www.sacw.net > Victims and refugees of 'Development', 'Nation Building' and Conflict in the Indian Subcontinent
What the State Cannot Destroy
by Harsh Mander [August 7, 2004]
In was a sombre rites of passage. The first death in the resettlement colony at Chanera, where the brutally uprooted residents of Harsud have been hastily and chaotically relocated. Prasad, a dalit landless worker, had stepped out of his makeshift hovel in pouring rain, and was electrocuted by a naked electrical wire carelessly strung on bamboo poles.
His grieving relatives and neighbours found that there was nowhere he could be cremated, because the authorities had neglected to provide a cremation ground. They gathered angrily outside the offices of the National Hydroelectric Development Corporation. An official told them contemptuously, ëYou expect us to provide for you when you die. Next you will even expect us to be responsible for more of you when you breedí. In the end, Prasadís body was removed to the abandoned ghost city of Harsud, and amid its uneasy ruins, it was consigned to the flames.
Prasadís devastated young widow Saroj is unable to even conceive how she will raise her four small children. It was formidable enough when her husband was alive. In Harsud, he used to find regular work, sometimes on construction sites or else in farms. But after they were forcibly evicted, he joined more than three thousand new daily wage workers, hopelessly searching for casual employment in a village with no factories and saturated agriculture. They had no option except to eat into their compensation. But no are dared to ask what they would live on when that was over.
ëAi, muavze!í (Oh, compensation!), is how the original residents of Chanera mock their unwelcome new neighbours. Even more humiliating is their nickname for their settlement, ëPhokatvadaí or ëvillage where residents get everything freeí. No name could be more inappropriate, because few are condemned to pay such a high cost to subsist in such misery.
The resettlement site resembles not a carefully planned township but a haphazardly assembled settlement for fugitives escaping a war-zone. On undulating rocky hillsides, white stones mark undersized house sites for relocated residents. Some are strewn on hill slopes, others in beds of streams. Authorities are deaf to pleas that houses cannot survive in these locations. People desperately build, only to find their walls and foundations washed away in the rains.
There is no drainage, sewerage or clean drinking water. Oustees are forced to defecate in open fields, from where they are beaten back by the original residents. Children are unremittingly hungry and sick. In many homes, the walls are marked by old sarees, the roofs by plastic sheets, defenceless before the merciless monsoon deluge. Rents in Chanera are ten times higher than in Harsud, and land four times more expensive.
The 148 year old graceful town of Harsud today eerily recalls images of the ruins of Bhuj and Latur after they were destroyed by earthquakes, walls collapsed, roofs caved in, the phantom streets strewn with rubble, memories and dreams. Only in Harsud, the destruction was wrought not by nature but a cruel and callous state.
Any forced displacement leaves a trail for generations of human suffering. We have already waited too long to challenge a development model that coercively extracts such profound sacrifices from powerless people only to augment privilege of a few. Alternatives for irrigation and power exist that do not exact such an enormous toll of human suffering, but they have few takers.
Public authorities charged with the responsibility of forcibly uprooting people, can never eliminate, but they can significantly reduce human suffering, if they share their agony, inform them of their rights, ensure they receive their full dues without harassment and corruption, and assist people to rebuild their homes and livelihoods well in advance of their uprootment.
Instead, in every large project in India, public servants treat ejected people as though they are enemies of the state, not innocent victims of unjust and oppressive development models and state policies. As far back as 1989, state authorities had earmarked Chanera for the resettlement of the residents of Harsud, doomed to submergence in the Indira Sagar reservoir. For 15 years, hardly a stone was lifted to prepare it for its uprooted residents. Barely two months before public authorities chose to vacate Harsud, people were coerced to shift to the barren undeveloped wasteland in Chanera. Batteries of policemen marched the streets, sometimes on horseback, to tame incipient resistance. Electricity and water supply lines were snapped. In a particularly malevolent innovation, residents were paid incentive to destroy their homes with their own hands.
More than a hundred villages have already silently drowned in the Indira Sagar reservoir. The coercive brutality of their uprootment was even more naked, because injustice in rural India is even more resolutely shielded from public conscience. We found police pickets already camping at villages now marked for future submergence.
In one of the resettlement colonies, a woman broke down, ëWhat we most cannot bear is to see our children hungry. I wish they had just given us all poison. It would have been better than this living deathí. It was a cry that we heard echoed wherever we traveled.
Chanera did appear at first like a land of the living dead. Yet we found that outside a hovel, someone had planted a young tulsi plant. Elsewhere we noticed a young couple stealing moments together, away from the eyes of their elders. In many colonies, women spoke of their determination to fight. There are some things that a callous state can never crush. One of these is the human spirit.
Return to South Asia Citizens Web