DEVELOPMENT-INDIA: We’re no Foreign Agents – Anti-Dam Activists

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Nov 3 2000 (IPS) - India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has compared the defeat of anti-Narmada dam activists after a six-year court battle to the country’s May 1998 nuclear tests and the eviction of Pakistani intruders from Kashmir last year.

But those who have campaigned for the past 15 years against the four billion U.S.-dollar Sardar Sarovar dam in western coastal Gujarat state say that Home Minister L.K. Advani, who made the comparison, is wrongly accusing them of being “foreign agents”.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), which has spearheaded the people’s campaign against the Narmada dam scheme, has hit back at Advani, describing his statements as “irresponsible.”

Famous anti-Narmada dam activist Medha Patkar has challenged the government to prove that her organisation has gotten funds from outside the country.

“The statement coming from the home minister is highly irresponsible,” said NBA spokesman Shripad Dharmadhikary.

“The NBA is a mass organisation of the people of this country and it draws its initiative from this country itself. It is expected of Mr. Advani, that as home minister, he would rise above party politics and avoid making such baseless statements,” he added.

Addressing a huge public gathering Tuesday at the dam site in Kevadia colony in Gujarat, Advani, known for his hawkish nationalist views, said it was “more than a coincidence” that the same people were opposing both the Sardar Sarovar dam and India’s nuclear bomb.

Advani made a symbolic start to the resumption of work on the dam, which was stopped more than five years ago under orders of the Supreme Court on a petition from the NBA. In October, the court finally rejected the NBA’s plea and allowed work on the partially built dam wall to resume.

The Gujarat government had hired hundreds of buses to bring in thousands of dam supporters to what was described in media reports as the biggest public gathering so far in the state.

Advani described the work on the dam as “developmental nationalism.” The home minister also suggested that there was a “foreign hand” at work behind activists who opposed the Sardar Sarovar dam.

The NBA’s movement against the project, which it describes as “destructive development”, is actively backed by well-known Indians, among them famous British Booker Prize-winning writer, Arundhati Roy.

Roy is also a staunch critic of the nuclear tests ordered by the BJP-led government. Advani’s comparison of the anti-dam with the anti-nuke campaigners, was said to have been made in reference to two well-publicised essays by Roy — one against the nuclear tests and the other against the Sardar Sarovar dam.

The NBA was also pitted against the government of Gujarat state, to which Advani belongs and where support for the Narmada dam cuts across political divides.

The Sardar Sarovar is described as the ‘lifeline’ of the mainly arid state, where a severe water scarcity forced tens of thousands of peasants to flee their homes earlier this year and last year.

Emboldened by the court victory against the NBA, the Gujarat government has asked the federal sleuthing agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), to probe alleged foreign funding for the NBA.

The federal government is also proposing to enact a new and more rigorous law to monitor the use of foreign funds received by non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Others have criticised Advani’s remarks against the NBA. “They have little else to show in terms of real development and are trying to divert people away from real issues such as the fall in the value of the rupee,” said Jayaprakash of the ‘Delhi Science Forum’, an independent policy analysts’ group.

He said that while it was debatable whether the Narmada project would take water to the arid areas of Gujarat, the dam would displace a quarter of a million people without offering them proper resettlement.

The NBA argues that the economic and social costs of the Sardar Sarovar would be more than the projected benefits. Even the benefits would go to the better off, while the scheme would lower the living standards of those displaced from the submergence area, say anti-dam campaigners.

The Sardar Sarovar is to be the first of 30 big and hundreds of small and medium dams planned on the Narmada River, which flows westward across central India into the Arabian Sea.