As India's government marches on with industrialising the country and damming the Godavari River, it won't allow the views of those who suffer to stand in its way.

By Sanjiev Johal

Cross-posted from http://www.volans.com/2009/11/godavari-complex/

There’s always an attendant confusion when I visit India. It’s a liberation and revulsion unique to the subcontinent. I was there last month in the western state of Maharashtra, polluting the skies to scatter my mother’s ashes in the waters of the river Godavari. Second in size only to the Ganges with its banks freckled by sacred sites for both Hindus and Sikhs, the Godavari is sometimes referred to as ‘Old Ganga’ or ‘South Ganga’. Just like the dangerously putrid Ganges, the waters of the Godavari are ever more hazardous than holy.

Dams restrict the free flow of the river, allowing mosquitoes to breed and disease to fester. Domestic and industrial pollution has contaminated agricultural land and groundwater leading to significant increases among local populations in diseases such as cancer and Hepatitis A and B. Sustained activism from a people’s movement a quarter of a century old claimed a ‘triumph’ when a pipeline of drinkable water was built to supply some river-basin towns, but still, after numerous court rulings, petitions and state governmental orders, industrial effluent, unfiltered by treatment plants, continues to be discharged into the Godavari.

I’ve never liked the term ‘disconnect’ when used in noun form. It sounds abortive, lazy. But I understand how it works, where it works. The will of the people whose lives are entwined with the fate of the Godavari demands that the river’s pollution be controlled, monitored and reduced. This will is, on the surface, substantiated by the judiciary and the legislature, and yet, the companies responsible for discharging untreated effluent into the Godavari continue to do so with crass impunity – I sense something of a disconnect.

In India, the fate of rivers and that of the so-called largest democracy in the world are inseparable. The troubled displacement of some fifty million people, the unaccountable bodies extolling the dubious virtues of dams and the cold face of government turned away from the plain sight of a co-ordinated, national resistance movement, point to an endemic democratic deficit. The largest democracy in the world may just be the greatest fallacy in the world.

Last year the Indian government released its National Action Plan on Climate Change as well setting up the National Water Mission. Sounds great. Just what the people wanted, a government that understands the concerns of the population and openly serves a common interest. However, the NAPCC and the NWM continue to serve the same tired and misguided agenda that seeks to build more dams, more hydro projects and interlink more rivers. Flawed policies that fail the people, the economy and the environment. What’s more, there is nothing even remotely transparent or participatory in the formulation of the NAPCC or its specific mission plans. Indian democracy, to paraphrase the Mahatma, would seem like a very good idea.

The Godavari River Pollution Control Scheme that promised fully functioning effluent treatment plants by 2008, is yet to be completed. Various levels of government have intervened, had their say and delivered laudable sentiments of intent. The courts too have issued bits of paper requiring industrial polluters to mend their ways but the Godavari continues to be a toxic lifeline for the people of the river-basin.

Those fighting for a pollution-free Godavari do so without violence. Their struggle is no proxy ideological war; the battleground is the river itself. Without a clean river they and their way of life cannot be sustained. If democracy is the tool by which the sustainable development of the Godavari river basin can be secured, then there’s a lot of sharpening yet to be done. Allowed to remain the self-serving play-thing of the ruling elite, Indian democracy’s blunt edge will be used to bludgeon the will of the people instead of implementing it.

The will of the Indian people…

It was, we are told, the will of the Hindu majority of the Indian people to raze entire towns populated by Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, slaughtering innocents with blood-curdling inhumanity. However, the collusion of the state and its apparatus, principally the Governor and the police, knowingly stoked the fires of religious intolerance whilst fanning the flames of an ancient rage. In fact the police, with orders to turn a blind eye to the carnage, actively participated in the rape of young girls, the burning of babies and the mutilation of citizens they were honour-bound to protect. The will of the people can be systematically manipulated and discontent is easily manufactured when the scapegoat is a sitting duck. It’s all so sickeningly unoriginal.

In a country riven by caste, divided by over a thousand spoken languages and beholden to myriad religious identities, ‘the will of the people’ becomes the private intellectual property of those who are able to control access to information. In India, power is knowledge. You believe what you are told because you don’t know any better. If you do know better, then, well, what you know is wrong. If you are not signed-up to the now defunct ‘India Shining’ movement or Indian ‘progress’ as the project for interminable economic growth is couched, then you are anti-prosperity, anti-democratic, antediluvial.

So if you point to the evident fact that more dams for example will not lead to more and cheaper electricity, they will not lead to rural development but will lead to social and ecological disaster, then you are an idiot, unpatriotic or even a terrorist. Name-calling is the first line of defence but then sticks and stones quickly turn into batons and bullets. India has one of the highest rates of deaths in police custody anywhere on the planet. Taking a stand to stop a dam being built or to demand a cleaner river can cost you your life.

But there is simply no substitute for ground-level, blood, sweat and tears mobilisation. The organised people’s movements when constructively allied with counterparts in the rich nations of the ‘developed world’, can achieve notable success.

A nexus of international organisations from countries such as Germany, Switzerland and the US did just that when they supported the Indian resistance group Narmada Bachao Andolan in its fight against India’s first private dam project. By making a singular local cause a common global concern, the combined pressure from these groups led to a number of multinational corporations and international banks withdrawing from the project. It was a small victory, but a template for resistance had been established, one built on grass-roots activism and bolstered by a vocal overseas network.

Our indignation at the human and environmental impact of spurious hydro-electric dam projects must also extend to the sponsors and profiteers of such ‘development’. The British Government’s Department for International Development is one such backer of Indian dams. The democratically elected government of one nation in cahoots with the democratically elected government of another in its devastation of its people and its ecology. The sham of DfID’s benevolence, dishing out conditional aid and expertise to the less developed, is the sham of democracy itself. With one hand it giveth…

If Indians stand in the way of ‘progress’ by standing up to the authorities and the big companies that want to hijack India’s resources for their own gain, then it is incumbent on those of us in the countries that support such ‘progress’ to actively demand that this support be abrogated. Democracy isn’t just putting an ‘x’ on a piece of paper once in a while, it is about putting your neck on the line to demand justice. The act of voting can change a government but sometimes little else. Acts of resistance, of civil disobedience, if India’s fight for independence is anything to go by, can change the fate of a nation, maybe even the course of a river.

What happens to the Godavari will offer a portent into India’s engagement with the ideas of democracy and sustainable development. I know I’ll be paying close attention – those waters contain a little something of me.