The End of Imagination (15 page)

A huge percentage of the displaced are Adivasis (57.6 percent in the case of the Sardar Sarovar dam).
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Include Dalits and the figure becomes obscene. According to the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, it’s about 60 percent.
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If you consider that Adivasis account for only 8 percent, and Dalits another 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. (Recently the
Indian Express
had an account of how Adivasis displaced from the Nagarjunasagar Dam Project are selling their babies to foreign adoption agencies.
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The government intervened and put the babies in two public hospitals, where six infants died of neglect.) When it comes to rehabilitation, the government’s priorities are clear. India does not
have
a national rehabilitation policy. According to the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (amended in 1984) the government is not legally bound to provide a displaced person anything but a cash compensation. Imagine that. A cash compensation, to be paid by an Indian government official to an illiterate male Adivasi (the women get nothing) in a land where even the postman demands a tip for a delivery! Most Adivasis have no formal title to their land and therefore cannot claim compensation anyway. Most Adivasis—or let’s say most small farmers—have as much use for money as a Supreme Court judge has for a bag of fertilizer.

The millions of displaced people don’t exist anymore. When history is written they won’t be in it. Not even as statistics. Some of them have subsequently been displaced three and four times—a dam, an artillery-proof range, another dam, a uranium mine, a power project. Once they start rolling there’s no resting place. The great majority is eventually absorbed into slums on the periphery of our great cities, where it coalesces into an immense pool of cheap construction labor (that builds more projects that displace more people). True, they’re not being annihilated or taken to gas chambers, but I can warrant that the quality of their accommodation is worse than in any concentration camp of the Third Reich. They’re not captive, but they redefine the meaning of liberty.

And still the nightmare doesn’t end. They 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 smallpox 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 the National Interest (which, of course, is paramount). Therefore gladly, unquestioningly, almost gratefully, we believe what we’re told. We believe what it benefits us to believe.

Allow me to shake your faith. Put your hand in mine and let me lead you through the maze. Do this because it’s important that you understand. If you find reason to disagree, by all means take the other side. But please don’t ignore it, don’t look away. It isn’t an easy tale to tell. It’s full of numbers and explanations. Numbers used to make my eyes glaze over. Not anymore. Not since I began to follow the direction in which they point.

Trust me. There’s a story here.

It’s true that India has progressed. It’s true that in 1947, when colonialism formally ended, India was food-deficient. In 1950 we produced 51 million tons of food grain. Today we produce close to 200 million tons.
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It’s true that in 1995 the state granaries were overflowing with 30 million tons of unsold grain. It’s also true that at the same time, 40 percent of India’s population—more than 350 million people—were living below the poverty line.
21
That’s more than the country’s population in 1947.

Indians are too poor to buy the food their country produces. Indians are being forced to grow the kinds of food they can’t afford to eat themselves. Look at what happened in Kalahandi District in western Orissa, best known for its starvation deaths. In the drought of 1996, people died of starvation (sixteen according to the state, over one hundred according to the press).
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Yet that same year rice production in Kalahandi was higher than the national average! Rice was exported from Kalahandi District to the center.

Certainly India has progressed, but most of its people haven’t. Our leaders say that we must have nuclear missiles to protect us from the threat of China and Pakistan. But who will protect us from ourselves?

What kind of country is this? Who owns it? Who runs it? What’s going on?

It’s time to spill a few state secrets. To puncture the myth about the inefficient, bumbling, corrupt, but ultimately genial, essentially democratic Indian State. Carelessness cannot account for 50 million disappeared people. Nor can Karma. Let’s not delude ourselves. There is method here, precise, relentless, and 100 percent man-made.

The Indian State is not a state that has failed. It is a state that has succeeded impressively in what it set out to do. It has been ruthlessly efficient in the way it has appropriated India’s resources—its land, its water, its forests, its fish, its meat, its eggs, its air—and redistributed them to a favored few (in return, no doubt, for a few favors). It is superbly accomplished in the art of protecting its cadres of paid-up elite, consummate in its methods of pulverizing those who inconvenience its intentions. But its finest feat of all is the way it achieves all this and emerges smelling sweet. The way it manages to keep its secrets, to contain information—that vitally concerns the daily lives of one billion people—in government files, accessible only to the keepers of the flame: ministers, bureaucrats, state engineers, defense strategists. Of course we make it easy for them, we its beneficiaries. We take care not to dig too deep. We don’t really
want
to know the grisly details.

Thanks to us, Independence came (and went), elections come and go, but there has been no shuffling of the deck. On the contrary, the old order has been consecrated, the rift fortified. We, the rulers, won’t pause to look up from our groaning table. We don’t seem to know that the resources we’re feasting on are finite and rapidly depleting. There’s cash in the bank, but soon there’ll be nothing left to buy with it. The food’s running out in the kitchen. And the servants haven’t eaten yet. Actually, the servants stopped eating a long time ago.

India lives in her villages, we’re told, in every other sanctimonious public speech. That’s bullshit. It’s just another fig leaf from the government’s bulging wardrobe. India doesn’t live in her villages. India
dies
in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India’s villages live only to serve her cities. Her villagers are her citizens’ vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just.

This impression we have of an overstretched State, struggling to cope with the sheer weight and scale of its problems, is a dangerous one. The fact is that it’s
creating
the problems. It’s a giant poverty-producing machine, masterful in its methods of pitting the poor against the very poor, of flinging crumbs to the wretched so that they dissipate their energies fighting each other, while peace (and advertising) reigns in the Master’s Lodgings.

Until this process is recognized for what it is, until it is addressed and attacked, elections—however fiercely they’re contested—will continue to be mock battles that serve only to further entrench unspeakable inequity. Democracy (our version of it) will continue to be the benevolent mask behind which a pestilence flourishes unchallenged. On a scale that will make old wars and past misfortunes look like controlled laboratory experiments. Already 50 million people have been fed into the Development mill and have emerged as air conditioners and popcorn and rayon suits—
subsidized
air conditioners and popcorn and rayon suits. If we must have these nice things—and they
are
nice—at least we should be made to pay for them.

There’s a hole in the flag that needs mending.

It’s a sad thing to have to say, but as long as we have faith, we have no hope. To hope, we have to
break
the faith. We have to fight specific wars in specific ways and we have to fight to win. Listen, then, to the story of the Narmada valley. Understand it. And, if you wish, enlist. Who knows, it may lead to magic.

The Narmada wells up on the plateau of Amarkantak in the Shahdol District of Madhya Pradesh, then winds its way through 1,300 kilometers of beautiful, broad-leaved forest and perhaps the most fertile agricultural land in India. Twenty-five million people live in the river valley, linked to the ecosystem and to each other by an ancient intricate web of interdependence (and, no doubt, exploitation).

Though the Narmada has been targeted for “water resource development” for more than fifty years now, the reason it has, until recently, evaded being captured and dismembered is that it flows through three states—Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat.

Ninety percent of the river flows through Madhya Pradesh; it merely skirts the northern border of Maharashtra, then flows through Gujarat for about 180 kilometers before emptying into the Arabian Sea at Bharuch.

As early as 1946, plans had been afoot to dam the river at Gora in Gujarat. In 1961 Nehru laid the foundation stone for a 49.8-meter-high dam—the midget progenitor of the Sardar Sarovar.

Around the same time, the Survey of India drew up new topographical maps of the river basin. The dam planners in Gujarat studied the new maps and decided that it would be more profitable to build a much bigger dam. But this meant hammering out an agreement with neighboring states.

For years the three states bickered and balked but failed to agree on a water-sharing formula. Eventually, in 1969, the central government set up the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal. It took the tribunal another ten years to announce its award.

The people whose lives were going to be devastated were neither informed nor consulted nor heard.

To apportion shares in the waters, the first, most basic thing the tribunal had to do was to find out how much water there was in the river. Usually this can only be reliably estimated if there is at least forty years of recorded data on the volume of actual flow in the river. Since this was not available, they decided to extrapolate from rainfall data. They arrived at a figure of 27.22 million acre feet (MAF).
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This figure is the statistical bedrock of the Narmada Valley Projects. We are still living with its legacy. It more or less determines the overall design of the projects—the height, location, and number of dams. By inference, it determines the cost of the projects, how much area will be submerged, how many people will be displaced, and what the benefits will be.

In 1992 actual observed flow data for the Narmada—which was now available for forty-five years (from 1948 to 1992)—showed that the yield from the river was only 22.69 MAF—18 percent less!
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The Central Water Commission admits that there is less water in the Narmada than had previously been assumed.
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The government of India says: “It may be noted that clause II [of the decision of the tribunal] relating to determination of dependable flow as 28 MAF is nonreviewable”!
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Never mind the data—the Narmada is legally bound by human decree to produce as much water as the government of India commands.

Its proponents boast that the Narmada Valley Projects are the most ambitious river valley development scheme ever conceived in human history. They plan to build 3,200 dams that will reconstitute the Narmada and her forty-one tributaries into a series of step reservoirs—an immense staircase of amenable water. Of these, 30 will be major dams, 135 medium, and the rest small. Two of the major dams will be multipurpose megadams. The Sardar Sarovar in Gujarat and the Narmada Sagar in Madhya Pradesh will, between them, hold more water than any other reservoir on the Indian subcontinent.

Whichever way you look at it, the Narmada Valley Development Projects are Big. They will alter the ecology of the entire river basin of one of India’s biggest rivers. For better or for worse, they will affect the lives of 25 million people who live in the valley. They will submerge and destroy 4,000 square kilometers of natural deciduous forest.
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Yet even before the Ministry of Environment cleared the projects, the World Bank offered to finance the linchpin of the project—the Sardar Sarovar dam, whose reservoir displaces people in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra but whose benefits go to Gujarat. The Bank was ready with its checkbook
before
any costs were computed,
before
any studies had been done,
before
anybody had any idea of what the human cost or the environmental impact of the dam would be!

The $450 million loan for the Sardar Sarovar Projects was sanctioned and in place in 1985. The Ministry of Environment clearance for the project came only in 1987! Talk about enthusiasm. It fairly borders on evangelism. Can anybody care so much?

Why were they so keen?

Between 1947 and 1994 the World Bank’s management had submitted six thousand projects to the executive board. The board hadn’t turned down a single one.
Not a single one
. Terms like “moving money” and “meeting loan targets” suddenly begin to make sense.