I've felt for a while that I should blog about the Jantar Mantar agitations in Delhi that came to a head recently, the Narmada agitation in particular. But it's difficult to, since issues that press upon your mind and heart so strongly are very difficult to write about. The guilt of distance and the immediacy of the issue combine in strange ways, and produce not only anger but a certain numbness, the numbness that accompanies the revelation of naked, unashamed injustice. Others have written about these issues, blogged about them too, with much greater competence than I could possibly do. But I'll try.
Two major movements for justice and survival, both of them desperate and nearing the end of their tether, converged on Jantar Mantar over the last month. Victims of the toxic gases released at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal in December 1984, accompanied by large numbers of their supporters, carried out a month-long march to Delhi to protest against the state's refusal to offer them protection and compensation, in the form of a sustained factory clean-up, provisions of clean drinking water not contaminated by toxic waste, and action against the company responsible for the death of over 20,000 people, and the medical disasters that have hit thousands and thousands more. Their demands were not met, they were not met by the Prime Minister, and so, having marched 800 km to Delhi to make claims and demands of indisputable justice, they decided to go on a hunger strike. Alongside them were their neighbours in victimhood, from the same part of the country. These were victims of another disaster - people displaced by the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada, protesting against the decision to raise the height of the dam, yet again, without making provisions for the relief and rehabilitation of the oustees. Medha Patkar, the leader of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the most important social movement in contemporary India, embarked, at the same time as the Bhopal protestors, on a fast unto death to pressurize the government towards action. Action, predictably, was taken in the form of police lathicharges, arrests of demonstrators and hunger strikers and sympathetic activists and students, the hysteric campaigns of both the Gujarat BJP and Congress, and the counter-protests of sections of the media bent on demonizing the NBA as a movement that was 'holding the government to ransom' with their demands. Evict several hundred thousand people from their homes, submerge their villages and forests, flush them out of their habitations like rats, refuse to offer them anything resembling humane compensation, and of course you're the ones being held to ransom when they let out a yap of protest. It is, after all, always the Great Indian Middle Class that suffers, everyone below them is merely battening on the state for undeserved privileges. Beggars, displaced people, slumdwellers, industrial casualties, the unemployed - spoilsports who refuse to play up to the still persistent hallucination of India Shining.
I know how hopelessly rhetorical that last sentence was. It's anger, anger and helplessness, that makes me write like this. At moments like this you realize that the government you enthusiastically helped vote into power differs from its fascist predecessors only on certain issues, that when it comes to 'development' the state essentially remains the State, untainted by anything remotely approaching compassion for the human casualties of its projects. And I voted for this government, and would do so again, because the alternative is too nightmarish to bear to live with.
Perhaps, though, I'm exaggerating the case. Because these two remarkable, admirable social movements didn't return to their bases without hope. They suffered through the fasting and protests, the police beat them and made them bleed, and Medha Patkar carried on her hunger strike almost to the point of death, for 19 days. But at the end of all of this, both movements gained something.
The Bhopal protestors have gone back happier than they have been in a long, long time. It is true that the victims will not see Dow Chemicals and Union Carbide punished. That will not happen. Big business in India will never pay for its acts of criminal negligence, not even if it produced the biggest industrial disaster in history. But the Bhopal marchers returned with promises that the contaminated water they and their children have grown up drinking will be cleaned up, that action will be taken to clean up the factory site, that steps will be taken to make sure that the mountain of corpses and half-corpses stops piling up.
Promises. Merely promises. And of course the Manmohan Singh government will not honour its pledges, of course the marchers will be back, in some form or another, to claim the justice that is theirs by right, and the survival that being human, and being alive, entitles them to. Don't keep murdering us. That, in essence, is the only real demand the Bhopal survivors have been making. The murder won't stop, despite the happiness they rightly feel at the government's recent concessions (please check out www.bhopal.net, and the marchers' blog on it). But at some level a victory was won - the government was shamed into token concessions, and the movement for the Bhopal victims will continue, and can draw some heart from this. Networks of support have sprung up, over the years, among activist organizations, NGOs, university groups of teachers and students, and the rare but crucial honest journalist. That does mean something - not victory by a long shot, but an advance of sorts. And what has been acknowledged, though mostly grudgingly and covertly, is the scale of the suffering that continues in areas affected by the poisonous gases from the factory, and reproduces itself, through deformities, disease and death, down generations. This recognition of suffering is symbolically of great consequence for a movement that has no weapons except arguments, facts and the capacity to invoke moral outrage.
With the NBA, matters are different. The hunger strike was not an ineffectual one, but matters remain incredibly grim. A ministerial team headed by Saifuddin Soz was dispatched to investigate the process of rehabilitation. Soz found, of course, that there is no such process except on paper, and was too honest to conceal that, as the Prime Minister undoubtedly wanted him to do. The matter was referred to the Supreme Court, and the statement it issued was equivocal. Dam construction was not stopped, but the legitimacy of the demand for proper rehabilitation was partially conceded. One would think there's a logical contradiction between these two decisions, given that each increase in the dam's height flushes out more and more people by the thousands, and given the current state of rehabilitation work in Madhya Pradesh. Still, given the Supreme Court's shameful history on the Narmada issue, it came as something of a relief that the judges were willing to concede that oustees had the right to live as human beings. I personally was surprised. Medha Patkar broke her fast, and the movement now waits, making use of a very short break from relentless pressure to draw breath, recoup, and re-strategize. The next SC hearing is on 1 May, I think. May Day: wouldn't that be a great occasion for the state to make another attempt to destroy a movement of the poor and dispossessed? Or perhaps not, perhaps things will be different. One lives in hope.
But this wasn't all. The government seems to have pretty much washed its hands of Soz's report, though it had commissioned it. Soz went beyond his brief, clearly, telling his masters more than they wanted to know. And the central government developed cold feet following a sustained, vicious campaign by politicians from Gujarat. The full fury of Gujarat politics has been unleashed upon the Narmada protestors, and there's no greater and more destructive fury in all of Indian politics, as the 2002 pogroms taught us. The Gujarat Congress and BJP joined hands in demonizing Medha Patkar and her peaceful army of protestors. The NBA's office in Vadodara was ransacked, not the first time this committedly non-violent movement (who, of course, are 'holding the nation to ransom') has been subjected to such intimidation. Modi declared he was going on a fast to counter Medha Patkar's propaganda, and would not give up till the government had issued a clear 'no' to the NBA. So as Narmada protestors sweltered in the heat of Jantar Mantar without food, Modi leaned back in an airconditioned cubicle and threatened not to eat. How much blood does this man want on his hands? The government, of course, began shitting in their pants, especially since the Gujarat Congress threw their weight behind the sanghis in their demand for the fulfilment of the world's most reviled hydro-electric project.
Aamir Khan, bless him, who expressed sympathy with the victims of the dam, has been subject to similar demonization. The baboons of the Congress and BJP who ransacked the NBA's office also burnt his posters and tried to ban his films. Once again, the same strategies. Single out prominent individuals who have been involved with or expressed concern for the victims of this holocaust. Isolate a few names - Medha Patkar, Aamir Khan (who did nothing more than visit the protestors and offer them some sympathy), and of course most of all Arundhati Roy, who has come to represent Mephistopheles in the imagination of the Indian middle-class Right. Insinuate, without a scrap of evidence, that these individuals are doing what they do, saying what they say, writing what they write, from interested motives, for profit or for brownie points. Suggest, thereby, that these manipulative, scheming crypto-Commie propagandists not only represent but are the movement, and it becomes easier to ignore the thousands of human beings, directly affected by the project, who are the real object of fear and hatred. Their collective weight becomes transformed, by a gigantic act of manipulated and deceptive representation, into a show-trial list of familiar and famous people, people who've worked ceaselessly and tirelessly for the movement, and in Medha Patkar's case are pivotal to it, but who in actuality are not the movement, for the movement involves masses of people. And this mass involvement is what has to be denied and made invisible, each time a mobilization happens.
This, however, is ultimately impossible. Which is why, once again, the Narmada movement has managed, against the odds, to win a temporary stalemate. 'Win' is a peculiar word to use, but in the case of this movement, at this stage of exhaustion and despair, not being terminated entirely is victory, of a kind, though a very grim kind. Both sets of battles - that concerning Bhopal and that concerning the Narmada - have followed a particular logic over the last month or so, and I think this logic is going to be repeated as the despair and urgency of movements for social justice in India intensifies. In both cases, a mobilization on an apocalyptic scale, declarations of 'victory or death', strategic launchpads for a sustained pressure campaign. On the side, frenetic lobbying, appeals, pleas to be heard, mobilizations of sympathizers across the country and especially in Delhi. A staking out of physical territory in the heart of India's capital, close to the centre of power. The strategic use of a fragile but enormous moral power, through invocations of traditions of non-violent protest and satyagraha, that despite the seeming unlikelihood of this manages to jostle the government from its committed unconcern just a little. The state responds through equivocation, scared by the scale of anger and bitterness, scared also by the monumental patience of these resistance movements that simply refuse to die away, but equally scared by - and ideologically on the same wavelength as - mobilizations on its right. A hard-line refusal to do anything bends into a nervous set of equivocations and self-contradictory statements, but never bends all the way towards an acknowledgement of the real suffering of either the Bhopal or Narmada victims. Both movements retreat, but strategically, on what appears to be at least partly their own terms. This could provide limited time and energy to recoup a little, and at least there are now formal, written commitments that can be used as evidence against the state when it dishonours its pledges again, as it's bound to do. It all sounds very paltry, but for the moment it'll have to do.
In the meantime, of course, there are children and adults still dying of toxic poisoning, there are tribals and villagers being forced off their lands as dam waters rise and drown centuries of human habitation, there are the corpses of people, homes and failed hopes that bob up and down on dam waters and float around in air contaminated by industrial waste, there are ghosts of factory workers and dispossessed men and women who've starved or drowned, and there are policemen who specialize in drawing the blood and breaking the bones of protestors from both movements. There are also the state governments of both Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, both of which are run by the BJP and the first of which is the most murderous in independent India's history. These aren't good times for people in these states to mobilize in campaigns that'll immediately be labelled as anti-national and unpatriotic, a labelling that'll be fully backed by rags like The Pioneer and, in most of its moods, the TOI.
But there's another side, and it's this: these mobilizations have gone on far too long, and have moved enough people and caused enough others to think, to simply vanish, whatever the overt and hidden forms of repression they're subjected to. And these causes, therefore, aren't entirely lost yet. Which, I suppose, is not to be forgotten easily.