This is one woman I have great respect for, ever since I read her articles ('The Algebra of Infinite Justice' and 'War for Peace') on
http://www.outlookindia.com/ about the USA invasion on Afganistan in the wake of WTC attack.
I love her for her saying this-
"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget." Today I came across her interview on the issue of Sardar sarovar dam and NBA. The full interview can be read
here. I will present exerpts that I particularly liked and would like to share with you. Read on.
At the last hearing on the 17th of April, the logical thing for the Supreme Court to do would have been to say “Stop construction of the dam. We know there’s a problem, let’s assess the problem before we go ahead.” Instead it did the opposite and the problem has been magnified. Every metre the dam goes up, an additional 1500 families come under the threat of submergence. This interim order is inconsistent with its own October 2000 and March 2005 Narmada judgments as well as the Narmada Water Dispute Tribunal Award, which state in no uncertain terms that displaced people must be resettled six months before submergence.
Recently, the real stakeholders were indiscreet enough to put their photographs in the huge, full-page advertisements that appeared in all the national dailies supporting the dam – religious leaders, politicians, and big industrialists. Where were the farmers? The people of Kutch and Saurashtra? A group of people in Kutch have filed a petition in the Supreme Court complaining that the Gujarat Government has reduced even that small allocation of water to Kutch and Saurashtra, in contravention of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award. The tragedy is that if they would only use more local, effective, rainwater harvesting schemes, for less than 10 per cent of the cost of the Sardar Sarovar, every single village in Kutch and Saurashtra could have drinking water. The Sardar Sarovar has never made sense, ecologically or economically.
But in politics there’s nothing as effective as a potential dam which promises paradise– it will soothe your sorrows, it will bring you breakfast in bed. The Sardar Sarovar has been the subject of frenzied political campaigning for every political party in Gujarat. And it’s all propaganda. Look at the recent spectacle we witnessed. Narendra Modi claiming to speak on behalf of poor farmers and the corporate cartel, sitting on a symbolic hunger-strike, a Gandhian satyagraha – and simultaneously issuing threats of violence. Incredibly, he went unchallenged by a single person in the UPA government. That’s how deep the mainstream political consensus is. 
...in power distribution, India has amongst the highest transmission and distribution losses in the world. Across the country, avoidable losses add up to more power than is generated by dozens of big dams. So before we go building more big dams and destroying communities, forests, rivers and ecosystems, maybe we could do something about how much electricity and water we waste and misuse. It would make a serious, radical difference. Minimising waste would be revolutionary.
The situation is out of control. Every single development project – whether it’s an IT Park in Bangalore or a steel plant in Kalinganagar or the Pollavaram dam – the first move is to take land from the poor. People are being displaced at gunpoint. Cities like Delhi and Bombay are become cities of bulldozers and police. The spectre of the shooting of adivasis in Kalinganagar in January – some of whose bodies were returned by the police mutilated, with their arms and breasts chopped off – all this hung over the protest at Jantar Mantar. There is a fury building up across the country.
The whole argument against big dams has been submerged by the rising waters of the reservoir and narrowed down to the issue of rehabilitation. But even this vital, though narrow issue of rehabilitation which should be pretty straightforward, contains a universe of its own – of deceit, lies and utter callousness. To pay lip service to rehabilitation is easy – even Narendra Modi does that. The real issue, as the Soz report points out, is that there is a world of difference between what’s on paper and what’s on the ground.
One of the major tricks that is played on the poor and on the public understanding of what’s going on in these 'development' projects is that large numbers of the displaced do not even count as officially ‘Project Affected’. Very few of the tribals whose land was acquired for the steel factory in Kalinganagar counted as ‘Project Affected’. Most were called ‘encroachers’, uprooted and told to buzz off. Those who did qualify were given Rs 35,000 for land that was sold for Rs 3.5 lakh and whose market value was even higher. So you take from the poor, subsidise the rich, and then call it the Free Market.
There’s another problem: when communities are uprooted and given illegal cash compensation, the cash is given only to the men. Many have no idea how to deal with cash, and drink it away or go on spending sprees. Automatically the women are disempowered.
Just because it is being made to appear as though it’s all inevitable, as though there’s no solution, should we forget that there ever was a problem? Should we leave the poorest and most vulnerable out of the ‘cost benefit’ analysis – and allow the myth of big dams to go on and on unchallenged?
As for those who are lucky enough to be counted as Project Affected, we know now they are being displaced without rehabilitation in utter violation of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award and the Supreme Court’s own verdicts, all of which specify that displaced families must be given land for land.
The Madhya Pradesh government is trying to force people to accept what it calls SRP – Special Rehabilitation Package – which is cash compensation. That’s illegal. The technique is to show hundreds of families the same plot of uncultivable land, and when they refuse to take it, force cash compensation on them. 
...our views paint us out of the small corner – the small, rich, glittering, influential corner. The corner with ‘the voice’. The corner that owns the guns and bombs and money and the media. I’d say our views cast us onto a vast, choppy, dark dangerous ocean where most of the world’s people float precariously. And from having drifted there a while, I’d say the mood is turning ugly.
There is an alternative vision. But it isn’t some grand Stalinist scheme that can be articulated in three sentences – no more than the ‘model’ of this existing world can be described in three sentences. You asked this question about an alternative very sweetly. It is usually asked in a sneering, combative way. Let me explain the way I look at it. The world we live in right now is an enormous accretion of an almost infinite number of decisions that have been made: economic decisions, ecological decisions, social, political, pedagogical, ideological. For each of those decisions that was made, there was an alternative. For every high dam that is being built there is an alternative. Maybe no dam, maybe a less high dam. For every corporate contract that is signed there is an alternative. There is an alternative to the Indo-US nuclear deal,...an alternative to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. There is an alternative to the draconian Land Acquisition Act.
The fundamental issue is that 'a country is not a corporation,' as Paul Krugman says. It cannot be run like one. All policy cannot be guided by commercial interests and motivated by profit. Citizens are not employees to be hired and fired, governments are not employers. Newspapers and TV Channels are not supposed to be boardroom bulletins. Corporations like Monsanto and Walmart are not supposed to shape India’s policies. But signing over resources like forests and rivers and minerals to giant corporations in the name of ‘efficiency’ and GDP growth, only increases the efficiency of terrible exploitation of the majority and the indecent accumulation of wealth by a minority – leading to the yawning divide between the rich and the poor and the kind of social conflict we’re seeing.
The keystone of the alternative world would be that nothing can justify the violation of the fundamental rights of citizens. That comes first. The growth rate comes second. Otherwise democracy has no meaning. You cannot resort to algebra: You cannot say I’m taking away the livelihood of 200,000 to enhance the livelihood of 2 million. Imagine what would happen if the government were to take the wealth of 200,000 of India’s richest people and redistribute it amongst 2 million of India’s poorest? We would hear a lot about socialist appropriation and the death of democracy. Why should taking from the rich be called appropriation and taking from the poor be called development? This kind of development, as I’ve been saying again and again – is really pushing India to the edge of civil war – spearheaded by the Maoists who now control huge swathes of land in India which they have declared ‘liberated’.
Poverty is being conflated with terrorism. The Indian Government has learned nothing. It has tried the military solution in Kashmir, in Manipur, in Nagaland. It has got nowhere. Now it’s ready to turn its army on its own people, like a maddened tiger eating its own limbs. Though here in the big cities we call ourselves a democracy, in the countryside, all kinds of illiberal ordinances have been passed, thousands have been imprisoned, civil liberties are a distant dream. Villages are being evacuated and turned into police camps. The Chattisgarh government is fueling the situation by arming poor villagers to fight the Maoists. I don’t know why they can’t seem to understand that there can be no military solution to poverty. Or maybe I’m being stupid – maybe they’re trying to eliminate the poor, not poverty.
The real problem, as we’ve seen, is that whether a struggle is violent or not, the government’s reaction is instinctively repressive. The military solution has not worked in Kashmir or Manipur or Nagaland. It will not work in mainland India. It may not be that the masses will rise in disciplined revolutionary fervour. It may be that we will become a society convulsed with violence, political, criminal, and mercenary. But the fact remains that the problem is social injustice, the solution is social justice. Not bullets, not bulldozers, not prisons.
