India: Death by development

India is a country pockmarked with scandals but in a happy normalcy. We take scandals in our stride, and corruption seems a way of life.

But there is a deeper scandal that we cannot tolerate. Today I want to talk of deeper scams, the ones at the core of our way of life. These are scandals which can destroy a civilisation.
Think of three error events. In Orissa, among the Pauri Bhuiya tribe, there is a rumour about their most sacred waterfall — Khandadhara. They talk of the death of Khandadhara, India’s 12th highest waterfall. The government has leased out all the land around Khandadhara, 2,500 hectares of it, to Pohang Steel Co. of South Korea (Posco). When that sale is complete, a 244-metre waterfall will dry up, drying with it ways of life, myth, sacrament, a realm of nature that the waterfall kept alive.
Before you ask what kind of society it is that can kill a waterfall, I suggest you ask a few more questions. Think of the Ganges, our most sacred river. The river is not just a way of life, but an ecological sacrament, a performance enacting a cosmology. While the Ganga flows, the genius of India flows with it, sustaining a river of meaning.
People talk about the Ganga being contaminated, but few talk of the 300 planned dams across the Ganges. Dams provide power and a network of dams creates a sacred complex that challenges the sacrament called the Ganga. I admit we need power, but you cannot create power by disfiguring the Ganga. Sustainability is not just the continuing of the river and the livelihoods that accompany it, but the sustenance of meanings that go with the river. Sustainability connects life, life cycle, livelihood, lifestyle and life-systems of meaning. The thoughtless way in which dams pockmark the Ganga makes one wonder if Jayanthi Natarajan is minister for environment and forests or another deputy minister for power.
The death of our coastlines is an issue few of us consider. Gujarat, which has the longest coastline in the country, presents itself as a premier state for development. Chief minister Narendra Modi preens himself as a textbook example of what chief ministers should do for development. Yet, the development crisis is beginning on this very coast where the beach has been leased out to the Mittals, the Ambanis and the Adanis. Fishermen are now saying “development, yes, but not at our cost and not on our coast”. The English and the regional press have played down one of the most fascinating social movements of today, the Boat Yatras of protest across a 670-kilometre-long coastline. Next to it, the Sadbhavana Yatra of Mr Modi is a tame affair, an official display of egotism.
The question one must ask is what do these three stories illustrate? These are not just sentimental stories to be retailed in a history of development while shedding crocodile tears. These silences, debates, protests point to a constitutional crisis that I am going to dub “the battle of commons”.
A commons originally was a piece of land outside a village to which villagers had common access. This land provided them timber for housing, food, medicines and made poverty and subsistence bearable. The Enclosure Movement, which anticipated the history of capitalism, destroyed access to such land and forced villagers to become migrants and vagrants in the city.
The new anti-Enclosure Movements of our time are seeking to revive the concept of the commons and extending it beyond the materiality and territoriality of land. A commons today can be a pond, the sea, a river, a knowledge system, a virtual network, a cultural heritage.
The diversity and variety of commons is critical. Built into this are varieties of cultural ideas. For example, in traditional Indian law, land as stock can be owned but water as flow cannot be treated as property. Imagine the possibilities if we extend the idea of flow to the realm of information: Information can only be utilised, not owned.
But whatever the diversity, this much is clear: the commons as part of the legacy and entitlements of a community resist the encroachment of market and nation state. The latter two combine in terms of the dynamics of development and globalisation to create the new Enclosure Movements which threaten the life, lifestyles, life-systems and livelihoods of marginal groups like nomads, pastoralists and scavengers. When development is destructive, all that the poor and those on the margins have are the commons.
Storytelling is critical and storytellers like Ayesha Khan, Felix Padel, Madhusree Mukerjee and the chroniclers of the Ganga struggle have produced brilliant and moving narratives. But storytelling on its own is not enough. Community must complement civil society in constitutionalising the commons. The sea, the coastline, the Ganges must become a sacramental part of the new social contract. They must become not just a commons of materials, but a commons of knowledge, of memory linking the past and future. Think of it, what are commons without ancestors and a future generation? It is this sense of the commons that we have to introduce into our current Constitution soaked in liberalism and socialism, but unaware of the cultures of survival and subsistence which sustain our natural economy, our informal economy, our tribal economies and our coastlines. It is only when the idea of the commons enters the ecology of the Constitution can we hope to ensure that marginal groups and subsistence communities can withstand the assault of globalisation and the accompanying apocalypse of obsolescence, defeat, genocide and erasure. Only such a hope will keep the democratic imagination alive.