The Narmada movement

The movement to save the Narmada River in Madhya Pradesh, India, from dams had two roots.

On the one hand, there were peripheral farmers who for ten years had waged a struggle with Gandhian methods against local petty oppressors and had been successful enough with this to venture on larger projects.

On the one hand, it was the middle-class people, also those from the Gandhian tradition, who had succeeded in resisting a dam project and dared to make a starting point for an alternative development throughout India, with a clear international impact.

Those who ran the dam project were the bourgeoisie of the West Coast’s big cities who followed the Indian bourgeoisie’s traditional capital accumulation method: dams to get free electricity – the farmers paid with their land, the state and international bodies contributed to the construction costs.

The farmers’ first choice was to seek replacement land from the state for the land that the dams would flood. It was only when this proved impossible that they turned to a complete rejection of the whole project.

The resistance was carried out entirely by Gandhian methods – to ”shame” the proponents of the dam project for its destructive consequences in the countryside. This included, for example, the refusal to move when the water rose – but these methods proved to be totally ineffective against the bourgeoisie of the coastal cities. Money does not smell!

Which led to the farmers losing and the dams flooding their land.

During the Narmada campaign, which roughly lasted from the end of the 1980s until the turn of the century, some other successes were howeve achieved. For example, the concept of alternative development was popularized as a counterpoint to the neoliberal policies pursued by the Indian government. And the equating of giant dams with development became increasingly impossible throughout the world.

Reading
Alf Gunvald Nilsen: Dispossession and resistance in India – the river and the rage, Routledge 2010.an 1994