Woman as Reason
January-February 2000

Is development possible without the ravages of capital?

by Maya Jhansi

The recent Seattle protests were not the first time that "globalized" capitalism has felt the prongs of a freedom movement unwilling to sacrifice human life for capitalist development. For more than a decade, people in northern India have been battling a large dam building project along the Narmada River that threatens to displace hundreds of thousands of people. This movement, led by women, accomplished an incredible feat: it forced the World Bank for the first time to pull out of a project it was funding.

At the end of November, I saw the leader of the Save the Narmada Valley Movement (NBA), Medha Patker, speak in Chicago on her way to the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. She spoke powerfully about "backlash of development" on peasants, lower castes, and women, using the Narmada Valley situation to dismantle the logic of neo-liberalism.

The dam project along the Narmada is a proposal to build 3,200 dams, including the megadam, the Sardar Sarovar, in order to harness a mighty river that flows through three states into the Arabian Sea. The struggle against the project has sparked an intense national debate about capitalism, the environment, democracy and the future of India.

It is no wonder then that this epic battle on the banks of the Narmada attracted the attention of India's most prominent woman writer, Arundhati Roy, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS. In addition to joining the movement as an activist (she was arrested on Jan. 11 for demonstrating against one of the large dams), she has written incisively about the struggle in a controversial essay called "The Greater Common Good," recently published along with another essay on India's nuclear bomb in her new book, THE COST OF LIVING (Modern Library, 1999).

What is particularly gripping about "The Greater Common Good" is the way Roy analyzes the Narmada project from the vantage point of those most affected. She shows the uselessness of cash compensation to the displaced and exposes the lie of resettlement. She brings out shocking statistics, that of the estimated 200,000 to be uprooted, 117,000 are Adivasis or tribals (India's indigenous peoples). Fully 60% of those being displaced in the name of progress are Dalits and Adivasis. This "ethnic otherness of their victims," Roy writes, "takes some of the pressure off the nation builders" (p. 9).

She situates Narmada in the context of other "development" projects in India, exposing the unbelievable fact that 50 million people have been displaced in India because of "development" projects, 40 million by large dams alone.

Underlying her analysis is a deconstruction of the myth that the Indian state has its people's best interest at heart. The epigraph to the essay is a quote by Jawaharlal Nehru from a speech given to villagers to be displaced by a dam in 1948: "If you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interests of the country." Throughout the book, Roy urges her readers to break their faith in the Indian state.

"Big Dams," she concludes, "are to a nation's 'development' what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're 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" (p. 80). This is where much of the controversy arises. In an open letter to Roy published in a prominent Indian newspaper, Gail Omvedt, a noted feminist and activist, takes Roy to task for equating big dams with big bombs, arguing that the path of industrialization is a form of progress supported by oppressed people in India: "Development to so many people in India means getting out of traditional traps of caste hierarchy and of being held in a birth-determined play." It seems that Omvedt has fallen into a modernist trap, assuming that the only way to break the oppressive ties of tradition is through destructive, technological development.

Many have responded to Omvedt's unprincipled attack on the NBA and on Medha Patker at such a crucial moment. However, larger philosophic issues are at stake here as well. Although both take up industrialization and "development," neither mentions the bad word: capitalism. In Omvedt's case, there seems to be a misplaced faith in technological progress that Roy challenges us to break. Omvedt assumes that the various "development" projects are actually undertaken in the world of globalized capitalism for the betterment of people's lives.

On the other hand, in Roy's championing of the god of small things, the specific wars and battles that will bring down "big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big mistakes," there seems to be a note of resignation, perhaps one inherited from the failure of socialism in the twentieth century. Roy calls the 21st century the Century of the Small. How does one explain then that the small, specific struggle in Narmada has raised the Biggest and most universal questions facing humanity? It seems to me that we can't simply trade in the Big for the Small. The movement itself won't let us.

Part of the problem is the continued but false association of the socialist idea with the centralized State and with nationalized property. What the Narmada movement is fighting for is decentralized power. It is fighting the power of the Indian state to lay claim on any land it chooses in the name of "national development." It seems to me that the movement is raising the question of whether we can achieve a more human, socialist society without going through capitalist devastation, without a centralized state, without destroying unique communities and their intricate ties to the ecosystem. These are big questions that deserve the whole world's attention.