Something is happening in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. Nobody seems to be taking much notice of it, which is hardly surprising, but it is happening
nevertheless. And for me, it brings back a sharp memory from exactly a year
ago. Near Bargi Nagar, about 20 miles south of Jabalpur, on August 23,
1996, I was startled by the bark of a dog.
Not much to be startled by, you may think, the bark of a dog. But I don't
mind admitting: that night, I got the fright of my life.
It was an utterly dark night, it had been raining steadily. A few of us had
been trudging through the rain and mud for some hours. We were heading for
Bargi Nagar, from where we hoped to find transport to Jabalpur. We were
only a mile or so from Bargi Nagar, close enough that we could see lights.
High on a hill, the temple was awash in light. Closer to ground level,
bright streetlights lined the top of the dam. Later, when we reached the
town, every little shop was lit with garish tubelights, including the tiny
dhaba where we sank down for a welcome cup of chai.
But that was there, still some distance away. Here, meanwhile, we trekked
through an absolute, almost primeval darkness. Here, a dog barked and I
nearly fell out of my skin. From the sound, he was just inches from my
ankles. A soft cough, right at my shoulder, followed the bark. I realised,
when my nerves stopped their jangling, that we were passing a village
house. It was only its owner's cough, and his dog's bark, that told me so.
I never saw either of them. Not even the house, except for just discerning
the vague shape of its roof. The darkness was that complete.
Why was it so dark? To answer that, I have to tell you about Bargi.
Bargi Nagar is on the banks of the Narmada River. The huge dam on the river
there was completed in 1990. It is the first of 30 such massive dams that
have been planned under the Narmada Basin Development Project. The Project
will produce a series of artificial lakes, like the one that has ballooned
out behind the Bargi dam. Doing so, it will mutilate what must surely be
one of India's most lovely natural treasures, this lithe, generous river.
That loss of a little strip of heaven is one thing. It pales in comparison
to others. Bargi's lake submerged 162 villages upriver from the dam. Tens
of thousands who used to live in those villages lost their homes and have
had to move. Some of them moved twice: the lake submerged even the land the
government put them on the first time. When they lost their land to the
dam, the government gave some -- only some -- of the villagers measly
amounts as compensation. Substantial portions of even those amounts were
lost too, as officials demanded bribes before they would hand them over.
Any other compensation for the villagers' losses remains just an empty
promise.
Today, many of the men of those 162 villages must travel hundreds of miles
to fields in distant parts of the state to find work. Others, including
several once prosperous farmers, now live in a putrid garbage-infested slum
in Jabalpur, pulling rickshaws for a living.
Every monsoon, several hundred villagers, fed up with government promises
that are never honoured, organise a protest demonstration. Last year, they
were at a village called Bijasen, some 12 miles upriver from the dam. Their
demands: relief, compensation and rehabilitation for their loss. This year,
they are in Jabalpur. Four of them there are on a fast unto death. Their
demands: relief, compensation and rehabilitation for their loss.
Truly, with the Bargi dam, it's deja vu all over again. Every year.
Last year, we visited the protesters in Bijasen. We tramped for several
hours: over hills, through streams and fields and bushes, down steep muddy
slopes, most of it in driving rain. We finally reached a village where we
piled into a tiny boat. During the two-hour ride over the then-placid
waters of the Narmada to Bijasen, my clothes and shoes dried slowly in the
weak early afternoon sun. Shivering from the day-long soaking, I was
thrilled to see even that watery sun. But I needn't have rejoiced: when
returning in the boat later that day, we got soaked again as a storm
whipped rain across our bodies, the river into a shaking frenzy. To think
we were going to meet people for whom this effort is an everyday affair!
A few days earlier, the police had arrived at Bijasen to break up the
demonstration. They waded into the crowd, flailing at the villagers with
lathis, breaking bones all around. One arm that had been lathi-charged by
an anonymous cop belonged to a woman. A four-and-a-half-feet-tall bent-over
70-year-old-grandmother woman.
The police must have thought their flailing would crush the agitation.
Hadn't they beaten the grandmother? But they thought entirely wrong. The
villagers remained in Bijasen, a reminder to a deaf world of the enormous
injustice that has passed for independent India's dam rehabilitation
programmes. When there have been programmes, that is.
"But somebody has to sacrifice," people say, "if India is to progress."
What progress, which somebodys, you might well ask.
At Bijasen a year ago, we met some of those somebodys. If you visit
Jabalpur today, you can meet some more of them. These are the people who
have sacrificed so the Bargi dam could be built. They need only travel a
short distance down the river from Bijasen, only slightly further from
Jabalpur, to see the miraculous progress their sacrifice has wrought. The
progress I could see as the dog barked at my passing ankles. At night, the
entire length of the mighty dam is lit up. So is Bargi Nagar. So is the
temple on the hill. All with electricity from the dam.
Yes, these are the sacrificing somebodys. These Indians like you and me,
staging their yearly protest, as you read this, about a certain progress
that never seems to reach them. Many miles from dams, I use their power to
write this column. Right next to one of the country's largest dams, these
villagers have never had electricity and still do not, seven years after
the dam was completed. Fifty years after Independence.
That's why it's so dark. In the villages on the shores of that stretch of
the Narmada, thousands of Indians sit in the same darkness their ancestors
have known for hundreds of years. Some sit in that darkness no more than an
hour's stroll away from the lights on a dam that has brought so much more
darkness into their lives.
No more than half an hour from a tubelight-festooned dhaba.
Take my word for it, you can get one of the world's finest cups of chai in
that tiny dhaba in Bargi Nagar, Madhya Pradesh. It's best savoured after a
long day hiking through mud and rain along the banks of the Narmada. As you
sip it gratefully in the flood of light, your aching knees and muddy jeans
remind you of the day's efforts. You remember the boat ride, the incessant
rain, slipping and sliding down a steep hill.
You remember the only signs of a home, of a human presence, that you
inadvertently found in the darkness just half an hour ago. A bark. A soft
cough.
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