By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Feb 4 2004 (IPS)

India’s longest-running people’s movement, which has been fighting megadams coming up across the Narmada river for more than 20 years, is finally getting a political edge as the country prepares to vote in a new government.

Some three months before the poll, battle lines are being drawn over the Narmada between the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee – which wants to push through with the megaprojects – and the main opposition Congress party, which has shown new interest in championing the cause of more than 300,000 people that stand to be displaced by the dams.

Of the four riparian states, western Maharashtra state, ruled by the Congress party, has decided to oppose pressure from BJP-ruled central Madhya Pradesh and western Rajasthan and Gujarat states to hasten the Narmada river projects starting with increasing the height of the massive, 4 billion U.S. dollar Sardar Sarovar dam.

The political support has breathed life into the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), which has led opposition to the projects. Its activists believe that the change of heart comes from the Congress party’s humiliating defeat in provincial polls held November in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan states.

”The defeat of the Congress party in Madhya Pradesh was a result of the hostile attitude of the government led by former chief minister Digvijay Singh towards affected people in the dam areas,” said Chittaroopa Palit, one of the main leaders of the NBA.

Digivjay Singh has been accused by the NBA of reducing the anti-dam campaign into a law-and-order problem and using special armed forces to crack down on people who continued to remain in the dam area, bulldozing their villages while denying them suitable alternate farming land as compensation.

Now out of power, Digvijay Singh makes it a point to be seen with NBA leaders, including its chief Medha Patkar. He accompanied her to meetings at the World Social Forum (WSF) last month in Mumbai, capital of Congress-ruled Maharashtra.

Last week, Maharashtra’s minister for revenue, rehabilitation and resettlement, Ramraje Naik Nimbalkar, said that his government would not agree to raising the height of the dam from its present 100 metres to 110 metres – thereby increasing the submergence – until pending rehabilitation work was first completed.

Nimbalkar compelled the review committee of the inter-state Narmada Control Authority to postpone a decision on raising the height of the dam to Feb. 12, refusing to even agree to the proposal in principle as demanded by the BJP-ruled states.

Supporting the Maharashtra government, Medha Patkar staged a six-day fast that she ended only after the state government sent her a formal letter saying it would not agree to any raising of the height of the Sardar Sarovar dam till rehabilitation was satisfactory.

The letter was partly was in corroboration of promises made at the WSF by Maharashtra Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde that his government would ensure that rehabilitation work, at least in his state, would get priority.

Patkar, who has won the Swedish ‘Right to Livelihood Award’, has led hundreds of anti-dam rallies, staged numerous sit-in strikes and Gandhian-style fasts. She has been beaten up and arrested several times by police during her 20-year-old campaign.

The high point of the NBA campaign was the withdrawal of the World Bank from the project in 1993 after an independent inquiry endorsed its impact assessment studies.

In 1994, India’s Supreme Court, after hearing a petition by the NBA, stayed all construction on the Narmada dams. But six years later, it suddenly allowed construction on the Sardar Sarovar to proceed to a height of 110 metres provided rehabilitation and environmental requirements were adhered to.

The NBA has stated that it is not opposed to development work in the Narmada. It says that all it is asking is that the overall height of the Sardar Sarovar is limited so that fewer people will be displaced and the impact of the environment reduced.

”At least 9,000 people have been rehabilitated due to our efforts,” she claimed at the WSF.

While the Sardar Sarovar dam falls in Gujarat and has resettlement plans, 29 other major dam projects that fall in Madhya Pradesh and where the bulk of the estimated quarter million displaced people, mostly tribals and impoverished farmers live, there are no resettlement plans.

As conceived by the Narmada Valley Development Plan (NVDP) in 1980, there are to be 30 big dams, 135 medium dams and 3,000 small dams on the Narmada and its tributaries. Supporting the plan are powerful lobbies of big-time contractors and businessmen.

Successive governments in Madhya Pradesh, India’s largest state in area, have regardless of political colour refused to acknowledge the fact that NVDP was causing massive displacements of people who have been forced to throng the cities and take to hard labour or prostitution.

Already, the new BJP minister responsible for the Narmada projects in Madhya Pradesh, Anup Mishra, has announced that his government would be pushing to raise the height of the Sardar Sarovar to its full planned height of 138 metres and thereby benefit from electricity generation.

Patkar said she has written to Uma Bharti, the new chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, asking that the NBA be consulted before any decision is made. ”If she (Uma Bharti) takes a look at ground realities, she will find that thousands of families shown as rehabilitated and resettled on paper are in fact nowhere,” Patkar said.

In spite of the support of the Congress party government in Maharashtra, the NBA and those displaced by the Narmada projects see a hard battle ahead because of general agreement among the BJP-ruled states that the megaprojects should continue.

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