scourge of floods – that no one was counting the costs. Even those parameters of a proposed project that could be assessed with some reasonable degree of accuracy – its economic and financial viability – were found to be greatly exaggerated when independently evaluated after completion (Singh et al., 1992). For many officials in India’s notoriously corrupt construction bureaucracy, such blithe optimism was no doubt lubricated by considerations of the illicit gains to be made from commissions and kickbacks, but there were enough upright administrators and engineers who also believed that large dams would deliver the nation from want. For planners, these benefits far outweighed the social and ecological costs of such projects – that is, if they thought of these costs at all. Given the sharply unequal social landscape that divided decision-makers from those adversely affected by their actions, the destruction of adivasi lives and the loss of their riverine ecosystems barely registered as public concerns. Puny subjects of a giant nation, adivasis could do little but resign themselves to the inevitability of a state-ordained fate. Theirs was the painful duty of making the nation great. Despite their distress, it is notable that there were no protests against displacement until the late 1980s. ⁴ And so it went on for more than 35 years after Independence. Colossal, eye-wateringly expensive projects were built. Millions of the most vulnerable people in the country were displaced. Hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of forested and farmed hills, valleys and rivers and their distinctive flora and fauna were destroyed forever.

From dams to development: The changing contours of challenge

The first stirrings of protest against damming a river occurred in 1973, when the state government of Kerala proposed a hydro-electric project on the River Kunthipuzha. The reservoir of the dam threatened to submerge an area of primary rainforest known as Silent Valley, habitat for the endangered Lion-tailed Macaque and other rare species. Scientists and wildlife conservationists wrote to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi about the need to preserve the unique biodiversity of the valley but, until 1983, the government was inclined to allow the project with some modifications. What eventually persuaded Indira Gandhi to change her mind was the determined campaign launched by the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP), a Left-affiliated people’s science organisation that mobilised its network of school and college science teachers as well as its supporters among the intelligentsia to keep the issue in the media spotlight. KSSP succeeded not only in stopping the dam but also eventually getting Silent Valley designated as a National Park.

In the years that the Silent Valley controversy simmered, ‘the environmental crisis’ had begun to be discussed internationally. The first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm in 1972, the same year that the Club of Rome published its report on The Limits to Growth. In India, the press reported on Chipko, a remarkable movement of village women who were hugging trees to stop government contractors from clearing deciduous forests in the foothills of the Himalaya (Guha, 1989). The Chipko movement brought a new dimension to budding environmental consciousness: if Silent Valley highlighted the importance of conserving biodiversity, Chipko made visible the concerns of rural communities confronted with ecological change that threatened their livelihoods. As young activists and intellectuals travelled to the hills and talked to villagers involved in the movement, they forged a distinctive understanding of ecological crises and their solutions. The State of India’s Environment report declared that poverty and environmental destruction were two sides of the same coin (CSE, 1984). Social justice and environmental welfare must be pursued in tandem. This perspective was to prevail and become the hallmark of Indian environmentalism through the 1980s, a time when environmentalism in the affluent Global North was primarily preoccupied with post-industrial concerns around the preservation of clean air and green spaces, where equity in the control and use of natural resources was not a fundamental issue (Baviskar, 2005a).

This unfolding understanding of Indian environmental politics was part of a growing human rights discourse that burgeoned in the last 1970s in the aftermath of a two-year Emergency when, faced with student protests and trade union-led strikes, Indira Gandhi had suspended civil liberties, imposed press censorship and jailed critics and political opponents. After the Emergency was lifted, disaffection with the state was at its peak. So was mobilisation by women, dalit or Scheduled Castes, farmers and workers, in small and large action groups and social movements (Kothari, 1988). The ideological inspiration of these groups ran the gamut from Gandhi to Mao, with a good deal of hybridisation in between. These ‘grassroots groups’ – so-called because of their direct engagement with the subjects they represented – were also increasingly encountering a new entity: the NGO (non-governmental organisation). Urban-based NGOs, many of whom were regarded with suspicion by Leftists as agents of American imperialism that aimed to undermine the revolutionary potential of Indian social movements (Karat, 1985), gradually came to be incorporated into the flourishing ecosystem of social advocacy, protest and organisation. This period was also marked by the rise of public interest litigation as the Supreme Court tried to redeem itself after its quiescent complicity with the Emergency regime by taking up the cause of citizens victimised by the state such as poor people imprisoned without trial and pavement-dwellers evicted without a hearing (Bhuwania, 2017).

It was in this vibrant political landscape that Kalpavriksh, a students’ environmental action group, undertook a journey along the Narmada to investigate the likely effects of a series of large dams that were planned along this central Indian river (Kalpavriksh and Hindu College Nature Club, 1984). Its report, Development or Destruction?, outlined for the first time the wide-ranging social and environmental impacts of 30 large dams and as many as 3000 medium and small dams on the tributaries of the river. Grassroots activists, who began to work in the area notified by the government to be submerged by the Sardar Sarovar Dam’s reservoir, first focused on securing the legal right to compensation for the people to be displaced. However, one of them, Medha Patkar, a social worker from Mumbai, soon realised that the resettlement package offered by the government was not only grossly inadequate but, in fact, impossible to implement for the estimated affected population of 250,000 in 245 villages. Patkar started organising villagers in the submergence zone of the dam and, with a team of activists, launched the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Campaign). The Andolan accomplished a remarkable political feat by bringing together two disparate and generally antagonistic constituencies: well-to-do upper-caste Hindu farmers in the plains and adivasis who lived in the forested hills (Baviskar, 1995). In particular, the campaign drew attention to the vulnerability of this latter group who regarded the Narmada as the source of all life. For these communities of small upland farmers, their villages along the river anchored them to their ancestral spirits, their cultural identity and social being. Displacement would mean dismemberment and no money or land elsewhere could make it any different.

The first critical evaluations of the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) focused on reviewing the cost-benefit analysis used to justify the project. Economists showed that the social and environmental costs of the dam were severely under-estimated while its potential benefits were greatly exaggerated (see Paranjpye, 1990). As the struggle in the valley gained momentum, these technical arguments against the project were augmented to include the issue of social justice. Activists demanded a ‘class-benefit analysis’ of the dam. If the SSP stripped away the meagre assets of impoverished adivasis to further enrich well-off farmers with irrigation, how could the dam be described as ‘serving the public interest’, they asked. A state project that did not first serve the poorest and most oppressed and that irretrievably destroyed the country’s natural wealth was neither ‘national’ nor ‘development’. The Andolan gradually became the epicentre of increasingly deep fissures that cracked the consensus around the dominant model of development. From questioning the distributional aspects of the project, the movement began to challenge the logic of large dams itself, asking whether this capital-intensive technology was appropriate for Indian environmental and socio-economic conditions. The protest in the valley now attracted not only human rights supporters but also disenchanted engineers looking at alternative technologies for decentralised water management, power generation and agriculture (Paranjape and Joy, 1995). The Chipko movement had agitated for local control over forests as opposed to centralised state-led decision-making. The Narmada Bachao Andolan raised those stakes to demand an overhaul of the entire project of development. ⁵

Social justice was at the heart of the Andolan’s critique of development. Instead of the abstract ‘nation’ conjured up by technocratic planners, the movement drew a different picture of a society divided between rich and poor, city versus village, India against Bharat, ⁶ growing further and further apart. While this discourse drew upon the Indian Constitution’s list of the fundamental rights guaranteed to each citizen, especially to those who had been denied these rights so far, it focused in particular on the question of cultural rights, and whether the distinctive beliefs and practices of a vulnerable minority could be crushed in the course of pursuing the greater common good (Mendelsohn and Baxi, 1994). ⁷ The movement emphasised the sacredness of the River Narmada for those who lived along its banks, choreographing protest events where hundreds of adivasis standing by the water vowed to save their beloved mother from being killed. Although the majority of affected villagers who were active participants in the Andolan consisted of relatively prosperous upper-caste farmers from the fertile plains, the image of the movement as disseminated by its metropolitan supporters and the media was of hill adivasis, picturesque in their traditional clothing, holding bows and arrows, defending a lifestyle based on benign co-existence with nature. Such performances portrayed adivasis as ‘ecologically noble savages’ such that saving them was coterminous with saving the river and forests. Despite the problems with such strategic essentialism, the movement came to be firmly associated in the public imagination as protecting a fragile and valuable culture. ⁸

To a large extent, this celebration of adivasi culture brought into the mainstream what had until then been a marginal perspective. For the most part, the Indian state and dominant society regarded adivasis as ‘backward’ people who needed to be modernised and assimilated into ‘civilisation’ or urban, middle-class, upper-caste Hindu life, aspiring towards ever-increasing consumption and accumulation. Those who argued in favour of adivasi culture, not only defending their right to self-determination but also discerning in their heritage an alternative model of living in harmony with nature, were sneered at as naive romantics. ⁹ The Andolan, too, faced this charge and, on this issue, found support within the country from only a tiny minority within the intelligentsia. This perspective on adivasis, however, was far more sympathetically received among international supporters of the movement. From the late 1980s, grassroots protests in the Narmada valley had been supplemented by organisations such as International Rivers Network, Friends of the Earth and Cultural Survival. Based in the USA and Europe, these NGOs targeted the World Bank for funding the Sardar Sarovar Dam, pointing out that the institution was violating international conventions on the rights of indigenous people (Khagram, 2004). While the claim of indigeneity was difficult to sustain in the Indian context, and was indeed officially refuted by the Indian government, it figured centrally in the World Bank’s decision to withdraw from the project in 1993. ¹⁰

After more than a decade of protests that included hundreds of marches and demonstrations, and being harassed, intimidated and assaulted by the police, when even extreme actions such as indefinite hunger strikes only resulted in the government setting up toothless commissions of enquiry, the Andolan decided to take its case to the Supreme Court. Taking heart from several progressive judgements passed by the court in public interest litigation, in 1994, the Andolan filed a comprehensive petition asking for the project to be stopped. Construction on the dam was halted but this reprieve proved to be temporary. In 2000, the court delivered its final orders, declaring that dams were ‘good for the nation’. In September 2017, the gates of the dam were closed, bringing about full submergence of the reservoir. By this time, in this long war of attrition, most of the affected people had accepted poor lands and meagre sums of money, and many of them had left the area, their resolve to stay and fight having frayed over the years of uncertainty. Only a tiny fraction that remained (681 families out of 50,000), that had fought until the bitter end, received substantial monetary compensation mandated by the court. While the activists moved on to other parts of the Narmada valley, trying to mobilise people affected by other dams being built – Maheshwar, Narmada Sagar and Omkareshwar – for those living in the submergence zone of the Sardar Sarovar Dam, and the public that had been following their valiant struggle, a major chapter in river-related politics had come to an end.

Growth, gods and bureaucracies: Accelerating accumulation by dispossession

By 1994, much of the Andolan’s electric charge had ebbed away. Indeed, much had changed in India in the last decade of the 20th century. In consonance with the global turn towards neoliberalism, India too adopted policies of economic liberalisation, inviting foreign investment and encouraging Indian capitalists by offering land, minerals and other resources, tax concessions and a ‘business-friendly’ regulatory environment. While the state remained the dominant partner in these new relationships, its orientation towards the objectives of rule became more firmly directed in favour of private capital. Economic growth was the prime goal of government and the Nehru-era notion of inclusive development to be achieved through redistributive policies was replaced by the trickle-down theory of prosperity. Although this rising tide did float many boats, it also left the smallest stranded. For small farmers, sharecroppers and agricultural workers whose lands and homesteads were acquired for dams, mining, industrial estates, real estate ventures, and Special Economic Zones – and the pace of dispossession speeded up since the government undertook to broker land for private businesses as well as public-sector projects – the growth of the Indian economy was bad news (Levien, 2018; Neilsen and Oskarsson, 2017).

Several of these turn-of-the-century land grabs resulted in pitched battles between the state and those resisting ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003). Private security forces now augmented police forces in violently suppressing protests and undertaking the daily work of intimidation and attrition. The development map of India was dotted in red: Kalinganagar, Kashipur, Jagatsinghpur and Niyamgiri in Odisha (Padel and Das, 2010), Nandigram and Singur in West Bengal (Majumder, 2018; Nielsen, 2018), proposed Special Economic Zones in Goa and Maharashtra (Sampat, 2010) were among the many sites of strong resistance. Faced with mounting anger that could result in electoral losses, the government in 2013 passed the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (called the LARR) which raised rates of monetary compensation among other provisions. Despite having been consulted in the drafting of this legislation, movement activists were disappointed to find that the LARR failed to specify ‘public purpose’ in a manner that would exclude land acquisition for private, profit-oriented projects. While this Act largely permitted business as usual, a previous piece of legislation, The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (called the FRA), which was chiefly intended to grant small plots of forest land to adivasis for cultivation, came to be used for challenging land acquisition in forested areas. Even in the limited number of instances where the FRA is applicable, activists have to engage in protracted bureaucratic and legal wrangling to implement the law.

For Indian rivers, the single-minded pursuit of economic growth has brought new challenges: more dams and inter-basin water transfer projects propose to change rivers beyond recognition. ¹¹ Touting hydro-electric power as renewable energy, seemingly all the more attractive in an age of fossil fuel-driven climate change and made to appear that way by politicians seeking to show their commitment to meeting internationally-set carbon-emission targets, the state is building a string of high dams across the Himalayan mountains. The vast basin of the River Brahmaputra in north-east India, where wild rivers cascade through forests dense with biodiversity, is to have dams on every tributary, on a scale that will double India’s entire hydro-electric power capacity (Baviskar, 2009; see Gamble in this issue, 2019). The steep gradients that these tributaries traverse enables them to gather energy, picking up and breaking down rocks that they deposit as mineral-rich sediment in the Brahmaputra’s floodplains in Assam. Hundreds of upstream dams would not only impound water, they would hold back the silt that keeps Assam’s farms and fisheries alive. ¹² The situation is equally worrying in north-west India where the proposed Pancheshwar Dam on the Mahakali River is slated to be the highest in the world. It will displace an estimated 30,000 people and destroy forests and riverine ecosystems in an intensely active seismic zone (Theophilus, 2018).

Not only are all Himalayan rivers to be dammed and redirected, but peninsular rivers are also being treated by politicians, technocrats, economists and engineers as little better than drains in an elaborate and labyrinthine plumbing system (see Figure 2). A megalomaniacal grand project of inter-linking rivers envisages ‘a garland of canals’ ringing the country and diverting water from ‘surplus’ rivers to ‘deficit’ ones. This at a time when fluvial flows have become highly stressed because of over-extraction and are likely to become even more uncertain because of climate change. There is little environmental and social assessment of the impacts of such spectacular projects but their enormous technical and economic scale helps explain why politicians and their construction industry funders love them. The proposed link between the Rivers Ken and Betwa is already in process, despite strong objections from conservationists alarmed that the reservoir will drown a large section of Panna National Park, habitat of critically endangered tigers and vultures (Van Gruisen, 2017), and general puzzlement from farmers and agro-ecologists about the rationality of linking one water-scarce area with another (Kumar, 2017).

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Figure 2.

Map of India showing proposed inter-basin canal networks (Credit: National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee).

To observers of the 1990s anti-dam campaigns, it is striking that there is hardly any visible opposition to these projects from affected communities. In the case of the Brahmaputra dams, downstream farmers have challenged the projects but their distance from the construction sites has diluted the strength of their demonstrations and calls for action. In large part, the absence of collective mobilisation by proximate populations can be traced to the legislative changes produced by the anti-dam campaigns of the 1990s. Those legally defined as ‘Project-Affected Persons’ or PAPs because their lands will be acquired for building the dam now stand to gain substantial monetary compensation due to the LARR 2013. These pay-outs are especially handsome in the Brahmaputra basin since the numbers of families to be displaced are small and builders are willing to offer large sums to pre-empt protest. ¹³ Without a local grassroots base, anti-dam campaigners find it hard to muster the political legitimacy that the Narmada Bachao Andolan and other mass-based campaigns could claim.

The other notable difference from the 1990s is in the ‘repertoire of contention’ deployed by anti-dam campaigns (Tilly, 2005). ¹⁴ In the last two decades, the notion of cultural rights to place has been monopolised by Hindu nationalists demanding that Muslims vacate centuries-old mosques and shrines because they were built on the site of previously-existing temples. ¹⁵ Claims about ancestral attachment – the indissoluble links between blood and soil – have been mobilised to disenfranchise non-Hindu minorities, even if they have lived in India for generations, as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1966). The suspicion and animosity engendered by Hindu nationalists has created a systemic shift towards treating Muslims as second-class citizens and regularly triggers violent clashes. This growing communal tension now extends into some adivasi areas too, where not only Muslims but also Christians have been attacked and killed. ¹⁶ In this context, progressive movements are wary of voicing claims about cultural rights because that strategy may potentially play to the Hindu nationalist gallery. In recent campaigns against displacement, the argument about defending a unique cultural attachment to land has only been used by the movement against bauxite mining by Vedanta Corporation in the Niyamgiri hills in eastern India (Padel and Das, 2010). The tiny community of Dongaria Kondh adivasis, only 8000 in number, who regard the Niyamgiri hills as sacred, unitedly defended their forests against land acquisition. Their distinctive dress and self-sufficient mode of living made this group a poster child for organisations like Survival International that took up their cause in the London headquarters of Vedanta (see Figure 3). While these culturalist claims had some traction in the Indian media, the instrument that actually enabled the Dongaria Kondh to eventually stop the project was the Forest Rights Act of 2006. ¹⁷

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Figure 3.

Dongaria Kondh women (Credit: Author).

It should be emphasised that the Niyamgiri campaign is unusual, both for its ability to fuse cultural and legal rights and for its success on both counts. In an overwhelming number of cases involving land acquisition, there is no grassroots collective action at all, for the reasons outlined above: the hardened hegemony around economic growth-at-all-costs and the increase in compensation rates for land. These factors are compounded by the scale and complexity of new river projects that stretch across and between basins, large landscapes where it is hard for localised communities to come together for sustained periods. Under these circumstances, campaigns to save rivers have shifted their organisational form as well as their repertoire of contention. Instead of Narmada Bachao Andolan-style mass movements, campaigns tend to emanate from networks of NGOs, where technically-trained and media-savvy activists proficient in legal and bureaucratic procedures analyse data in official documents in order to file objections and petitions before government committees and courts. The South Asia Network of Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) is an excellent example of such environmental and social justice advocacy. ¹⁸ While it supports local mobilisation and works closely with grassroots organisations, it often finds itself the sole actor commenting on and intervening against mega-projects that, cumulatively, have ‘landscape-level’ impacts on whole eco-systems and regions.

As collective action by affected populations has become harder, voicing concerns in the vocabulary of human rights has become rarer. Increasingly, NGOs draw upon a discourse of environmental health: safeguarding the integrity of rivers by maintaining minimum flows, protecting complex and fragile ecosystems, and cautioning about climate change-induced uncertainties. Hydrology, biology and climate science now carry more weight with the bureaucracy and the courts than sociology and anthropology. Environment trumps social justice, a far cry from the Andolan’s insistence on the inseparability of the two. A troubling corollary to this – which may either reflect Hindu nationalist thought or be a strategic response to it – is the move to recognise rivers as ‘living human entities’, as the Uttarakhand High Court declared in March 2017 for the Ganga and Yamuna, taking inspiration from New Zealand’s legislation to grant legal rights to North Island’s Wanghanui River, which is sacred to the Maori. The Uttarakhand state government successfully challenged the High Court’s order in the Supreme Court. ¹⁹ While the divinity of Indian rivers has never been an impediment to polluting them (Alley, 2002), the attempt to grant them the legal rights due to living beings poses a new challenge. Who will speak for rivers? Will environmentalists who claim to speak on their behalf respect the rights of citizens who are as much a part of riverine ecosystems as its water, rocks and sand, flora and fauna? People whose life depends on the fate of rivers and the landscapes they sustain were earlier trapped in the body of the nation. Will they now be swallowed by the ‘living being’ that is the river? When it comes to recognising human rights, Indian conservationists have an abysmal record (Baviskar, 2005a). The likelihood that they will strive for ecological and social justice seems remote. And the prospects for poor citizens to represent themselves seem equally dim. While, at first glance, the zoo-centrism underlying the grant of ‘living entity’ status to rivers appears to be a radical critique of the dominant capitalist model of exploiting and destroying nature, in practice it may further marginalise vulnerable people. This debate, however, has only begun. And, considering the challenge of stopping the surge of projects relentlessly rolling in, it may not even be relevant. What is evident is that the future for Indian rivers and those who live by them is bleaker than ever before.