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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | To the heart of the Narmada by Mahim Pratap Singh

To the heart of the Narmada by Mahim Pratap Singh

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published Published on Dec 5, 2010   modified Modified on Dec 5, 2010

Twenty five years after the beginning of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the movement buzzes with inputs from activists and students. But, dogged by many limitations, is there a positive end in sight?

An increased and meaningful interface between tribals and non-tribals came about...

The air enveloping the ghats at Koteshwar is heavy with spirituality. Devotees, tourists and other visitors throng the place every day to pray at the several temples around the ghats and toss coins in the sacred waters of the Narmada as if attaching petty bribes to their prayers.

However, almost as if through divine intervention, the same coins end up answering the prayers of the most unlikely person. Twelve-year-old Kiran comes to the ghats every morning with sparkling eyes and a simple piece of equipment — a small magnet wheel tied to a green plastic rope.

She tosses the magnet in the Narmada and pulls it out a few seconds later to collect the catch — rough coins clinging to the magnet like fish drawn to bait.

The little coin-catcher uses the coins—a daily catch of around Rs.30-35 — to pay her school fees and contribute to the daily economics of the household — run by her mother, an agricultural labourer in a nearby cotton field.

“My father passed away when I was only five,” she says. “These coins I collect, though not enough, at least offer some help to my mother and also takes care of my school fees.”

Last days

Koteshwar ghat, where one of the first major meetings of the Narmada Bachao Andolan was held way back in the mid 1980s, will be submerged, along with the temples and the prospects of Kiran's survival, with the completion of the Sardar Sarovar dam project.

The second-last weekend of October marked the 25th anniversary of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement or NBA), the people's movement spread across three states against the “damming” of the Narmada primarily under the leadership of Medha Patkar. The two-day “event” brought social activists, students and journalists from all over the country to Barwani in Madhya Pradesh, the epicentre of the movement, from where the assorted caravan travelled to Dhadgaon in Maharashtra and back to Barwani; switching between overloaded boats and open-top trucks, halting at picturesque adivasi villages in between.

During the two days that the event lasted, Medha Patkar was everywhere — making travel arrangements for visitors, making sure the ambience resonated with lively tribal dances and music, talking to a hundred different people about a hundred different issues. I finally had a chance to talk to Ms. Patkar on a boat filled with journalists and activists as it sailed the shimmering backwaters of the Narmada, illuminated by the beautiful Sharad Poornima full moon.Talking about the government's response, she had a fresh experience to share. “We recently received a letter from the Narmada Control Authority saying they do not want any dialogue with us,” she said, trying to be audible against the loud humming of the boat engine. That immediately led me to ask her, “does that mean the government has stopped paying any heed to peaceful protests or have the protests themselves lost their power?”, a point also driven home recently by long-time NBA supporter Arundhati Roy when she stated that “Gandhian methods of resistance were not proving effective” (Outlook, June 21, 2010).

“Well, with due respect to Arundhati, has the government really heeded the Maoist struggle? The government has only responded to the violence, not to the struggle. Has it resolved anything?” she asked seriously, suddenly abandoning the ever-present smile on her face.

“I firmly believe that the NBA has been able to achieve much more than what the Maoist movement has,” she said.

After a night halt at Kharia Bhaadal, a relocated adivasi village submerged by the backwaters, we started off again the next morning, stopping at Kakrana, where people alighted and hopped on to the four trucks waiting to take them to Barwani, stopping at Nisarpur on the way for lunch — home cooked food contributed by families of NBA supporters.

The remainder of the conversation took place on the open-top back of a truck, with Medha sitting calmly, unperturbed by smells of human sweat suspended amidst heat, dust and the cacophony of conversations, questions and the cheery sloganeering by supporters, compounded by growling din of the truck engine.

Wouldn't it have been more effective with broader political capacity building of the people involved? Or even by entering electoral politics as a “green alternative”?

On the one hand, they are aggrieved farmers; potential “oustees” facing submergence, while on the other hand, they are voters divided on choice between the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Congress. Their lives as the former do not quadrate with the latter, where they have to choose their representatives for the state assembly or the parliament.

“We did contemplate entering electoral politics, but even without that our struggle has been very political. The movement has, in its course, made efforts to distance electoral politics away from the caste-religion divide and towards the more important development divide. The green alternative has become a part of the political life of the people of the region, and its growing stronger,” Medha says.

And yet, subsequent legislators, after endorsing the movement before the elections, have failed to stand by their promised support. Be it Prem Singh Patel, the BJP MLA from Barwani or Baalaram Bachchan, the Congress MLA from Rajpur.

Former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijaya Singh, during whose term the movement was at its peak, acknowledges this. “It has not been able to emerge as an election issue because of the numbers of the affected families has never been large to influence an election result,” says Mr. Singh.But did his government do enough to do justice to the movement's demands?

“I think the government always was sympathetic to their cause. Now with Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi having taken up the cause of the land oustees, there is a serious discussion on [the] re-drafting the Land Acquisition Act and Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy which would be more responsive to the needs of oustees,” says Mr. Singh.

Besides obvious “successes”, the movement has managed, in its course, to alter several conservative patterns of relationships in the region. For instance, it helped change the existing uni-dimensional and patriarchal male-female relations in the region considerably. Women came out of their houses, participating with vigour in rallies, protests and public meetings.

Similarly, public meetings of the movement were often held in temples, in the process significantly diluting rigid caste-based restrictions on temple entry. An increased and meaningful interface between tribals and non-tribals also came about during the course of the movement.
  
Medha Patkar rallies for support.

Gaps in understanding

However important these “by-products” of the movement are, several activists associated with the movement point out that a major limitation has been its inability to build a broader political understanding among the people involved.

Rakesh Dewan, a long-standing supporter of the movement, puts it across in these words: “Talking about the same things over and over again in public meetings is pointless. It is no longer a question of choosing between the clichéd binary of violence and non-violence, but one of re-assessing and re-defining our weapons of struggle.”

Again, some hold the view that the movement should have redrawn its strategy after the Supreme Court judgment of 2000.

According to Amita Baviskar, Sociologist and author of the book In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley, “abandoning peaceful methods is never an option, but with the benefit of hindsight, the movement should have reworked its strategy after the SC ruled in favour of the construction of the dam”. The October 18 2000 judgment comprised a majority judgment in favour of the construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam delivered by Chief Justice of India A.S. Anand and Justice B.N.Kirpal and a minority judgment to halt the construction of the dam by Justice S.P. Bharucha.

At the end of it all, with the visitors preparing to leave, Medha got busy again in the bi-annual conference of the National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM).

The next morning she had to leave for Delhi to be present for a Supreme Court hearing. It is only a matter of irony that two movements originating from the heart of the country—The Bhopal Gas Leak disaster which spurned a worldwide debate on the fallouts of indiscriminate industrialisation and the NBA which raised pertinent questions globally on a hitherto idealised developmental model—have ended up remaining unending struggles.

The Hindu, 5 December, 2010, http://www.hindu.com/mag/2010/12/05/stories/2010120550140400.htm


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