Don’t damn the people

MEDHA PATKAR

DECEMBER 1, 1954

When it rains in central India, there is one voice that drowns the sound of the swirling, raging waters of the Narmada. Of a woman, standing firm in the inundated villages, the water inching up her frail body menacingly. She is on yet another jal samadhi mission. Even the towering dams on the Narmada seem dwarfed.
And thus, Medha Patkar has ensured that India can never again remain unmoved by debates on dams, development and displacement. Over the past three decades, she has attracted some of the best brains and celebrities from urban India — from Arundhati Roy to Aamir Khan — to back a movement of thousands of peasants, women, tribals, the landless and marginalised to challenge the very logic of economic development.
She has become the focal point around which has spun a movement that has challenged the might of several state governments and the central government for almost two decades.
A post-graduate from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, she gave up the life of an academic only to begin a furious mass movement, which later formalised into the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA). It began as a fight for information about the Narmada Valley Development Projects. And, over the years, it has continued as a fight for rehabilitation of the lakhs of people being left homeless by the Sardar Sarovar Dam and other large dams along the Narmada.
Over the years, the movement won a few battles and lost some critical ones. But, at the turn of the century, it has taught India its biggest lesson in economics: real development cannot be brought about at the cost of the poor.
Today, when the government still mulls over a ‘just’ rehabilitation policy, one is always reminded of Patkar’s role in bringing the issue to the centrestage of Indian politics. Her vociferous stand against big dams may even divide environmentalists into two camps. But, she has ensured that Nehru’s ‘temples of modern India’ cannot submerge the homes and voices of thousands just that easily.
She is remembered by the media and the intelligentsia for highlighting the larger debate, be it the Narmada or the Yangtze. But along the Narmada river, several thousand villagers remember her as the didi who ensured they get a roof over their heads, or a strip of seasonal river to carry out some farming on or a mafia-free pond to fish in. Urban India will always recollect her name passionately, tinged either with awe or rage but the farmers on India’s margins can only remember her with a degree of reverence.