[Reader-list] Big Dams, Contempt of Court and the Narmada Movement

[Joy Chatterjee]

I got this from a network of collective e-mail sending and I wanted to 
share my dismay along with the author at the naked display of power that 
citizens have to face.

best
Joy


Big Dams, Contempt of Court and the Narmada Movement

SALMAN RUSHDIE

Nargis, the Indian movie star of the 1950's who later had a career in 
politics, once denounced the great film director Satyajit Ray for making 
films that offered too negative an image of India. In her own movies, she 
said, she had always celebrated the positive. When asked for an example, 
she replied, "Dams."

Big dams have long been an essential part of India's technological 
iconography, and their role in providing water and power to the nation was 
for a time unquestioned, even unquestionable. Lately, however, there has 
been an increasingly confrontational debate about the role that large dams 
have played in development. One of the biggest new dams under construction 
is the Sardar Sarovar Project on the Narmada River in the State of Gujarat, 
with a proposed final height of 447 feet. Among its most vocal opponents is 
the novelist Arundhati Roy. She and other critics of the project object to 
the displacement of more than 200,000 people by rising waters, to the 
damage to the Narmada Valley's fragile ecosystem and to the failure of some 
big dams to deliver what they promise. (India's Bargi Dam, for example, 
irrigates only 5 percent of the area promised.) She points out that while 
the rural poor are the ones who pay the price for a dam, it is the urban 
rich who benefit: 80 percent of rural households in India have no 
electricity; 200 million people have no access to safe drinking water. The 
recent report of the World Commission on Dams, an international agency 
established by the World Bank and World Conservation Union, largely 
supports these conclusions in its review of 125 large dams. The report 
blames big dams for increased flooding, damage to farmland and the 
extinction of some freshwater fish.

Many dams fall short of their targets, and of the 40 million to 80 million 
people displaced by worldwide dam building, few have received sufficient 
compensation. Ms. Roy and the Narmada Valley campaigners have long argued 
that alternative methods are capable of meeting Gujarat's water needs; the 
world commission report echoes this view, stressing the need to focus on 
renewable energy, recycling, better irrigation and reduction of water losses.

The battle over the Narmada Dam has been long and bitter. However, there 
has been a surreal new twist. Arundhati Roy and two leading members of the 
protest movement, Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, were accused by five 
lawyers of having attacked them during a Dec. 13, 2000, protest outside the 
Supreme Court in Delhi against the court's decision to allow building work 
on the Sardar Sarovar project to proceed. Ms. Roy and Ms. Patkar allegedly 
called on the crowd to kill the lawyers, and Mr. Bhushan is accused of 
having grabbed one of the lawyers and threatened him with death. Yet all 
this happened, the accusers contend, under the noses of a large detachment 
of policemen. Any threats passed unrecorded by the filmmaker Sanjay Kak, 
who was covering the demonstration with a video camera. And it was 
subsequently revealed that Mr. Bhushan had in fact been somewhere else at 
the time of the protest.

In spite of the demonstrable absurdity of these charges, however, the 
Supreme Court decided to entertain the lawyers' petition and served the 
three activists with criminal contempt notices. In doing so it ignored its 
own rules and procedures.

After being summoned to court, Ms. Roy delivered a characteristically 
trenchant affidavit in which she said that the court's willingness to haul 
her and her colleagues up before it on such flimsy charges "indicates a 
disquieting inclination on the part of the court to silence criticism and 
muzzle dissent, to harass and intimidate those who disagree with it." Last 
week, the Supreme Court insisted that she withdraw this affidavit; she 
refused, and the court is considering new contempt of court charges that 
could send her to jail.

She is, as she told The Guardian of London, "now deeper in the soup." What 
the Supreme Court of India should realize is that by pursuing Arundhati 
Roy, Medha Patkar and Prasant Bhushan in this fashion, it places itself 
before the court of world opinion.

Can it be that the Supreme Court of the world's largest democracy will 
reveal itself to be biased against free speech and be prepared to act at 
the bidding of a powerful interest group - the coalition of political and 
financial interests behind the Narmada Dam? Only by abandoning its pursuit 
of Arundhati Roy and the Narmada Valley campaigners can the Supreme Court 
escape such a judgment.

Salman Rushdie is the author of the forthcoming novel, "Fury."
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