Dispossession and Resistance in the Narmada Valley, India

1 Working Paper Series Papers available in the Working Paper Series are works in progress. Please do not cite without permission. Any comments should be addressed directly to the author Reference WP00 5 Title The River and The Rage: Dispossession and Resistance in the Narmada Valley, India Author Alf Gunvald Nilsen School of Politics and International Relations University of Nottingham Email: Alf. nilsen @nottingham.ac.uk 2 THE RIVER AND THE RAGE: DISPOSSESSION AND RESISTANCE IN THE NARMADA VALLEY, INDIA Alf Gunvald Nilsen INTRODUCTION On December 31, 2006 the concrete work on the Sardar Sarovar dam, built across the Narmada River in eastern Gujarat, was completed, with the dam standing at 120 metres (Bavadam, 2007). The following day, the Narmada Bachao Andolan – the movement which represents the dam-affected communities of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat and which has been campaigning for the cancellation of the project since the late 1980s – issued a press statement decrying the event as ‘a total betrayal and a clear message for all adivasis, farmers, Fishworkers, labourers and urban poor to traders: all who are being promised rehabilitation only to be ousted, forcibly evicted in the name of development’ (NBA, 2007). On January 19, the dam-builders held a ceremony in Gujarat, attended by the BJP Chief Ministers of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, in which the Sardar Sarovar dam is dedicated to the Indian nation (Bavadam, 2007). And in the Narmada Valley, 127.000 people face imminent submergence without an adequate scheme for resettlement and rehabilitation in place (NBA, 2007). The events that unfolded in late December 2006 and early January 2007 arguably constitute the endgame of a process of dispossession and resistance that has played itself out over two decades and which bears the imprint of the master change processes, the animating social forces, and the hegemonic ideologies that have been imperative in shaping and representing the trajectory of capitalist development in postcolonial India, namely the conflict over dam building on the Narmada River. The Narmada Valley Development Project (NVDP) is a multi-purpose river valley development project which envisions the construction of more than 3.000 dams of varying sizes on the Narmada River, which winds its way from the Maikal ranges in Amarkantak in Shahol district of Northern Madhya Pradesh to the Arabian Sea at Bharuch, Gujarat 1. Like any large river valley development scheme, the NVDP will lead to large-scale submergence of land and thus also the displacement of those communities for whom this land provides habitat, livelihood and lifeworld. And for this reason, the projects have become the object of intense contestation by the communities that stand to be affected by submergence and 1 Several dams in the scheme – the Tawa dam (1973), Bargi (1989), the Barna, Sukta and Kolar dams, and most recently the Indira Sagar Project – have been completed. Other dams – the Sardar Sarovar Project, the Maheshwar Hydroelectric Project, the Maan dam, and the Omkareshwar Dam – are in the process of being built. 3 displacement. From the mid-1980s onwards, social action groups working with dam- affected adivasi (indigenous) groups and gradually also in caste Hindu farming communities in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh started an intense questioning of the responsible authorities as to the prospects for fair and adequate resettlement and rehabilitation. By the late 1980s, several of these groups had merged into the pan-state organization Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; Save the Narmada Movement) which articulated a stance of total opposition to the kingpin in the project – the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) - and which further embedded its campaign against the SSP in a trenchant critique of the dominant model of development in India (see Baviskar, 1995; Dwivedi, 2006; Nilsen, forthcoming)2. In this article I set out to analyze the building of popular resistance to the Sardar Sarovar Project as a movement process 3. The term refers to a process of contention in which subaltern social groups continually develop multiple forms of materially grounded and locally generated skilled activities around a rationality that in some way opposes the hegemonic projects of dominant social groups. As Piven and Cloward (1977: 20-1) has rightly argued, ‘people experience deprivation and oppression within a concrete setting, not as the end result of large and abstract processes … it is the daily experience of people that shapes their grievances, establishes the measure of their demands, and points out the targets of their anger’. Yet, following Wainwright (1994: 7), those experiences do not merely constitute empirical instances or facts; rather, they are ‘clues to underlying structures and relationships which are not observable other than through the particular phenomena or events that they produce’. Furthermore, these structures and relationship can come within the cognitive reach of movement participants if they combine and extend their ‘fragmented knowledge’ (ibid: 108). This, in turn, imparts a particular quality to movement processes which may manifest itself in a change in the character of the grievances, the demands and the targets of the anger of social movements. The quality in question is the contingent potentiality that the oppositional 2 During the 1990s the NBA also branched out its mobilization against dams of the Narmada to contest the Maheshwar Hydroelectric Project, the Maan dam, and the Indira Sagar Project. There was also mobilization around the rights of the oustees of the Bargi dam on the upper reaches of the Narmada in the first half of the 1990s. I restrict the scope of this article to the NBA’s campaign against the SSP. I also do not engage with the International Narmada Campaign against the World Bank as this has already been done fairly exhaustively by others (Sen, n.d.; Udall, 1995; Wade, 1997; Khagram, 2004). 3 The analysis is based on research carried out between 2000 and 2003, and draws on both primary and secondary data. The primary data consists of in-depth interviews with a range of NBA activists, observations drawn from participation in NBA protests and visits to villages mobilized by the NBA, as well as a wide selection of documents produced by the movement and by individual activists and ex-activists of the Andolan. The secondary data consists of the extant body of scholarly literature on the Narmada Valley conflict. 4 collective action of subaltern social groups may start from forms of oppositional collective action which are bounded in scope and aims to a specific, situated and local experience of problems and grievances and then gradually develop towards more encompassing and radical counterhegemonic projects. Such processes, if they occur, are energized and animated by the collective processes of “learning by doing” or ‘cognitive praxis’ that emanate from the practical concerns and dynamics of social movement activity (see Kilgore, 1999; Eyerman and Jamison, 1991). Following Barker and Cox (2002), we can conceive of a two-way learning process which revolves around (i) the knowledge that activists garner through conflictual encounters with opponents and the successes and failures of strategies deployed in such encounters, and (ii) the knowledge that activists garner through the sharing of experiences and discussions and disputes over (a) strategic and tactical choices and (b) the ideological and moral justification of opposition that is continually ongoing within social movements. The possible result of this process is an extension of ‘the logic implicit in participants’ skilled activity to a more comprehensive standpoint’ (Cox, 1998: 7) in two specific ways. One can be called “joining the dots” – i.e. activists may develop a clearer understanding of how a situated experience of a specific problem is linked to underlying social structures and historical processes. The other can be called “joining hands” – i.e. distinct groups of activists may come to recognize each other as being affected by the same problems and, in turn, the same underlying structures and processes, and on the basis of this they may come together to oppose a common adversary. The sum effect of this is a process in which situated struggles ‘shift gears, transcend particularities, and arrive at some conception of a universal alternative to that social system which is the source of their difficulties’ (Harvey, 2000: 241). In order to make analytical sense of movement processes I propose the concepts local rationality, militant particularism, campaign, and social movement project. These will serve as ideal-typical categories that may allow us to grapple with the characteristics of the various phases of movement processes and the distinctive features of those mechanisms through which the collective agency of subaltern social groups is widened, deepened and radicalized 4. A local rationality is a formal characteristic about the way people make sense of and engage with the world that is capable of being generalized and taking on a life of its own (see Cox, 1999a: 113; Cox and Nilsen, 2005; Nilsen, 2006). At the heart of local 4 Movement processes are of course uneven as opposed to homogenous trajectories; as Nash (1992), among others, has pointed out, a social movement is in itself a field containing a plethora of experiences and articulations of such experiences. This, however, is primarily a methodological problem: as Cox (1999b) argues, social movement researchers have to be alert to

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