Zindabad! The Resistance Lives Long and Loud in Rural India and at the 2004 World Social Forum.

Vol. 7, No. 2

April, 2004

by Hope Chu
50 Years Is Enough Network

Zindabad!
The Resistance Lives Long and Loud in Rural India and at the 2004 World
Social Forum.

By Hope Chu
50 Years Is Enough Network

Whose Development?: Fighting for Dignity in a Vast Land

India is vast – in land, in human numbers, in scope of national visions. This
scale is present everywhere; and especially in the strategies for growth and
development. So sweeping are the government’s plans for development, it is
easy for whole villages and communities to be overlooked, ignored, and
sacrificed in the name of “progress”, “growth”, and “development”. For the
sake of the nation, millions of the nation’s people are displaced from their
land, deprived of their livelihoods, and left to a life subject to the whims of the
market and the government.

It is in this context that some of the world’s most vibrant and active social
movements have arisen and flourished. From the organization of the Dalits –
the “untouchable” caste– and the now-famous resistance to the large dam
projects, to the numerous women’s and indigenous people’s organizations,
India’s marginalized have found a voice and created a representation they
aren’t afforded in the government. It is in these organizations, alliances, and
andolans that India finds its real democracy.

Seeing is Believing: The Plundered Lands of Fighting Peoples

This January, in the week preceding the 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbai
(formerly Bombay), I had the honor of participating in a week-long tour of the
rural areas of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. The tour was organized by
the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), a coalition of over 200
Indian social movements and, in their own words, “an attempt towards
building a people's political force, outside the electoral politics that can
counter the forces of destruction, inequality and exploitation and realize the
values of equity, justice, peace and nonviolence”.

Beginning in Bhopal, the site of the Union Carbide atrocity, the tour traveled
up the Narmada river valley, meeting with villages threatened with
submergence from the rising dam waters. I met the NAPM tour at a remote
point of the Narmada River where the three states of Madhya Pradesh,
Maharashtra, and Gujarat meet, upstream of the contentious Sardar Sarovar
Dam (India’s most infamous mega-dam project, started in conjunction with the
World Bank). Here the Narmada is quiet, and the dry, winter-season land
rises in dusty pyramids along the riverside. Thatched houses with fields lying
fallow are scattered in the hills; all of them are the ancestral homes and lands
of adivasi (India’s indigenous people) communities, all of them are
condemned to submergence by the ambitious development projects and
government edict.

From Mumbai, it takes nearly twelve hours by train and Jeep to get to this part
of the sleepy, unassuming Narmada river valley. This distance is more than
just a mere matter of geography; it is also manifested in the disconnect
between state policies and local conditions; between the interests of
government, the elite, and international actors such as the World Bank, and
the interests of the people. It is a distance felt not only by the people of the
Narmada river, but by other adivasi communities, by women, by fisherpeople,
by people alienated from their lands, dislocated from their communities, and
forced into slums at the very doorstep of the halls of power.

This divide grows no smaller as one moves toward Mumbai; throughout the
state of Maharashtra, adivasi villages are devastated by deforestation,
policies of land and water alienation, police violence, exploitation at the
hands of the Hindu upper castes and moneylenders, and corrupt structures of
local government. Two decades of intense timber harvesting have utterly
transformed the landscape, leaving unfertile and loose soil that makes
intensive agriculture impossible, turning small farmers and forest people into
day laborers, indebted and vulnerable to alcoholism and brutality from those
institutions that should protect them. Now these communities face more
exploitation and environmental degradation from calcite mining, resource
extraction conducted without consulting or the consent of the villagers who
will lose their land and livelihoods to the mines.

Resistance is Fertile: Local Solutions to Global Problems

Just outside Mumbai, accessible by the commuter train, lies one of many
towns struggling against that most ubiquitous of multinationals, Coca Cola.
Access to the water in Thane is threatened by the privatization of the
groundwater and its acquisition by Coke. The people of Thane have
organized against Coke, and have united with other communities whose
water has also been bought or contaminated by the company. Anti-Coke
organizers in Thane, as in many areas afflicted by Coke, face intimidation and
violence by the multinational and by the government. The tour experienced
this intimidation shortly after convening our meeting with resistance leaders at
a local school, when we were asked to leave by school administrators, who
had received threats from a pro-Coke faction.

Out of this divide between sweeping policy and reality, however, springs
resistance to the exploitation of natural resources and indigenous peoples by
distant powers; the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), the Shoshit Jan
Andolan and Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan (two adivasi organizations),
among countless others, challenge this distance with a myriad of tactics.
Engaging and confronting the powers that be is one facet of the resistance,
but the power of the people’s movements lies in their alternative vision of
development, in locally- initiated and community-controlled projects.

In response to the mega-dam projects on the Narmada, the village of Bilgaon
has constructed a micro-dam, spanning a minor tributary of the Narmada with
negligible environmental impact. The micro-dam not only produces enough
electricity to provide each family in the village with a tube light and lightbulb,
with some 5 kilowatts left over, but during the daylight hours, the power is
used to pump water, allowing the villagers to plan for a second harvest. The
dam was constructed with the aid of the People’s School of Energy based in
Kerala and the Association for India’s Development (AID), and control of the
dam and generator lies in the hands of the villagers.

Education has also been reclaimed by communities; we visited two adivasi
schools on the NAPM tour, the Adharshila Learning Center and the jeevan
shala (“light of life”) schools of the Narmada valley. The jeevan shala,
founded by the NBA, afford the children of the Narmada the only education
offered in that region. The Adharshila Learning Center is also an adivasi
school, started by two committed organizers with donations from the
community. Perched on a mesa overlooking an expanse of cultivated fields,
the Learning Center is a cluster of buildings housing an upper and lower
school, a library, and dormitories. Students engage not only in traditional
academic subjects including English, but also in organic farming, animal care,
traditional medicine, and manual arts.

Sharing the Vision: Another World Is Possible!

These organizations and movements met with thousands of others from
around the world at the 2004 World Social Forum (WSF), including the 50
Years Is Enough Network. Originally conceived as a response to the elite-
membership, policy oriented World Economic Forum held annually in Davos,
Switzerland, the WSF provides a space for groups and individuals to meet
and strategize on issues ranging from indigenous people’s rights to food
security, from the World Bank, IMF and WTO to child labor. This year the WSF
far exceeded any estimates with over 150,000 participants hailing from over
130 countries. The National Alliance of People’s Movements, the Narmada
Bachao Andolan, the Shoshit Jan Andolan, and the Jagrit Adivasi Dalit
Sangathan also participated in the WSF, with large contingents.

The 50 Years Is Enough Network participated in the WSF as a member of the
Grassroots Global Justice (GGJ) contingent, a delegation of over 100
community, labor, and student organizers. The GGJ delegation, which also
participated in last year’s WSF in Porto Alegre, Brazil, is a far cry from the first
US participants in the WSF. The GGJ delegation, made up mostly of people
of color and women, and representing women’s, labor, indigenous, and
economic justice struggles in the US, presented a different vision of the US
than that promulgated and promoted by media, advertising, and government
to other countries.

The people – especially the women and youth leaders – I met on my tour of
people’s movements and at the WSF, the courage in the face of intimidation
and violence I witnessed in rural India, the dedication and passion with which
all I met fight oppression, marginalization, and injustice daily, all these made
what was once only an inspiring slogan a truth to me; all these make me
positive that Another World IS Possible!

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