Hidrocarburos Totales a. Distribución espacial

The Sardar Sarovar Project and the long-lasting conflict that it sparked off have attracted international scholarly attention. The Narmada Bachao Andolan became world famous for its persistent struggle against the dams on the Narmada, and during the decade from 1990 to

58 _{The annual symposium of the Arne Næss Chair in Global Justice and the Environment organised by the Centre}

93 2000 the movement was growing and had worldwide influence. Ramachandra Guha calls the NBA India‟s “most celebrated tribal assertion in the 1990s” (2007:612).

During the 1990s, the momentum of the conflict seemed to be in favour of the resistance movement, and the seeming victory of David over Goliath interested critical scholars internationally. The World Bank loan agreement had been cancelled, the Bank changed its funding policies for dams and other large infrastructure projects, and the public interest litigation filed by the NBA in the Supreme Court led to a five-year standstill on the construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam. In addition, an independent world commission was established to review the experience with large dams globally.

As a „case‟, many researchers have used the project and the conflict as a lens through which they could highlight and explain various aspects of the struggles over development (for example Fisher 1995; Vajpeyi and Zhang 1998; Drèze, Samson et al. 2000; Turaga 2000; Whitehead 2000; Routledge 2003; Khagram 2004; Mehta 2005; Ruet 2005; Baviskar 2006; Dwivedi 2006; Levien 2006; Nilsen 2006; Wood 2007). As the following overview of the most important studies will show, common to most of the Narmada research is that it has had its empirical and analytical focus on the Narmada valley and the issue of displacement and resistance. Most scholars therefore analyse the situation and perspective of those displaced and/or of the resistance movement. Few, if any, have dealt with the impacts in the project‟s command area or looked closely at the planners‟ perspective.

An overview of perspectives and findings

Within the Marxist political-economy framework adopted by Alf Nilsen (2006; 2008), Narmada is seen as a case of the dynamics of capitalist development. He argues in The Valley

and the Nation - The River and the Rage59 that the Narmada conflict illustrates how capitalism

is based on a process of “accumulation by dispossession” and of intensified commodification of nature. The NBA is, to Nilsen, a case of a social movement of modernisation from below, demanding and asserting the rights of the displaced vis-à-vis the state. Working with Kaviraj‟s notion of India‟s “passive revolution”, during which the main structures of rural property ownership remained intact, he argues that the dispossession taking place in the

94 Narmada Valley is an example of a generic development in India where productive resources are concentrated in the hands of already dominant social groups. The SSP, he argues, is “primarily propelled by domestic dominant classes, political elites and the state” (Nilsen 2006:441). He further argues that this is a geographically uneven process of further marginalization of regions in the Narmada Valley to the benefit of already economically and politically powerful regions in South and Central Gujarat. The NBA lost the case in the Supreme Court not because the court found that the benefits of the dam were greater than the costs but because the resistance to the SSP “struck against the heart of the dynamic of resource transfer and the balance of class power underpinning this dynamic” (Nilsen 2008:319). Although there were “cracks and fissures” in the state system, the dominant proprietary classes and their representatives closed ranks when their vested interest in the Narmada water was threatened. In the words of Nilsen, the “accumulation by dispossession” of the SSP

“occurs through the expropriation and concurrent pressure towards the proletarianization in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, and similarly the expropriations of caste Hindu farming communities who engage in petty commodity production in the Nimad region of western Madhya Pradesh. Simultaneously, it will transform property rights in water in favour of dominant proprietary classes in industry and agriculture in Central Gujarat.” (Nilsen 2008:305)

Despite these claims about the likely results of the SSP in the command area, the main focus of Nilsen‟s research was the social movement of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, its strategies and struggles, and not the motivations for damming the Narmada and diverting its water to Central and North Gujarat. He shows how the NBA sees itself as a social movement for

alternative development, not rejection of development or modernisation as such. The NBA

“can best be understood as a „modernization offensive from below‟, directed at the exclusions of the „entrenched capitalist modernity‟ engendered by the National Project as a modernization offensive from above”, he writes (Nilsen 2006:395).

Sanjeev Khagram (2002; 2004), like Nilsen, focuses on the social movement against the SSP. In the book Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power, he applies a “new transnationalist” perspective on the case of opposition to big dams. Noting the remarkable decline in dam building globally in the 1990s, he asks: “Why have historically weak and marginalized actors been increasingly able to prevent far more powerful interests and organizations from constructing big dams?” (Khagram 2004:3). Early dam and river-

95 valley projects in India were also met with resistance, but these were domestic and isolated struggles. This changed with the Narmada Bachao Andolan, who actively sought, and were sought by, a transnational alliance working for the rights of indigenous peoples and the environment across the world. This transnational alliance, and the increasing legitimity of its cause provided by the global spread of norms on human rights, indigenous peoples, and the environment, was crucial for the success of the NBA, he argues. The international agenda had by the late 1980s changed, and a powerful critique of the dominant development model had been raised. The institutionalisation of the new norms both at the international and domestic levels had enlarged the political opportunity structures available to transnationally allied actors, and made possible the success of the NBA and other anti-dam movements in other countries. Although published in 2002 and 2004, Khagram regrettably ends his discussion of the SSP with the Public Interest Litigation which temporarily stopped the construction on the dam in 1994 and he does not mention that the Supreme Court ordered in favour of the dam construction in 2000. The construction has continued without major limitations since then, and the NBA has altered its strategy towards more demands for just rehabilitation of the displaced.

A more critical, although still sympathetic, analysis of the social movements against dams is provided by Amita Baviskar (1995; 2003; 2006). In her book In the Belly of the River: Tribal

Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley (Baviskar 2006 (2nd ed), first published

1996) she analyses the livelihoods, culture, and relationship with nature of the adivasi (Bhil and Bhilala) inhabitants of the upper reaches of the Narmada Valley. Their villages and livelihoods were to be submerged by the reservoir created by the Sardar Sarovar dam. Her first rounds of field research were done in 1992, during a crucial period in the movement‟s opposition to World Bank funding. Her research brings out the complex relationship between

adivasis and the environment, and questions the romanticised picture of adivasi livelihoods

which are often the result both of the work of social movements campaigning on their behalf and also reflected in scholarly writing.

The NBA articulates a development critique which brings out the insensitivity of the state towards the cultural values and needs of the adivasis. Their aim is to highlight the value of what stands to be lost when the adivasi societies of the Narmada valley are submerged. However, for Baviskar, the resulting representation is an essentialised and reified version of

96

adivasi culture and livelihoods. In the process of political collective action, resistance is

articulated and led by urban political activists who represent and speak on behalf of the

adivasis, but “in trying to demonstrate that the critique of development actually exists in the

lives of adivasis, intellectuals end up creating caricatures” (Baviskar 2006:240). “We cannot frame the adivasi past (or present) as a „natural economy‟ – a starting point for a historical process that is a counterpoint to development,” she argues, “we have to come to terms with its disordered reality to create a more equal basis for co-operation” (Baviskar 2006:243).

Baviskar (2006) points out that in order to create a strong and unitary movement, conflicting interests and ideas between the members of the movement had to be moved to the background. She proposes a more nuanced understanding of adivasi environmentalism. “While people revere nature in all its forms, and religiosity suffuses their everyday lives,” she writes, “these beliefs do not translate into a set of sustainable resource use practices” (Baviskar 2006:17). There is a difference between the beliefs and practices of adivasis and of those who claim to speak on their behalf, she argues. There is a need to explore how these differences may be united, “in a synthesis which gains from the normative vision of the intellectuals and, at the same time, incorporates a more realistic view of adivasi life” (Baviskar 2006:238). In another article (Baviskar 1995), she examines the construction of the „tribal‟ as an essentialised category both within the World Bank Independent Review Report and within the SSNNL, arguing that there lies a danger in basing the opposition to the dam on the cultural rights of the adivasis as a distinct cultural community. The danger lies in the difficulty of knowing which cultures are worthy of protection and which are not. Instead, the opposition should be organised around their political rights as individual citizens within a state, she argues.

“If we examine the decision-making process about the SSP to see the extent to which it has accommodated the concerns of affected people, and their rights as citizens to information, participation and choice, we come up with an even more devastating indictment of the project than the Morse Commission.” (Baviskar 1995:94)

The sociological categories are always double-edged, she warns, and sociologists (or any social scientist for that matter) “must walk the tightrope between the twin perils of essentialising difference and obliterating it” (Baviskar 1995:99).

97 Paul Routledge (2003) examines the repertoires of resistance employed by the NBA. In particular, he highlights how discursive resistance – academic analyses, peasant testimonials and slogans – complement the more material strategies like satyagrahas, rallies, and hunger strikes; boycott and non-cooperation with the government in the process of resettlement; and the creation of new services like NBA-run schools and micro-hydroelectric projects in the areas to be submerged. Routledge argues that the development model pursued by the Indian state through the SSP means economic, ecological, cultural and political erasure (Routledge 2003). Like Nilsen and Khagram, Routledge points to the importance of the development of a counter-expertise to the government‟s claims about the benefits of the project, and the role of the transnational alliance in backing the struggle. And like Baviskar, he acknowledges the existence of internal ambiguities within the movement. The discursive resistance “articulates a unity that effaces internal difference, contradiction and ambiguity” (abstract), and social movements “frequently suppress their own internal heterogeneities and subgroups in the interests of some broader strategy” (Routledge 2003:265).

Lyla Mehta (2001; 2003; 2005) is one of the few Narmada researchers who have studied parts of the command area and the proposed beneficiaries of the project, in a part of Kutch in North Gujarat. This is the driest part of the command area. In her book The politics and poetics of

water: The naturalization of scarcity in Western India (Mehta 2005) she argues that it is

highly unlikely that Kutch will receive dependable Narmada water, and secondly, that equitable water distribution in Kutch (and elsewhere) will require a much more partisan distributional water policy, curbing wasteful water use by the rich and ensuring water access for the poor. She explores the “sociology and political ecology of water scarcity in Kutch” and “examines the competing discourses of scarcity, their underlying social and power relations and the resulting water management practices in the region”, asking “what makes water a „scarce‟ resource and how [is] scarcity (...) constructed differently by different actors” (Mehta 2005:4). Her field research was done mainly in 1995 and 1996, many years before the canals were expected to be completed in this area. She tries to understand the all-pervasive support for the SSP in the region, despite the many studies and reports which have questioned the feasibility of giving dependable Narmada irrigation water to Kutch. Kutch is in the tail end of the canal network, and most canal projects in India have had problems serving their tail ends. She relies on the evidence brought forward by project critics: the establishment in the

98 early 1990s of several new sugar cane factories60 along the initial reaches of the Narmada Main Canal in Central Gujarat61, the promotion of new industries in the industrial “Golden Corridor” running southwards from Ahmedabad and largely situated in the SSP command area, and the lack of plans for the drinking water component of the project. She concludes that most of the water “will be disproportionately appropriated by the politically strong Gujarat districts of Bharuch, Kheda and Baroda, situated in the initial reaches of the SSP command area” (Mehta 2001:2035). She asks: “Despite all this evidence, why is there so much belief in the ostensible bounty of the SSP?”

To this, Mehta ventures the explanation that “the State and its supporters have succeeded in manufacturing perceptions or myths concerning the SSP” (Mehta 2001:2035). The manufactured myth is that of „scarcity‟: that water in Kutch is scarce and that the region must be served by the transfer of external water for which the only source is the Narmada. Her field research show that the large and rich farmers in this “water scarce” region are well served with water from their own borewells, so that lush, green fields do exist among the dry patches of land even in a low-rainfall year (Mehta 2005). A related myth, propagated by the manufacturers, is that of dwindling rainfall. The people of Kutch are convinced that every year, the rainfall is less, although Mehta‟s analysis of rainfall data shows that this is not the case. The rainfall is variable and erratic, but there is no downward trend in the amount of rain received (Mehta 2005). The main manufactured myth of the state is that there is no alternative to the SSP, and Mehta claims that the main aim of the manufacture is to serve “the interests of business, engineering, bureaucratic, “development” and political elites” (Mehta 2001:2036). The result has been the massive popular support for the Sardar Sarovar Project in Gujarat. Mehta identifies four groups of Gujarati actors who take part in this manufacture: the politicians in power, for whom promises of water are important vote-grabbers; the mass media, who rarely carry critical articles on the SSP; NGOs like the Centre for Rural Care and the Arch-Vahini “who helped the state in the resettlement and rehabilitation of the displaced populations” (Mehta 2001:2035); and academic institutions that are tied to government

60 _{I have only seen this claim repeated in all SSP-critical literature, but never found the source of it.} 61

The experiences of the Ukai dam in South Gujarat are important for the arguments of the Narmada critics. Here, canal irrigation gave boost to a thriving sugar-based economy, creating great wealth for many farmers and sugar cooperative shareholders, but simultaneously leading to immiseration of the marginal landowners and the landless labourers because they were displaced by more docile migrant labourers (Breman 2007).

99 funding and therefore have “written reports that have offered legitimacy to dominant state discourses concerning the project” (2001:2035).

The manufacture of scarcity serves to legitimize the controversial Sardar Sarovar Project, and to undermine alternative solutions to the limited amount of water available for the different water users of Kutch, argues Mehta. Less invasive solutions would be local water harvesting methods, policies to curb wasteful water use by rich irrigators and industrialists in semi-arid climates, and land-use policies that may be more suitable to low rainfall areas like Kutch for example rangeland and grazing rather than agriculture (Mehta 2005). She argues that environmental narratives “tend to serve certain socio-political agendas and/or reflect the world-views of their advocates instead of being rooted in local realities” and “obscure plural readings of landscape use practices”:

“The notion of the bounty of the SSP and its contribution to Kutch‟s and Gujarat‟s development is a classic “development narrative” which has a programmatic character and has the objective of getting its listeners to believe or do something.” (Mehta 2001:2038)

The manufactured notion of scarcity, Mehta explains, further obscures how inequalities shape access to and control over water, and it hides the fact that water scarcity is not mainly a natural situation but one with anthropogenic causes due to bad water management and overuse (Mehta 2001).

Two volumes have been published which bring out the arguments of both sides in the conflict, “Towards Sustainable Development” edited by William Fisher (1995) and “The Dam and the Nation” edited by Dreze et al (2000 (orig. pub. 1997)).

The Dam and the Nation (Drèze, Samson et al. 2000) is a collection of papers originally

presented at a workshop on the Narmada projects held at the Centre for Economics and the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi in December 1993. The workshop brought together scholars and activists with different perspectives on the issue62, and the book aims at providing a detailed investigation of the issue of displacement and resettlement in the Narmada Valley. Satyajit Singh concludes in his introduction that the studies presented in the

62 _{Contributors are Amita Baviskar, Bela Bhatia, Vasudha Dhagamwar, Roxanne P. Hakim, Vidyut Joshi, S.}

Parasuraman, Anil Patel, and the institutions Centre for Social Studies Surat, the Independent Review Team, and Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

100 book “give little reason for comfort”, and that the problem of displacement in the Narmada Valley “remains largely unsolved” (Singh 2000:22). Regarding the benefit side of the project, Singh points out the massive popular support for the project in Gujarat is only partly due to the pro-dam propaganda from the government: “the dam has also been supported in Gujarat by many popular organizations with a credible record of opposition to the government in other contexts” (Singh 2000:2). The conflict is rather between different sections of the people and different branches of the state than between the people and the state, he argues.

The Fisher volume, Towards Sustainable Development, sprang out of a conference about the SSP held at Columbia University, New York, in March 1992. The book is divided into seven parts and in each part, both sides in the conflict present their views and analyses, they “speak for themselves” as Fisher says. The contributors all represent actors in the conflict or at least have a clear normative stand either for or against the dam. The Government of Gujarat, the