JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REVIEWS

ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 18, 2020

RE(READING) ’S THE GREATER COMMON GOOD : A DOCUMENTATION OF NARMADA BACHAO ANDOLAN

Atlantica Boruah Research Scholar, Dibrugarh University Email id: [email protected]

Anannya Boruah Assistant Professor, Majuli College, Kamalabari

Abstract Arundhati Roy is recognised as one of the most articulated and effective activist writers of post independent India. She uses her writing as a crusade against the development paradigm which supports ecological destruction and displacement of people through large dams and projects, neo colonial corporate capitalism and communalism which pushes third world societies into self destruction. As seen in most of her writings Roy persistently questions the link between globalisation and India‟s struggle with legacy of colonialism. This article is a humble attempt to re(read) her non fictional essay The Greater Common Good as a rage against the government and the state authority to the sufferers of the big dam projects in our country. The essay is based on the factual plight of the people who are sufferers of the Narmada Valley Project. Here the author questions the very idea of “development” where a number of aboriginal people sacrifices for the sake of a small quantity of people. The increasing number of dams and their effect in the livelihood of a large number of people is posing a threat to the environmental instability of the country and the world. The rereading of the essay is an attempt to overview the plight of the common man of Narmada Valley and the other areas of the country as a result of the dam-age. (Keywords: ecological concern, globalisation, Narmada Bachao Andolan, dam)

India‟s thrust for development means the government must find a way to provide energy to power it. Supplies of fossil fuels are diminishing and India along with China is under pressure to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate the global impact of climate change. In this context alternative fuels such as hydropower are increasingly attractive. The construction of huge dams, known as „mega dams‟ is a result of these pressures. Hydropower is clean, efficient, dependable and largely renewable. Yet, the world over, there have been protests about this type of energy resource these large infrastructure projects have provoked controversy due to a public perception that local inhabitants will not share the benefits, and instead will suffer threats to their livelihoods, environment and culture. The increasing number of dams and their effect in the livelihood of a large number of people is posing a threat to the environmental instability of the country and the world. The Narmada Dam debate is a longstanding and highly polemical struggle over a river valley whose factions are split between those rendered homeless in the wake of the dam‟s construction and those others upholding the dam‟s essentialness for the nation‟s development and progress. Development and displacement may appear contradictory terms, but they are facts of our national life and these facts are more astonishing than any of our fictions. Arundhati Roy is recognised as one of the most articulated and effective activist writers of post independent India. She uses her writing as a crusade against the development paradigm which supports ecological destruction and displacement of people through large dams and projects, neo colonial corporate capitalism and communalism which pushes third world societies into self destruction. The article attempts to re(read) the non fictional essay of Arundhati Roy, The Greater Common Good as a stand against the government and the state authority to the sufferers of the big dam projects in our country. The re-reading of the essay is an attempt to overview the plight of the common man of Narmada Valley and the other areas of the country as a result of the dam-age. The traverses three of India‟s north western states: , , and . The Narmada basin is almost 100,000 square kilometers in size and is home to twenty-one million people. The Narmada Project envisioned the creation of thirty large dams, 135 medium dams, and 3,000 small dams. The Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) in the state of Gujarat includes the most controversial large dam. The sardar sarovar project would cause the most massive displacement by any one project till date. The case of the is an extremely complex one: involving the cost of massive environmental damage, internal displacements (of mostly adivasis, or tribals, dalits, or untouchables, and poor village populations) and the pull of economic development. This met with massive popular protest which gave birth to the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement) which drew in its folds prominent members of civil society including the Gandhian social activists- and , and Himanshu Thakker, Shripad Dharmadhikary, Arundhati Roy etc.

4116

JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REVIEWS

ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 18, 2020

Within this background we have Arundhati Roy. In 1999, after winning the 1997 Booker Prize for God of Small Things, she became a supporter and activist for the NBA. To draw international focus on the issue, the author donated her Booker Prize money and royalties to the campaign, and wrote The Greater Common Good. Her essay has a lot to teach. The Greater Common Good is a rhetorical master class and develops a powerful analysis of the complex dam problem in India and how they disproportionally affect adivasis and dalits. Roy always show her concern for the poor, the Dalit, women and the discriminated one within the society and we can make out that in her later writings; among them some are ―The Algebra of Infinite Justice, War is Peace, The End of Imagination, The Greater Common Good etc which depicts the scenario of the modern society where on one side the people were endorsed with fundamental rights of Democracy and on the other, those rights were snatched away by the big leaders of the nation in the name of development. This essay addresses the colonial legacy of the Land Acquisition Act (1894) and discusses how the legal framework of the modern state repeats and reinforces a process of orientalization of indigenous populations rooted in imperialist, evolutionary economic and legal discourses. To her the public perception of the Narmada valley project as a “war between the modern, rational, progressive forces of “Development” versus an irrational, emotional “Anti-development” resistance or a Nehru versus Gandhi Contest is rather a more complex one. It is because according to her the human beings are not perfect enough to follower any development paradigm of either Nehru or Gandhi. Arundhati Roy flags well-authenticated figures which underscore the practical and moral unviability of big dams. Providing adequate number of datas about the consequences‟ of big dams in the developed countries she wrote how the dams are failing to give a productive result than displacing a large number of aboriginal peoples to utter poverty. In The Greater Common Good, she explains the human cost of big dam projects and the pathetic benefits they offer to offset vast environmental destruction and mass displacements of ordinary people. Roy denounces the project. She contends that while the dam promises electricity to urban Indians, brings water to big farmers, augments the power of government bureaucracies, and furnishes the rich with lucrative contracts, it flushes out “like rats” the indigenous and tribal populations from their forested homes, bringing them to the doorsteps of urban poverty and degradation. The Narmada River Valley has been home to indigenous tribes for thousands of years, long before the advent of Hinduism (Basham, 1968). But the dam would flood the equatorial forests and force the tribal populations to make their life in city slums or in some inhospitable space allotted by the government. Roy is particularly concerned, because the tribal populations don‟t possess the skills to meet the challenges of the urban jungles. The author shows how the tribal people are not happy at all in the resettlement colonies because these colonies are far from the sky to which they have been accustomed so far. They are deprived of their age long myths and traditions and natural gifts where it was easy for them to get their food and other things of life. She has a good command of both the big picture and the small. She tells the tale of a father, displaced from his old home by the building of a dam, holding his sick baby in his arms while he tells Roy how many kinds of fruit he used to pick in the forest. Roy allows people to speak for themselves, and so pushes those who are often forgotten into the foreground of the debate. One of the most farcical facts that Roy discovers through her research is that, even after so many years, neither the government nor its experts have the least idea about the exact flow of the river on which dams worth billions of dollars, destroying millions of lives, are to be built. The entire process of displacement is disempowering because it breaks up socio-political organisations opposing the project or the development process itself. In the case of tribals, the experience of displacement becomes much more dangerous. They encounter tremendous odds in dealing with the market economy. Their unfamiliarity with modern technology and skills coupled with official indifference to their entry into the mainstream economy, pushes a majority of tribals into conditions of servility and bondage

Big dams, these days, are no longer the monuments of modern civilization, emblem of man‟s ascendency over Nature. Monuments are generally unaging, timeless and are full of worship and devotion. But the recent havoc caused by the big dams all over the world is the testimony of the fact that big dams do the opposite of what people say about them.The other problem associated with the dam projects is the heavy loan India has taken from the World Bank for the development aid given to the sufferers of the said project. But the irony is that India is in a situation where it pays back more money to the bank in interest and repayments of principal than it receives from it. We are forced to create new debts in order to be able to repay our old ones.

The most substantive charge is that Roy has no alternative to the present order. She wants people to stop building barriers across rivers, to stop killing one another, to stop making bombs, to stop dropping bombs. Because she knows that they won't stop, her characteristic tone is one of keening lamentation. This unrelieved tone of shock and sadness, in the end, makes for rather limited political commentary. But as it is, even if Roy has no interest in putting forward ideas for building a better world, at least she has the desire to make us notice what is happening to this one. India is the third largest dam building country with over 3600 large dams and more than 700 under construction. Dams have been the biggest source of destruction of habitat and displacement of people in the last

4117

JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REVIEWS

ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 18, 2020

50 years. Northeast India, an ethnically and ecological diverse region, is earmarked for several mega-dam projects. More than 300 dams are scheduled to be built in the region in upcoming years. The Northeast, especially the state of Arunachal Pradesh, where the majority of the dams are due to be built, in biodiversity area which are ecologically sensitive and prone to earthquakes. These resulted in a loss of agricultural land, which in turn led to the displacement of residents. So, what is the need of the day is not to waste our powers but to turn them into right direction. Science is a blessing when it is carefully used. But it becomes curse when it is used for the annihilation of human race.

Works Cited: 1. Khan. Tabassum Ruhi, “Dam” the Irony for The Greater Common Good: A Critical Cultural Analysis of the Narmada Dam Debate.International Journal of Communication .6(1).2012.194-213. 2. Marino. Alessandra. „The cost of dams‟: acts of writing as resistance in post colonial India. Citizenship Studies. 16:5-6.2012.705-719. 3. Murali. D.Whiff of mortality in the dam industry. The Hindu Business Line.17 September 2005. 4. Narula. Smita. The Story of Narmada Bachao Andolan: Human Rights in the Global Economy and the Struggle Against the World Bank. New York University Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers. 2008. 351-383. 5. Rangarajan, Mahesh.(ed) Environmental Issues in India-A Reader. Pearson.2007 6. Roy. Arundhati. The Greater Common Good. Bombay: India Book Distributors. 1999. 7. Das. Arup Jyoti, Reporting dams and development: Strengthening media‟s capacity to report research in Northeast India. Panos South Asia. 1-17.2012

4118