http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040706E.shtml
Salt, Dams, Nuke Sites: India's Struggle
J. Sri Raman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective Thursday 06 April 2006
Today, India is witnessing a re-enactment of an episode of the
country's freedom struggle and its most significant and inspiring
saga. On this day, 76 years ago, Mahatma Gandhi launched his Salt
Satyagraha, to assert the common Indian's right to manufacture his own
salt, a right that the British colonial rulers sought to deny.
Gandhi's memory and message have now created and catalyzed a movement
to protest and resist a post-Independence ban on production and sale
of common salt.
Today, a 52-year-old woman, social activist Medha Patkar,
continues her Gandhian fast in New Delhi's prestigious hospital,
the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), amidst
administrations of saline water. She is protesting against
displacement of thousands of people by a dam project in Gujarat, no
less prestigious to the powers-that-be, and to reiterate her
endlessly repeated demands for their dignified rehabilitation.
Today, it is 18 days since an earthquake of undisclosed
intensity shook, if only for a few seconds, an area in India's deep
south that harbors a nuclear complex, to which major additions are
being made shortly. Feeble voices have been raised over what this
means for the people of the region, devastated by the tsunami not
long ago, but questions from those concerned have been dismissed
with a contempt that they did not deserve.
The three apparently disjointed events together serve to
illustrate a development strategy that directly threatens the
people of India and the cause of peace within the country and in
the sub-continent as a whole.
The Mahatma's Salt Satyagraha was a conscious and a
marvelously creative attempt to put the poor people at the center
of the Independence movement. It is a sad irony that, after nearly
six decades of independence, the poor salt farmers and salt
consumers of India have to fight to protect their right from
corporate masters in place of the colonial ones. The ban on
non-iodized salt will spell ruin for salt farmers on the shores of
Gandhi's Gujarat and elsewhere as well as at least a five-fold
increase in the price of salt for the common man.
The government and its experts, of course, have not cared to
answer any of the questions from critics of the ban. Such as: why
this hurry to ban common salt consumed through millennia with no
disastrous health consequences when tobacco products suffer no
trade restriction, when there is no plan even to consider pleas for
controlling sale of pesticides found to be harmful, if only in
cases of heavy use? Does lack of iodine alone cause the health
disorders that non-iodized salt is blamed for? Is not over-iodized
food, too, known to pose health hazards?
The government and its experts have cared even less, over two
decades, to answer questions over the project to build a network of
dams over River Narmada flowing through three states of India -
Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. The main question here has
been about the displacement by the dam project of nearly 200,000
people in all. Mostly aboriginals, tribal people, as the
mainstream, middle-class India calls them, they had no one to speak
up for them until Medha Patkar made their cause hers.
Medha's Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement), or the
NBA, has seen many ups and downs in its struggle. But it has scored
two major victories. The first was when it succeeded in forcing the
World Bank, the original funder of the project, to withdraw. The
second victory was the verdict of India's Supreme Court that asked
the project authorities to rehabilitate the oustees, as required
under approved guidelines, before proceeding with the project by
increasing the dam's height. The current NBA protest follows an
alleged violation of the court order.
The question of dams and development - specially the optimum
size of dams from the viewpoint of environmental and economic
viability - can be debated endlessly. And it has been. Beyond all
debate, however, is the imperative need to ensure the
rehabilitation of the displaced, who, in this farm-dependent
community, are also the dispossessed. As Arundhaty Roy, vilified
even more for defending the displaced than for denouncing India's
nuclear bombs, has pointed out, all the data about all the dams
built since 1947 (including their dimensions, budgets and envisaged
irrigation benefits) are available except in one respect. There is
no record - none - of the number of those displaced by the dams, of
where these people disappeared to.
The famished and feverish Medha made the same point when she
whispered to the media, before being whisked away to the hospital:
"Perhaps they would not have bothered at all about these people
waiting to be drowned (by the heightened dam), if I had not come
and sat here (on a fast). It is a sad thought."
It was even less surprising when the concerned authorities
refused to answer any question about an earthquake that shook an
area including Koodankulam, site of a nuclear complex, on March 19.
The event was described only as a "mild tremor" in English-language
newspapers that cared to cover it at all. Dailies of the local
Tamil language described the cracks in houses caused by the quake,
but this section of the media has very little influence in India's
corridors of power, yet to recover from a colonial hangover.
The tsunami devastated the same region, but the disaster was
dismissed then as too unusual to warrant a concern about nuclear
safety. The tremor of March should have compelled the authorities
to wonder if the area could now be considered quake-prone. They,
however, could not even be persuaded to disclose the intensity of
the tremor. Just as they did not care to allay fears caused by the
tsunami havoc in the area of the better-known Kalpakkam nuclear
complex, now officially acknowledged as one of "strategic"
importance.
The People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy, active in the
area, has voiced added concern over the plans to build two more
nuclear power reactors in Koodankulam. It is being ignored,
however, as an odd group out of sync with the times, when India
looks forward to a luminous nuclear future as a direct result of
the deal with the USA under the George Bush administration. What
does a possible nuclear calamity matter, when the deal puts no cap
on the nuclear-weapon program either, and keeps alive all those
alluring prospects of a deadly arms race in the sub-continent?
The three events together illustrate a development strategy
that has no place or thought for the defenseless people it
threatens. The re-enactment of the Mahatma's salt march, the
countrywide response to Medha's fast, and the questions that belie
claims of a national consensus over the nuclear issue illustrate
something else: determination of the people not to stay silent
spectators of the unfolding strategy.
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A freelance journalist and a peace activist of India, J. Sri Raman
is the author of Flashpoint (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a
regular contributor to t r u t h o u t.
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