Mishal Husain:
What would you consider then a fair deal for the Adivasi, for Luharia's community?
Arundhati Roy:
Well, it's interesting that in November 2000 the World Commission in Dansk came out with a report which suggested a set of guidelines for the building of dams which included policies on re-settlement, land for land, consulting affected people and so on. And I said, look, what if we were to say that let's take these guidelines and let's implement them in projects that are half-finished, in projects that have been finished. Let's just say resettle those who have already been displaced before you start building another dam. Wouldn't you think that was a reasonable proposition? It was shouted down as being absurd and radical and all over on this learning curve. So, we're always on a learning curve. And it's already a theoretical question, what will be the fair deal. Do you think if resettlement were possible, it would be good? The fact is that if resettlement is possible, then why not resettle the millions of people who've already been displaced before we move ahead? Let's try it. Let's implement that much before we move on. But, no, it's always this theoretical question, which is painful after a while to even begin to answer, because it just hasn't worked. It hasn't worked for years, and people have been destroyed by it. So at least let's put that right before we start the next thing.
Mishal Husain:
What would you say to the argument that India doesn't have the luxury of being a welfare state. It's a developing country. And that the government has to make choices which are very hard and are painful.
Arundhati Roy:
Okay, tell me something. Supposing theoretically you have a project which is supposed to benefit 40 million people and is only displacing 400,000 people. Why is it so hard, if really you're gonna benefit 40 million to accommodation these 400,000? Why? Why is it difficult? Mathematically, it should be so easy, should it not? You just could just say instead of 40 million, you are benefiting 40 million and 400,000. Why is it? Because it's not true. It doesn't happen like that. Take the case of the Bargi Dam. You know? They built it. Ten years ago it was ready. It irrigates 5 percent of the land they said it would irrigate. It displaced -- instead of 70,000 people -- 114,000 who were just driven from their homes. It cost, I think, ten times more than it said it would. Each of one of these projects according to the World Commission on Dams costs almost double what they say it will cost, and even then the costs are not really factored in. You know. So, it's a sort of industry that's based on half-truths and lies and broken promises and it just motors ahead.
Mishal Husain:
Well, what do you think the future holds for Luharia? At the end of the film, we see him moving his house to a higher point in his village. Do you think he's going to be forced to give up eventually?
Arundhati Roy:
Well, look, the villages that have been submerged ahead of Jalsindhi like Manubali and all these places, people have been forced to give up. People have been slowly ground down and broken. People do live in the slums in Jabalpur and Punjab and Delhi now. And so, today, to me, the debate in all this connects up to a very much bigger question in the world which is that here you have a movement, 15 years of the most spectacular non-violent resistance movement in a country like India. The NBA has used every single democratic institution it could. It has put forward the most reasoned, moderate arguments that you can find, and it's been just thrown aside like garbage, even by an institution like the Supreme Court of India, even in the face of evidence that you cannot argue with. So, I keep saying this that if we don't respect non-violence, then violence becomes the only option for people. If governments do not show themselves to respect reasoned, non-violent resistance then by default they respect violence.
Mishal Husain:
But don't you have to respect the rule of law? I mean this is something the Supreme Court, the highest court in India, has now ruled upon?
Arundhati Roy:
I don't accept that kind of institutional rule of law unquestioning. That's another story of course. But what is Luharia going to do? What is Luharia and the other millions like him going to do or think or say? In a democracy you must have the ability to keep questioning. And when that stops and when you come up against a wall, then societies break up. Societies dissolve into things. It's not that everybody's going to rise up in some kind of noble insurrection. But already in India around the Narmada Valley, insurgents have taken over masses of land. The government can't go in. All over Bihar, all over Madhya Pradesh. This is what is happening, because you don't respect the dignity of the ordinary citizen. At the end of the day supposing we keep on talking about is it all right for 400,000 people to pay for the benefit of 40 million. You tell me. If the government today were to say, "Okay, we're going to freeze the bank accounts of 400,000 of India's richest industrialists and richest people and take that money and re-distribute it to the poor," what will happen? There'd be, "Oh, democracy has broken down." "This is you know a terrible thing." "Anarchy--" So, it's all about who's being pushed around.
Mishal Husain:
The dam is clearly a reality. It's height is growing all the time. How do you face failure? You're part of a movement which ultimately has failed.
Arundhati Roy:
Absolutely. It's a terrible, terrible question that one has to ask oneself all the time. And as I say, the big, deep question is it's not just that the dam is going up, but it's the failure of non-violence that bothers me. It's the failure of being able to use that as a weapon that bothers me and disturbs me, because I don't know what to think then. I don't know what to say. What do you say to Luharia? What do you say to people who have struggled for 15 years? And it is a failure that we must accept, and it is a failure that we must think deeply about. And this is not to say that the movement hasn't had successes -- which is that it has questioned and shaken the foundation of the belief in this religion of big dams. People are asking questions, which is a big thing, because they were pristine before. They are not now. Remember that there are 3000 dams being built on the Narmada -- we're talking about one of them. The next dam up, the Mihishwa Dam, which was also a struggle by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) the first privatized dam in India, construction has stopped, because of a movement which took a different shape and a different form. And so far construction on that dam has stopped. So it's not all kind of unmitigated defeat. But certainly, it throws up big questions on the nature of resistance, on the nature of democracy, on the role that institutions in democracies play, on the role that the media plays and in the ways in which questions and the debate is posited in the mainstream.
Mishal Husain:
How do you feel about the fact though that in India your arguments haven't met with as much support as they have in parts of the West? That somehow you haven't managed to convince many Indians. People say that your arguments are emotional, and that they don't accept the pressing needs and the challenges that India has to face.
Arundhati Roy:
Well, my arguments are emotional, but those emotions are based on fact. And I refuse to accept that there's a sort of duality between fact and emotion. If we were to lose the ability to be emotional, if we were to lose the ability to be angry, to be outraged, we would be robots. And I refuse that. And partly, the reason that they say the arguments are emotional is because they don't want to face the facts. And there isn't a single fact about big dams, about irrigation efficiencies, about salinization, drainage, displacement, any technical argument that isn't in the argument that the MBA has made or that I have made. So our emotions and our outrage are based on an unrelenting collection of facts and technology and politics. Obviously, it's easier for the West to accept this argument than for India, because in India it comes up right up against the establishment, right up against the powers that want this.
So, obviously, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out. And the fact is that it has questioned the basis of development. And today, forgetting just the Narmada issue, dispossession is taking place on a barbaric scale, because the major priorities I think in government are the privatization of electricity and water. And so the name of that debate is suddenly going to leap-frog into the center of a big movement that's taking place all across India in a very, very serious way.
Mishal Husain:
Do you think that development is something then that's optional?
Arundhati Roy:
I don't understand.
Mishal Husain:
Do you think that these villages basically should be left as they are and that development and progress in the way that we understand it, whether it's schools or hospitals or better housing or whatever is something that isn't necessarily a good thing?
Arundhati Roy:
No, no. I think -- You know what? Again, I think this is a kind of spin that often the government wants to put on people who are protesting a particular type of development to say, "Oh, you're anti-development, or you're neo-Ludites." Of course, that's not the case. The case is development for whom? Who pays? Who profits and where do you begin? Everybody can't have the life of a normal, average American person in India, they can't. So, it's about egalitarianism. It's about sharing things more equally. It's about access to natural resources. It's about those things. About the model of development. I'd say quite simply if I were asked to put my position on the table that what we're fighting for is to decrease or eliminate the distance between those that make decisions and those that have to suffer them. Because eventually it doesn't matter how beautiful the language is in your resettlement policy. The fact is that the more beautiful it is the more sure we are that it's not going to be implemented. So how do you reduce that distance between the powerful and the powerless?
|
