Action 2007 week in New Delhi exposed the increasing divide between the English-speaking, upwardly mobile, new economy India and the farmers, workers and urban slum-dwellers who make up the vast majority of “Bharat.” World Water Day (March 22), showed how aggressively inaccessible the government had become to the poor. Sixty two people led by Medha Patkar were arrested and remanded to 15 days in jail for demonstrating against water privatization on the premises of the Planning Commission. We learned that perpetual prohibitory orders are in force at key government buildings! The irony was that when 2000 people held their own Jan Sansad (People's Parliament) within earshot of the Parliament and invited 21 Ministers, none of them chose to attend, but when the people themselves went to the government buildings, they were arrested.

Remarkably, Action 2007 saw agricultural laborers join hands with farmers' groups, Gandhian groups with Dalit and minority organizations, displaced rural communities with urban street-hawkers and slum-dwellers. People from Kerala to Nandigram, North-East to Gujarat, presented their experiences and analyses on Special Economic Zones (SEZs), Right to Work and Right to Information, Urban development and Forest rights for adivasis.

Despite the arrests, the second week saw two major rallies of unorganized sector workers and farmers. In a victory for people power, representatives of Action 2007 met the Planning Commission for four hours on April 2nd, and also met with many Ministers including Commerce, Labour, Tribal affairs, Water Resources and the Empowered Group on SEZs.

In essence, Bharat served a wake-up call to India: the political and economic system cannot ignore the interests of the majority. Will the governments and the elite heed the call? Or set the stage for more Nandigrams?

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Kirankumar Vissa (AID College Park) is an electrical engineer and serves on the Board of Directors in AID. He spent 4 months in India visiting AID partners and participated in Action 2007.