Listen to the nonviolent poor

While the rest of us are mesmerized by talk of war and terrorism and wars against terror, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, in central India, a little life raft has set sail into the wind.

On a pavement in Bhopal, in an area called Tin Shed, a small group of people embarked on a journey of faith and hope. There's nothing new in what they're doing. What's new is the climate in which they're doing it.

On May 20, activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), the Save the Narmada Movement against Big Dams, began an indefinite fast in Bhopal. They fasted longer than Gandhi did on any of his fasts during India's freedom struggle.

Their demands are more modest than his ever were. They are protesting against the Madhya Pradesh government's forcible eviction of more than 1,000 Adivasi (indigenous) families to make way for the Maan Dam on the Narmada River. All they're asking is that the government of Madhya Pradesh implement its own policy of providing land to those being displaced by the Maan Dam.

There's no controversy here. The dam has been built. The displaced people must be resettled before the reservoir fills up in the monsoon and submerges their villages. Among the activists was 22-year-old Ram Kunwar. Hers is the first village that will be submerged when the waters rise in the Maan reservoir. Yet during the fast, no government official bothered even to pay the activists a visit.

At the end of 30 days, the activists called off the fast, having wrested a meager concession from the government – the setting up of a committee to "look into" the complaints. In India they kill us with committees.

Unlike other large dams in India, where the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of displaced people is simply not possible (except on paper, in court documents), in the case of Maan the total number of displaced people is about 6,000. People have even identified land that is available and could be bought and allotted to them by the government. And yet the government refuses.

Instead it's busy distributing paltry cash compensation, which is illegal and violates its own policy. It says quite openly that if it were to give in to the demands of the Maan "oustees," it would set a precedent for the hundreds of thousands of people, most of them Dalits (untouchables) and Adivasis, whose villages are slated to be submerged by the 29 other big dams planned in the Narmada Valley. The state government's commitment to these projects remains absolute, regardless of the social and environmental costs.

What will happen to those displaced by the Maan Dam when their villages are submerged in a few weeks' time? Will they just go down in the ledgers as "the price of progress" along with the millions of other people displaced by big dams? That phrase cleverly frames the whole argument as one between those who are prodevelopment versus those who are antidevelopment – and suggests the inevitability of the choice you have to make: prodevelopment, what else? It slyly suggests that movements like the NBA are antiquated and absurdly anti-electricity or anti-irrigation. This, of course, is nonsense.

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