Battling for justice

River Narmada is magnificent in monsoons. It gets swollen by dozens of smaller rivers, streams and rivulets joining it and inexorably draws into its fold the trees that grow along its coast, melts embankments and floods habitations along its course. It thunders its way across two states for a length of 1400 km before merging into the Arabian Sea. In monsoons, the river is as much a veritable theatre of destruction as it is a source of nourishment.

For 30 years now, the banks of Narmada have been a platform for a people’s movement. People, who consider themselves children of Narmada but have been facing the threat of burial under the same waters. The Narmada Bachao Andolan recently completed 30 years of a relentless campaign against human interventions that threaten the survival of lakhs of people living along the banks. The 30 years of Government vagaries in the form of projects, policies and programmes that have made a mockery of people’s right to survival and have distorted development priorities.

“By the time I was born, the Narmada Bachao Andolan was in full force. My grandfather was a part of the protest, my father was a part of it and now it is my fight. People often ask me why, unlike other young people, I am not focused on my career. Officials have tried to gently lure me away from the protest.

Even my own family sometimes worries that I am wasting my life. But I have no choice. This is a fight I am born into and is my legacy,” says Rahul Yadav, a third-generation protester and now a full-time activist in the movement.

It was in 1985, that Medha Patkar first highlighted the major fallacies in the construction of big dams across the River Narmada. And in the following 30 years, the height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam – the biggest along the river and in the history of dams in India – has been incrementally raised to a treacherous 139m, threatening the entire Narmada Valley with submergence, with no way out for the communities that have been living and subsisting there for many decades.

In the three decades, various parties have come into power and gone, the courts issued innumerable verdicts, most of them censuring the slipshod dam work and judicial commissions and official committees were set up and cancelled. Till date the communities live on the edge of fear, with submergence of all that they live for just a heavy rain away.

Lakshmi Bai is a farmer, who has lived in Piplod village for decades along with her extended family, sharing the agricultural land and livestock and income. The rehabilitation plan that the governments have randomly proposed puts her at a risk of getting isolated from her family, with a possibility of relocation to different places.

“This will hit our sharing of resources, of sharing income and, in fact, having a life together as we have now. They are trying to break us, break our families and break our communities,” Lakshmi Bai says. This is not an isolated story. It is the story of thousands of families living in the submergence zone in Narmada Valley.

As the dam height has been gradually raised to the present level, Narmada Bachao Andolan has upped the ante and launched a fresh agitation at the end of last month, organising ‘Rally for Valley’, with activists and supporters pouring in from various parts of the country and even from abroad.

“For the villages in the submergence zone, the Andolan has become a part of their daily lives. From discussing the issues of displacement to debating the impact on their livelihoods to talking about Andolan, its strategies, its victories, the Narmada Bachao Andolan has become an integral part of their life.

The fight is huge,” says Suresh Ediga of the US-based organisation i4farmers and a journalist with NRI Samay radio channel, who travelled to India from New Jersey to participate in the Jal Satyagraha Yatra and the Rally for Valley at Raj Ghat near Badwani in Madhya Pradesh. “In the one week that I was there, the water level rose so alarmingly that I actually watched a bridge get submerged,” Ediga says.

As the Government ignored even Supreme Court guidelines on the height of the dam and orders to stop further construction until all the environmental caveats are complied with, the Andolan has been forced to reduce its agenda from dams with the ecological balance to a proper rehabilitation package, at the very least. The NBA is now on an indefinite agitation, bringing in representatives from all the villages affected by the rising levels of water and confronting the Narmada Valley Development Authority with the issues yet again.

As Jam Singh, a farmer from Umhlali village, who after 30 years got compensatory land in a different village for the 15 acres he is losing, points out. “I may have received land but what about the thousands of others in my own village and community whose life still hangs in the balance? I am recompensed yet the fight is still mine. There are still issues.”

The rehabilitation programme ignores the diverse needs of a community that will be not just physically displaced but also lose its main livelihood options. Cash compensation is a temporary solution, as those affected realised. “The brokers that the government set on us faked registrations and made a lot of money. That is what the Jha Commission unearthed,” Yadav says.

The walls in the villages threatened by submergence tell the tale of the Andolan in crisp slogans. They are painted with writings that at once oppose the project even while venerating Maa Narmada. Jal, Jungle, Zameen is the slogan by which the fight goes on.

“Ghati ki naree kaisi hai, phool nahin chingari hai” proclaims one such slogan. And as the Rally for Valley went around villages, the muddy brown waterscape of Narmada formed a background for groups of women, dressed in glowing colours, and listening to the meetings with rapt attention.

It is not just the landed who are suffering the loss. “We haven’t gotten a single job since 2007 and not a single entry in our job cards either. We survive mostly by working in the fields as agriculture labour. If my husband and I work all week then we make Rs 1200. But working all week is also not possible since I’ve to look after the home and the kids. But at least we have a livelihood here,” Pamal Balayee of Dhanora village explains.

“If the dam were pro-development, we would have supported it. But it is destructive. It causes long-term damage. And the government never talked to us. We never got land for land even after 31 years of our movement. That is why the fight has to go on. Not fighting is not an option,” says Sitaram Patidar, who has been involved in the Andolan since the beginning.

The NBA is now seeking a CBI enquiry into the Sardar Sarovar Rehabilitation Project scam, based on the findings of the SS Jha Commission. “The Jha Commission report pointed out that there was a Rs 1500 crore scam in implementing the rehabilitation package. The affected never received the cash. It was officials and middlemen who pocketed the money,” says Rahul Yadav. The Jha Commission findings indicate that there have been irregularities in four districts of Badwani, Dhar, Alirajpu and Khargone in Madhya Pradesh.

But, as such, even the rehabilitation is a highly dubious process, complain the activists. The government is indifferent to the human cost, of how lives are affected, they say. “The Madhya Pradesh CM reportedly told industrialists ‘point your finger at a piece of land and it will be given to you’. But when it comes to the rehabilitation, it was simply an empty land where four walls and a roof were built.

And some poles with no electric cables. What about the displaced people’s right to livelihood, to a school and Anganwadi, to roads and hospitals? The government claimed that the rehabilitation was completed in 2007. But where are those homes?” Suresh Ediga questions. And, hence, the main demand now is that the rehabilitation process to be completed properly.

It is one of the most protracted rights battles in the country’s history. It is the most peaceful protest till date, though the activists have been occasionally attacked. These people have no political agendas or financial scheme. They do not look beyond their home and land. They have no rancour either towards the Government, that is apparently turning a deaf ear to their pleas and towards the river that is engulfing everything.

They are ordinary men and women whose conventional wisdom is born out of ecological sensitivity. Their advice is to protect the environment. And to protect the rights of communities. What makes them sustain the movement in spite of consecutive defeats with the dam getting bigger?

“I can see how our entire life is getting crumbled. I can see how a civilisation, a culture, a community is being obliterated. And when I see how even people from afar, directly unaffected by the submergence come and support us, I think we have to keep it up,” says Rahul Yadav. “If we still have our villages and lands today, it is because of this agitation,” adds Jagannath Patidar, an 88-year-old farmer who still goes to work on his land.

As the Narmada fighters begin yet another staring contest with the indefinite Raj Ghat agitation picking up momentum, a point of coincidence between the Government’s designs for the region and the welfare of the people remains elusive, making the Narmada a river stained with the tears of a wounded community.

By: Usha Turaga-Revelli