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Perspectives: An addendum to India's progress - Somnath Mukherjee's article in the Statesman |
Delinking development from grassroots aspirations will only delegitimise the State in the eyes of the very people who justify its existence, says Somnath Mukherji.
The past few weeks witnessed, as it were, the nation of India providing the State of India with a list of expected questions for an upcoming surprise examination by its people. Decades of struggle, years of suffering, miles of distance were all condensed and summarised into a spatio-temporal frame of 20 metres by 20 days for easy comprehension and recapitulation. One had to only go to Jantar Mantar and witness the people representing the two struggles of Bhopal and Narmada on either side of the road. Yet, there were hundreds of other struggles which did not make it to the coveted list ~ the Kalinganagars and Vidarbhas, the Mehdiganjs and Plachimadas, the Jadugodas and Kashipurs, the Gangavarams and Jambudwips. They had not suffered long enough to be even taken into consideration.
The non-violent movements in Bhopal and Narmada are examples of State apathy, neglect and coercion and corporate irresponsibility on the one hand and people's resilience and perseverance on the other. Both are prime examples of centres externalising the cost of development to the peripheries within its own national boundaries.
In the Narmada valley, the Narmada Control Authority's (NCA) decision to raise the height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam by 10 metres would swell the number of displaced people by the thousands, magnanimously labelled as the "Project Affected People". Affected? People whose home, hearth environ, history and religion are submerged are not "affected"; they are ravaged. People who have never had a share of the State's benefits and stand to gain nothing from the dam, to say the least, are the ones paying the price. A forlorn view of the submerged dome of the historic Hapeshwar temple, in the Narmada valley, somehow does not hurt the piety of the religio-political parties who instigate people with a potent concoction of mythology and history to take to violence. The repressive function of the State is conveniently outsourced to the party machinery which ransacks the Narmada Bachao Andolan's (NBA's) office in Vadodara. The State and the political parties selectively adopt an uncompromising position on the construction of the dam but take inordinately long to contemplate on a report by its own Group of Ministers, which lays bare the inadequate rehabilitation and resettlement.
They had to suffer for 21 years, walk 800 kilometres and live on the blistering streets of Delhi for 20 days before getting the Prime Minister's attention. Blistering it has been indeed for the Bhopalis ~ the neglect, the denial, the collusion and perhaps living itself. It was not too long ago that Parliament passed the Right to Employment Bill. What utility does such entitlement accord to people who are too sick to work, whose soil and water have been poisoned by an absconding corporation and a negligent government, where mothers carry pesticides and heavy metals in their breast milk, where people's right to procreate has been stolen? The government needed to be reminded by the Supreme Court that clean water is a basic need for human existence. So beholden is the State to the corporation that it bestows upon it total impunity in mere anticipation of the economic benefits to flow.
The people in the Narmada valley and Bhopal may not be poor, but the so-called ushers of development are certainly dispossessed of the people's participation. Factories can be built, dams raised and rivers linked, but de-linking development from grassroots aspirations will only delegitimise the State and its agencies in the eyes of the very people who justify its existence. John Rawls writes in his book, A Theory of Justice: "Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of the society as a whole cannot override".
[The author is an electrical engineer in Boston and a volunteer with the Association for India's Development ( www.aidindia.org)]
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