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Scimitars in the SunN. RAM interviews ARUNDHATI ROY on a writer's place in politics. |
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I am hysterical. I'm screaming from the bloody rooftops. . . I want to wake the neighbours, that's my whole point. I want everybody to open their eyes.
If justice isn't a court's business, then what is?
Empathy would lead to passion, to incandescent anger, to wild indignation, to action. Concern, on the other hand, leads to articles, books, Ph.Ds, fellowships. |
Arundhati Roy's debut novel, The God of Small Things, published in 1997, took the literary world by storm, winning among other things the 1997 Booker Prize and accolades from leading writers and critics. It continues to be one of the best-loved and best-read recent works of literary fiction round the world. It has sold six million copies in 40 languages. Since then, the novelist has published (always, first in Indian publications) three major political essays - The End of Imagination, The Greater Common Good, and Power Politics. Each has addressed a big and critical issue, an issue that has mattered to millions of people and to the present and future of India. . . . Interestingly, Roy has turned over the substantial royalties from the book publication of these essays to the movements they espouse. The Booker Prize money was also given to the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) in 1999. There has been a profound change of context since The Greater Common Good was published a year and a half ago. . . in October 2000 the apex court - the movement's last 'institutional' resort - slammed the door in its face. N. Ram: Arundhati Roy, the Supreme Court judgment is unambiguous in its support for the Sardar Sarovar dam. Is it all over? Are you, as the saying goes, running on empty? Arundhati Roy: There are troubled times ahead, and yes, I think we - when I say 'we', I don't mean to speak on behalf of the NBA, I just generally mean people who share their point of view - yes, I think we are up against it. We do have our backs to the wall... but then, as another saying goes, 'It ain't over till the fat lady sings' [smiles]. Remember, there are a total of 30 Big Dams planned in the Narmada Valley. Upstream from the Sardar Sarovar, the people fighting the Maheshwar dam are winning victory after victory. Protests in the Nimad region have forced several foreign investors - Bayernwerk, Pacgen, Siemens - to pull out. Recently, they managed to make Ogden Energy Group, an American company, withdraw from the project. There's a full-blown civil disobedience movement on there. But yes, the Supreme Court judgment on the Sardar Sarovar is a tremendous blow - the aftershocks will be felt not just in the Narmada Valley, but all over the country. Wise men - L.C. Jain, Ramaswamy Iyer - have done brilliant analyses of the judgment. The worrying thing is not just that the Court has allowed construction of the dam to proceed, but the manner in which it disregarded the evidence placed before it. It ignored the fact that conditional environmental clearance for the project was given before a single comprehensive study of the project was done. It ignored the government of Madhya Pradesh's affidavit that it has no land to resettle the oustees, that in all these years M.P. has not produced a single hectare of agricultural land for its oustees. It ignored the fact that not one village has been resettled according to the directives of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award, the fact that 13 years after the project was given conditional clearance, not a single condition has been fulfilled, that there isn't even a rehabilitation Master Plan - let alone proper rehabilitation. Most importantly, most urgently, it allowed construction to proceed to 90 metres despite the fact that the Court was fully aware that families displaced at the current height of the dam have not yet been rehabilitated - some of them haven't even had their land acquired yet! It has, in effect, ordered the violation of the Tribunal Award, it has indirectly endorsed the violation of human rights to life and livelihood. There will be mayhem in the Narmada Valley this monsoon if it rains - and of course, mayhem if it doesn't, because then there'll be drought. Either way the people are trapped - between the Rain Gods and the Supreme Court Gods. For the Supreme Court of India to sanction what amounts to submergence without rehabilitation is an extraordinary thing. Think of the implications - today, the India Country study done for the World Commission on Dams [WCD] says that Big Dams could have displaced up to 56 million people in this country in the last 50 years! PARAS
SHAH Following the
October 2000 Supreme Court judgment,
construction resumes at the dam site in
Gujarat.
But the most worrying thing in the Sardar Sarovar judgment is the part where it says that once government begins work on a project, after it has incurred costs, the Court ought to have no further role to play. This, after the very same Court found enough cause in 1994 to hold up construction work for six whole years... With this single statement, the Supreme Court of India is abdicating its supreme responsibility. If the Court has no role to play in arbitrating between the state and its citizens in the matter of violations of human rights, then what is it here for? If justice isn't a court's business, then what is? Why do you think things have come to this pass? This figure you have spoken of several times - between 33 million and 56 million people displaced by big dams in the last 50 years - it is hard to imagine something of this magnitude happening in another country without it being somehow taken into serious account... Without it being taken into account, without it giving pause for thought, without it affecting the nature of our country's decision-making process. The government doesn't even have a record of displaced people, they don't even count as statistics, it's chilling. Terrifying. After everything that has been written, said and done, the Indian government continues to turn a deaf ear to the protests. 695 big dams - 40 per cent of all the big dams being built in the world - are being built in India as we speak . Yet India is the only country in the world that refused to allow the World Commission on Dams to hold a public hearing here. The Gujarat Government banned its entry into Gujarat and threatened its representatives with arrest! . . . There was a tiny ripple of interest in the news for a couple of days. Even that's died down. We're back to business as usual. As they say in the army - 'Bash On Regardless'. Literally! You must have an explanation, a personal theory perhaps, of why the government is so implacable, so unwilling to listen? Part of the explanation - the relatively innocent part, I'd say - has to do with the fact that belief in Big Dams has become a reflex article of faith. Some people - particularly older planners and engineers - have internalised the Nehruvian thing about Big Dams being the Temples of Modern India. Dams have become India's secular gods - faith in them is impervious to argument. Another important part of the explanation has to do with the simple matter of corruption. Big Dams are gold mines for politicians , bureaucrats, the construction industry... But the really sad, ugly part has less to do with government than with the way our society is structured. More than 60 per cent of the millions of people displaced by dams are Dalit and Adivasi [the untouchables]. But Adivasis account for only 8 per cent and Dalits about 15 per cent of our population. So you see what's happening here - a vast majority of displaced people don't even weigh in as real people. ANURAG
SINGH Tin shacks for
resettlement.
And another thing - what percentage of the people who plan these mammoth projects are Dalit, Adivasi or even rural? Zero. There is no egalitarian social contact whatsoever between the two worlds. Deep at the heart of the horror of what's going on, lies the caste system: this layered, horizontally divided society with no vertical bolts, no glue - no intermarriage, no social mingling, no human - humane - interaction that holds the layers together. So when the bottom half of society simply shears off and falls away, it happens silently. It doesn't create the torsion, the upheaval, the blowout, the sheer structural damage that it might, had there been the equivalent of vertical bolts. This works perfectly for the supporters of these projects. But even those of us who do understand and sympathise with the issue, even if we feel concern, scholarly concern, writerly concern, journalistic concern - the press has done a reasonably persistent job of keeping it in the news - still, for the most part , there's no real empathy with those who pay the price. Empathy would lead to passion, to incandescent anger, to wild indignation, to action. Concern, on the other hand, leads to articles, books, Ph.Ds, fellowships. Of course, it is dispassionate enquiry that has created the pile-up of incriminating evidence against Big Dams. But now that the evidence is available and is in the public domain, it's time to do something about it. Instead, what's happening now is that the relationship between concern and empathy is becoming oppositional, confrontational. When concern turns on empathy and says 'this town isn't big enough for the two of us,' then we're in trouble, big trouble. It means something ugly is afoot. It means concern has become a professional enterprise, a profitable business that's protecting its interests like any other. People have set up shop, they don't want the furniture disturbed. That's when this politics becomes murky, dangerous and manipulative. This is exactly what's happening now - any display of feeling, of sentiment, is being frowned upon by some worthy keepers of the flame. Every emotion must be stifled, must appear at the high table dressed for dinner. Nobody's allowed to violate the dress code or, god forbid, appear naked. The guests must not be embarrassed. The feast must go on... I was talking to the press about the fact that the Supreme Court judgment had made things worse for the NBA than they were before it went to court. The Court ordered that the final arbiter of any dispute would be the Prime Minister. This is so clearly in contravention of the directives laid down by the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award. I said that a country in which it is left to the Prime Minister to clear a large dam project without any scientific studies being done; in which it is left to the Prime Minister to decide the final height of a dam regardless of how much water there is in the river; in which it is left to the Prime Minister to decide whether or not there is land available for resettlement - sounds very much like a Banana Republic to me. What's the point of committees and Ministries and authorities if it's all up to Big Daddy in the end?
What next? Where does the struggle go from here? I don't know, really. It has to move into a different gear. All our eyes are on the NBA, waiting for its next move. It will take some time to evolve a strategy. But they are extraordinary people - brilliant. I have never met a group of people with their range of skills - their mobilisation abilities, their intellectual rigour, their political acumen. . . . You see, while the rest of us sit around arguing about how much we ought to respect the Supreme Court judgment, the people in the valley have no option. They can hardly be expected to respectfully accept their own dispossession . . . It's something the government must think very seriously about. A 15-year-old non-violent peoples' movement is an extraordinary, magnificent thing. If it is dismissed in this contemptuous fashion, if violence is the only thing that forces the government t o the negotiating table, then anarchy lurks around the corner. . . . "Big Dams are to a nation's 'development' what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They are both weapons of mass destruction, both weapons governments use to control their own people, both twentieth century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival..." . . . The globalisation debate has a very interesting spin on it - all its admirers, from Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan, A.B. Vajpayee to the cheering brokers in the stalls, all of them say the same lofty things: if we have the right institutions of governance in place - effective courts, good laws, honest politicians, participative democracy, a transparent administration that respects human rights and gives people a say in decisions that affect their lives - then the globalisation project will work for the poor as well. My point is that if all this was in place, then almost anything would succeed: socialism, communism, you name it. Everything works in Paradise, even a poor old Banana Republic! But in an imperfect world, is it globalisation that's going to bring us all this bounty? Is that what's happening here now that India is on the fast track to the free market? . . . Coming back to the issue of celebrity-hood - what's your relationship with it? How does it affect your writing? How do you deal with it? Celebrity-hood - I hate that word. How do I deal with it? When Rock Hudson's career was on the skids, if he heard of a friend or colleague who was doing well, he'd say "Damn him, I hope he dies." That's a bit how I feel about my celebrity-hood. When I see a picture of myself in the papers, I feel hostile towards my public self and say "Damn her, I hope she dies"...[smiles]. But actually, it's a very, very difficult thing for a person to come to terms with. For a while I thought it would drive me clean crazy. But I think I'm beginning to get the hang of it now. I worked it out from first principles - I'm a writer first and a celebrity next. I'm a writer who happens to have become, for the moment, a celebrity. . . But I also don't not do the things I want to do. I live, I love, I bum around, but above all, I write. And I support what I write. The celebrity part just trails along behind me making a heck of a noise - like a tin can attached to a cat's tail. I can't take it off - but it'll fall off on its own sooner or later. For now, I try to ignore it. . . What do you find most difficult about being who you are and doing what you do? Well, every writer - good, bad, successful or not - who's sitting at a desk looking at a blank piece of paper, is lonely. It's probably the loneliest work in the world. But once the work is done, it's different. I'm not lonely at all - I'm the opposite of lonely. How can I, of all people, complain? I like to think that if by chance I were to become completely destitute, I could spend the rest of my life walking into people's homes and saying, "I wrote The God of Small Things, will you give me lunch?" It's a wonderful feeling. When I go to the Narmada Valley, I see my essay being read in Hindi, in Gujarati, in Marathi - even translated orally into Bhilali. I see parts of it being performed as a play. What more could a writer ask for? How much less lonely can I be? It's true that I write about contentious things. . . Each time I step out I hear the snicker-snack of knives being sharpened, I catch the glint of scimitars in the sun.
[The Narmada Valley where the dams are being built is in the state of Gujarat, not far from the epicenter of the catastrophic January earthquake. &endash; Editor]
Excerpted and reprinted with the written consent of Frontline India's National Magazine on indiaserver.com. Volume 18 - Issue 01, Jan. 06 - 19, 2001 at <http://www.the hindu.com/fline/fl1801/index.htm>
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