Rare Gandhi-style protest in India

On July 14, Patkar ended a two-day hunger strike that forced the Maharashtra government to agree to increase the number of displaced adivasi families eligible for new homes. Neighboring states have been less generous.

Officials say everyone displaced by the Narmada project will get new land, a home, a community with power, water, schools, and hospitals. It's a small price to pay, the government says, for the greater good - electricity and water for a country where shortages are a constant source of misery.

Yet Patkar says the government underestimates the number of displaced people because it never did a proper survey.

While not a tribal herself, Patkar says she has become so tied up with their plight that she now wakes up with nightmares of villages being submerged.

Patkar's commitment to the valley started nearly 20 years ago. Traveling village by village, she and other organizers taught tribals how to resist state policies without weapons. These supporters, in turn, became one of the best organized and most coherent networks in recent Indian history.

Through pressure and hunger strikes, the Andolon forced delays by courts and governors. Their biggest victory came in 1993 when the World Bank canceled support for the project. The bank had funded the dam in 1985 with a $450 million loan but withdrew, citing a lack of environmental studies and faulty resettlement plans.

Yet the dam project itself keeps rolling along, leading even some Patkar supporters to say that Gandhian style methods don't work. Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning author of "The God of Small Things," recently told an Indian news magazine that nonviolence on the Narmada had been "an outright failure."

Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist at Jawaharlal Nehru University, says that Gandhianism has fallen out of favor in modern India.

"You can use Gandhianism as a corrective of something that has gone wrong, but as a way of life, you can't do it," says Mr. Gupta. "It's a backward Utopia. Gandhi believed that Indians could have lived without the desire for progress. But if that is true, then we wouldn't have come this far ... in terms of material development."

"We are not that kind of environmentalist that says don't touch a tree," says Patkar. "We are saying, use the resources by taking the people who are affected by the dam into the planning process."

Many of the angry villagers have been willing to plant themselves for up to 28 hours inside homes as the chilly Narmada waters rose up to their necks. Thus far, none have been swept away, but many have resisted vigorously when police dragged them to safety. Others have lost their lives, however, wading into the quicksand-like mud that collects on the banks. Still others have refused to eat for up to 26 days, keeping each other's spirits up by praying and singing Hindi film songs.

It was that group spirit that kept people going, says Patkar, with a laugh. When you see what is at stake, "you don't feel like living in this world without [achieving these goals]. You're so committed to getting that thing that it comes naturally."

Patkar insists that the Andolon must avoid becoming just a one-issue movement. "People tell us, look just stick to rehabilitation, that is something that people understand," says Patkar. But "we have to ask all the issues. The top-to-bottom approach to development is undemocratic."

• Dan Morrison contributed to this report from Jalsindhi.

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