Asia Times: India's goddess of small dams


	March 9, 2002	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

India's goddess of small dams
By Sultan Shahin

NEW DELHI - Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning author in 1997 with her debut novel, The God of Small Things, is well on her way to becoming the goddess of small dams herself, a goddess, however, who will have to be perpetually locked in conflicts with the gods of big things.

Big dams, she thinks, symbolize the evil of the big people who come together to oppress the millions of small people they uproot, without ever making adequate arrangements for their rehabilitation. More than an
author, Roy is now increasingly known as an activist of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada River) movement, to which she has donated the entire Booker Prize money of US$30,000.

In this celebrated David-versus-Goliath struggle of modern India, the diminutive Roy (157 centimeters, or 5 feet 2 inches, tall) this week served a one-day jail sentence in Delhi's Tihar jail imposed on her by the "tyrannical" Supreme Court, which found her guilty of riminal contempt of court. Had she not paid a fine of 2,000 rupees ($40) imposed on her by the apex court, as she had earlier threatened not to, she would have had to spend another three months in prison.

The Supreme Court convicted the 41-year-old writer on Wednesday for "scandalizing" the court, "lowering its dignity" and for attempting to damage the institution of the judiciary by her statements.

"The judgment only confirms what I said in my affidavit. It is a sad realization for me, because I feel the Supreme Court of India is an important institution and the citizens of India have high expectations from it," Roy said just before being taken to jail.

The contempt charges arose out of Roy's criticisms of a Supreme Court judgment in October 2000 that gave the go-ahead for the building of a controversial dam in the Narmada River valley. She took part in a protest against the controversial project in December, alongside other environmental campaigners.

In a petition filed against her the day after the demonstration, a group of lawyers claimed that she had shouted abusive slogans outside court and had behaved like a "thug". Roy then issued her own affidavit, describing the petition as "absurd" and "despicable" and she was then promptly charged with contempt by the Supreme Court.

In the original hearing, from which reporters were barred, the court is said to have criticized Roy's failure to apologize for her behavior and complained that she had not behaved like "a reasonable man". However, in the judgment convicting her, the court ruled that "freedom of speech is subject to reasonable restrictions" and said that the one-day sentence showed that the court had been magnanimous in its sentencing and had kept in mind that she was a woman.

Roy was unrepentant after the court's sentence. "I stand by what I said and I am prepared to suffer the consequences. The dignity of the court can only be upheld by the quality of their judgments; the quality of their judgments will be assessed by the people of this country," she said in a statement. "The message is clear. Any citizen who dares to criticize the court does so at his or her peril."

It is not the first time that Roy has been in trouble with the judiciary over the Narmada dam project. She was issued with a petition after she wrote a series of articles criticizing the project and the Indian judicial system a couple of years ago.

Her incarceration has been strongly condemned by writers and activists throughout the world. More than 300 members of the Italian parliament wrote to the president of India, K R Narayanan, conveying their support and saying that "the Italian people who read and support Arundhati Roy ... appreciate the nobility of the political, moral and literary commitment".

Celebrated US intellectual and and writer Noam Chomsky, too, conveyed his support for Roy and expressed "great admiration for her courage". Also, a group of writers from the United States, including Toni Morrison and Harold Printer, along with actor Harrison Ford, have urged Narayanan to reject the charges against Roy.

Commenting on the arrest of Roy and the Supreme Court decision, Medha Patkar, head of Narmada Andolan, said, "Justice has been buried but people are still alive." The supporters of Roy kept vigil in front of the jail throughout the night and presented flowers to her on her release. They carried placards saying such things as "Apex court must be accountable", "Can truth scandalize the court" and "Condemn communalism, not criticism". Her supporters also took out a symbolic "funeral procession of justice".

In its 76-page judgment, the Supreme Court order observed, "When the court exercises contempt power, it does not do so to vindicate the dignity and honor of the individual judge who is personally attacked or scandalized, but to uphold the majesty of the law and the administration of justice. The foundation of the judiciary is the trust and the confidence of the people in its ability to deliver fearless and impartial justice. No person can flout the mandate of law of respecting the courts for establishment of rule of law under the cloak of freedoms of speech and expression guaranteed by the constitution with reasonable restrictions.

"When it is stated that the court displays a disturbing willingness to issue notice on an absurd, despicable, entirely unsubstantiated petition, it amounts to a destructive attack on the reputation and the credibility of the institution and it undermines the public confidence in the judiciary as a whole and by no stretch of imagination can be held to be a fair criticism of the court's proceedings. She [Roy] has attributed motives to the court of silencing criticism and muzzling dissent by harassing and intimidating those who disagree with it.

"In her affidavits, she has not shown any repentance. Such an attitude shows her persistent and consistent attempt to malign the institution of the judiciary found to be most important pillar in the Indian democratic set-up."

A dropout architecture student and onetime aerobics instructor, Roy tried her hand at writing novels. She managed to chronicle in an intensely lyrical style small things such as the beetles and the lush greenery of Kerala in her debut novel, The God of Small Things. It earned her one of India's biggest ever advances before going on to win the Booker Prize and sell 6 million copies. This made her an instant celebrity and a darling of middle-class India, not to mention extremely wealthy from the estimated more than $1 million she has earned in royalties from sales of the book, which has been translated into scores of languages.

Since her success with the first book, Roy has concentrated on social and human-rights issues, teaming up with environmentalist Medha Patkar to oppose the Narmada dam, and in publishing a scathing condemnation of India's 1998 nuclear tests in her celebrated essay, "War is Peace". She is also deeply critical of the government policy and practice of building big dams, sentiments she expressed in an essay that was later published as a book, The Greater Common Good. She regards both nuclear bombs and big dams as weapons of mass destruction. No wonder she has now become one of the most hated figures of the same middle class that not too long ago idolized her. India's right-wing ruling elite is now out to denigrate her, to erode her credibility in any way it can.

The Narmada Valley Development Project involves the construction of hundreds of large dams and an extensive irrigation system. One of the dams, Sardar Sarovar, would uproot almost half a million people in nearly 250 villages. After countless hunger strikes, demonstrations and lawsuits, the Supreme Court suspended construction of the dam in 1995. However, in February 1999, the Supreme Court lifted its stay on construction and allowed the dam height to be increased (to 138 meters), leading to Roy's condemnation. The government has maintained that all of the displaced people - mostly in Gujarat state, some in Rajasthan - will be rehoused and the project will help irrigate parched lands.

Roy said that the decision to take her to court was no accident. "I think it is to do with an ancient fear of writers," she said. "I think the clarity of what you are saying is threatening."

The power of Roy's pen (or is it a word-processor?) coupled with her empathy for the dispossessed or likely-to-be-dispossessed of the land, the characters or potential characters of her writings, is clearly proving too explosive to handle for the powers-that-be. Few people in the country knew anything about the destructive record of big dams before she set out to study and then write about them. All previous literature on the subject was for professionals who knew too much, while the rest knew nothing. The vested interests, the oppressors, would not speak, for their own good. The victims, the oppressed, did not know how to speak. They did not have a voice. With Roy on their side, they now have a powerful voice. She writes about the arcana of the dam business in the manner of a novel that cannot be put down. The whole conspiracy of the foreign and the local vested interests lies exposed. No wonder she has made such powerful enemies.

In her essay "The Greater Common Good", widely available on the Internet as well as in a book form, she brings out the misery of the 50 million (unbelievable, but a conservative near-official figure) people who have virtually disappeared from the face of the Earth, having been displaced by big dams. She writes, "Big dams haven't really lived up to their role as the monuments of modern civilization, emblems of man's ascendancy over nature. Monuments are supposed to be timeless, but dams have an all-too-finite lifetime. They last only as long as it takes nature to fill them with silt. It's common knowledge now that big dams do the opposite of what their publicity people say they do - the local pain for national gain myth has been blown wide open.

"For all these reasons, the dam-building industry in the First World is in trouble and out of work. So it's exported to the Third World in the name of development aid, along with their other waste like old weapons, superannuated aircraft carriers and banned pesticides. On the one hand, the Indian government, every Indian government, rails self-righteously against the First World, and on the other, actually pays to receive their gift-wrapped garbage. Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise. Like colonialism was. It has destroyed most of Africa. Bangladesh is reeling from its ministrations. We know all this, in numbing detail. Yet in India our leaders welcome it with slavish smiles [and make nuclear bombs to shore up their flagging self-esteem].

"Over the last 50 years India has spent 80,000 crores rupees [$16 billion] on the irrigation sector alone. Yet there are more drought-prone areas and more flood-prone areas today than there were in 1947. Despite the disturbing evidence of irrigation disasters, dam-induced floods and rapid disenchantment with the green revolution [declining yields, degraded land], the government has not commissioned a post-project evaluation of a single one of its 3,600 dams to gauge whether or not it has achieved what it set out to achieve, whether or not the [always phenomenal] costs were justified, or even what the costs actually were ...

"What about those that have been displaced by the thousands of other development projects? At a private lecture, N C Saxena, secretary to the Planning Commission, said he thought the number was in the region of 50 million [of which 40 million were displaced by dams] ...

"I feel like someone who's just stumbled on a mass grave. Fifty million is more than the population of Gujarat. Almost three times the population of Australia. More than three times the number of refugees that partition created in India. Ten times the number of Palestinian refugees. The Western world today is convulsed over the future of 1 million people who have fled from Kosovo.

"A huge percentage of the displaced are tribal people [57.6 percent in the case of the Sardar Sarovar Dam]. Include dalits and the figure becomes obscene. According to the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, it's about 60 percent. If you consider that tribal people account for only 8 percent, and dalits 15 percent, of India's population, it opens up a whole other dimension to the story. The ethnic 'otherness' of their victims takes some of the pressure off the nation-builders. It's like having an expense account. Someone else pays the bills. People from another country. Another world. India's poorest people are subsidizing the lifestyles of her richest. Did I hear someone say something about the world's biggest democracy?

"What has happened to all these millions of people? Where are they now? How do they earn a living? Nobody really knows. [Last month's papers had an account of how tribal people displaced by the Nagarjunasagar dam project are selling their babies to foreign adoption agencies. The government intervened and put the babies in two public hospitals, where six died.] When it comes to rehabilitation, the government's priorities are clear. India does not have a national rehabilitation policy.

"And still the nightmare doesn't end. They [the displaced] continue to be uprooted even from their hellish hovels by government bulldozers that fan out on cleanup missions whenever elections are comfortingly far away and the urban rich get twitchy about hygiene. In cities like Delhi, they run the risk of being shot by the police for shitting in public places - like three slum-dwellers were, not more than two years ago. In the French Canadian wars of the 1770s, Lord Amherst exterminated most of Canada's native indians by offering them blankets infested with the small-pox virus. Two centuries on, we of the real India have found less obvious ways of achieving similar ends.

"The millions of displaced people in India are nothing but refugees of an unacknowledged war. And we, like the citizens of white America and French Canada and Hitler's Germany, are condoning it by looking away. Why? Because we're told that it's being done for the sake of the greater common good. That it's being done in the name of progress, in the name of national interest [which, of course, is paramount]. Therefore gladly, unquestioningly, almost gratefully, we believe what we're told. We believe that it benefits us to believe."

As far as the Narmada dam that the Supreme Court is so determined to help build, it would be profitable, according to Roy, to read at least a portion of what is known as the Morse Report. In June 1991, the World Bank appointed Bradford Morse, a former head of the United Nations Development Program, as chairman of an independent review. His brief was to make a thorough assessment of the Sardar Sarovar projects. He was guaranteed free access to all secret bank documents relating to the projects.

Roy comments, "What the Morse Report reveals, in temperate, measured tones [which I admire, but cannot achieve], is scandalous. It is the most balanced, unbiased, yet damning indictment of the relationship between the Indian state and the World Bank. Without appearing to, perhaps even without intending to, the report cuts through to the cozy core, to the space where they live together and love each other [somewhere between what they say and what they do].

"The core recommendation of the 357-page independent review was unequivocal and wholly unexpected: 'We think the Sardar Sarovar projects as they stand are flawed, that resettlement and rehabilitation of all those displaced by the projects is not possible under prevailing circumstances, and that environmental impacts of the projects have not been properly considered or adequately addressed. Moreover, we believe that the bank shares responsibility with the borrower for the situation that has developed ... it seems clear that engineering and economic imperatives have driven the projects to the exclusion of human and environmental concerns ... India and the states involved ... have spent a great deal of money. No one wants to see this money wasted. But we caution that it may be more wasteful to proceed without full knowledge of the human and environmental costs. We have decided that it would be irresponsible for us to patch together a series of recommendations on implementation when the flaws in the projects are as obvious as they seem to us. As a result, we think that the wisest course would be for the bank to step back from the projects and consider them afresh. The failure of the bank's incremental strategy should be acknowledged."

Roy's feelings about and understanding of the purpose of big dams is summed up in the following paragraph - "Big dams are to a nation's 'development' what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both 20th century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They're both malignant indications of civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link - the understanding - between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.

"Can we unscramble it? Maybe. Inch by inch. Bomb by bomb. Dam by dam. Maybe by fighting specific wars in specific ways. We could begin in the Narmada Valley."

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