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Journalism of Courage
With Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra passing through Gujarat, where state elections are due next month, the participation of activist and former Aam Aadmi Party member Medha Patkar has resulted in criticism from the BJP.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at a rally on Monday (November 21), “Today in Surendranagar district, it is natural to remember Maa Narmada. I would visit Surendranagar for the Narmada Yojana several times as Surendranagar district would benefit the most. But think about those who have been removed from pad (position) by Indians. Such people are doing a yatra for pad (position) now.”
A few days ago too, he sent a similar message while campaigning, saying, “Think about the type of people who blocked the Narmada project…Narmada was the only source of drinking water for our people in Kutch and Saurashtra. For blocking those waters for three decades, they went to court and launched agitations. They defamed Gujarat…no one in the world, including the World Bank, was ready to lend money to Gujarat. Yesterday, a leader of Congress was out on a padyatra (march), placing his arms on the shoulders of that sister who had led this agitation.”
More directly, Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel had said earlier, “…we should remember who were those people who had deprived Kutch from getting the Narmada water for nearly five decades. We all know who those Urban Naxals who had opposed the Narmada dam project were… One of those Urban Naxals was Medha Patkar. We all know which political party these people were associated with.”
Patkar is a well-known social activist. She completed her higher education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and has worked on issues related to tribals, Dalits, farmers, labourers and women. Most notably, she is the founder member of the ‘Narmada Bachao Andolan’ or the Save Narmada Movement (NBA).
Her association with the NBA made headlines in the 1990s, as Patkar was a vocal critic of the Sardar Sarovar Dam (SSD), then proposed to be built on the Narmada river that flows through Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.
Patkar as part of the NBA was often leading the protests, also undertaking days-long hunger strikes to demand compensation for the displaced people as part of the SSD project, and for the project to be stopped. However, the Supreme Court ordered the project to continue in 2000.
She continued working on similar issues later. Patkar was attacked in the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots at the Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad during a peace meeting. The criminal complaint in the case named two BJP leaders, including the current president of the party’s Ahmedabad city unit, and the trial is still on.
There was also some criticism of Patkar after she was censured by a three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court for filing a false affidavit in a case related to people affected by the Narmada project in MP, in 2011.
Her foray into politics began with joining the AAP, and she unsuccessfully contested in the 2014 general elections from the Mumbai North-East seat. She quit the party the next year, criticising the manner in which leaders Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan were expelled from the national executive body.
According to the SSD website, the plan for harnessing the river for irrigation and power generation in the Narmada basin was initiated as early as 1946. The project’s foundation stone was laid by then Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in April 1961.
Nehru was a proponent of such projects, famously terming dams the “temples of modern India”. Right after Indian independence, many dam projects were inaugurated for fulfilling water and power generation needs. But the SSD project is believed to be the brainchild of India’s first Home Minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
Due to a dispute over the means of distributing the Narmada water among Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, a committee was set up to decide the fate of the project under the Chairmanship of Dr AN Khosla.
The Khosla committee, in 1965, recommended a higher dam with a Full Reservoir Level of 500 ft (152.44m). However, the MP government did not agree to this and so the Narmada Water Dispute Tribunal (NWDT) was constituted by the Government of India in October 1969. The NWDT gave its final award in December 1979, directing the most water to MP, followed by Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra.
As the project began in the 1980s, it was met with opposition from some local people and activists like Patkar. Their concern was largely about the proper rehabilitation of tribals and others whose lands would get submerged in constructing the reservoir. These people came together to form the NBA.
While they hoped to stop the Sardar Sarovar Dam project, Patkar’s first target was the financing acquired by the project from the World Bank in 1985.
Eventually, the World Bank reviewed the project and claimed that inadequate assessment had been made by the Indian government and the World Bank prior to sanctioning it. On March 31, 1993, the government cancelled the loan authorised by the World Bank.
According to the later Supreme Court judgment, the Bank said in a 1990 report, “Important assumptions upon which the projects are based are now questionable or are known to be unfounded. Environmental and social trade-off have been made, and continue to be made, without a full understanding of the consequences. As a result, benefits tend to be over-stated, while social and environmental costs are frequently understated.”
In 2000, the SC allowed the dam’s construction to proceed, provided it met with certain conditions. The foremost condition was that all those displaced by the increase in height of 5 metres be satisfactorily rehabilitated and that the process is repeated for every five metres increase in height.
In 2017, the PM inaugurated the project on his birthday, a few months before the 2018 state elections. He said, “When the World Bank refused to give funds, the temples of Gujarat donated money… This project, therefore, is not of any particular party or government. It is the project of each and every person.”
Patkar continued criticising the rehabilitation policies, saying in 2017, “While Maharashtra and Gujrat have been able to provide land to thousands of affected people, in Madhya Pradesh only 53 people have been compensated with land for their eviction.”
