India Bachao Andolan

If today the government decides to stop work on the Narmada dam citing poor rehabilitation efforts, some very decent people will celebrate a victory. Every decent Indian should actually mourn a defeat 8212; the defeat of logic, intelligent policy and institutional procedures. First off, if dam construction is stopped, how can a brief visit by three ministers form the basis of such a huge decision? Conclusions of court-mandated authorities who have been working on rehabilitation for so long will be dismissed. Those born of a ministerial pass-through necessitated by a high profile protest will be considered substantive. This is similar to the position that judicial review of the Narmada issue is fine as long as protestors find judges echoing only their concerns. When the directive calls for construction as well as better rehabilitation, as the Supreme Court judgment did, when it sets out a detailed institutional formula for grievance redressal, judicial intervention becomes irrelevant, open to de facto defiance.

Of course, the political class is getting good at opposing the judiciary when the latter tries to rationalise policy. There8217;s a fight over illegal urban construction in Delhi and Mumbai, there has already been a fight over quota extension and there may be another one; a legal challenge to what Arjun Singh proposes is eminently feasible as Justice Lahoti explained in this newspaper. The builders8217; mafia and the Narmada activists may never break political bread together, but in placing their narrower agendas over greater public good, politicians achieve the same effect.

The greater public good in these cases is first-rate infrastructure. Land is always an issue in big projects. Post the Supreme Court verdict, Narmada should have become an exemplar for the right policy. But it is again threatening to become a precedent for endless, politically charged negotiations. How long before the National Highway Authorities8217; already poor efforts to acquire land start attracting Narmada-type agitations? This is a question the Congress should particularly ask itself. Bharat Nirman is its development slogan. But in three states where its rival is the BJP, its Narmada politics might look as if Left rhetoricians wrote it. The Left has no stake in the Narmada states. The Congress has. Will the government at least remember that political reality?