Developing compliance and resistance: the state, transnational social movements and tribal peoples contesting India s Narmada project

Transcription

1 Developing compliance and resistance: the state, transnational social movements and tribal peoples contesting India s Narmada project AJAY GANDHI Abstract In this article I conceptualize a conflict over the Narmada damming project in central India by highlighting particular spatial fields and larger trajectories of political interaction. The Narmada project s maintenance and destabilization is evinced in a range of processes, including conflict over afforestation in tribal villages, protest narratives over resettlement in regional centres, and transnational lobbying of donor agencies. The interpenetration of social practices by different scales, and the mobility of discourses are emphasized. Further, I examine how organizational and social decisions such as implementing a rehabilitation programme, accepting state compensation and participating in public protest point to the contingent nature of power, revealing both complicity and disarticulation between involved parties. Descriptive points and commentary focus on the Indian riparian states implementing the project; the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement); and affected adivasi (tribal) communities in the Narmada Valley. In this article I depart from a concern with how social processes and the power relations sustaining them are manifested through local agency, national interlocutors and international discourses. How can we conceptualize contemporary social relations marked by forces such as nation-states, transnational corporations and social movements, where conflict must both be situated within particular temporal and spatial fields and larger trajectories of social and political interaction? This is explored by examining how development, the Narmada damming project in central India, is implemented and opposed. Descriptive points and commentary focus on three constituents in the Narmada conflict. First, I highlight the riparian states implementing the project, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. Second, I discuss a social movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement; hereafter NBA or the Andolan) and affiliated activist allies. Finally, I examine the effects of displacement and land encroachment on adivasi (tribal) communities in the Narmada Valley. My argument is structured through two lines of enquiry. First, the Narmada project is situated within multiple geographical and social scales, whereby it is manifested and opposed. The Narmada project s maintenance and destabilization is evinced in a range of processes, including conflict over compensatory afforestation in villages, protest narratives over resettlement and corruption in regional towns, and Global Networks 3, 4 (2003) ISSN Blackwell Publishing Ltd & Global Networks Partnership 481

2 Ajay Gandhi transnational lobbying of donor agencies. The interpenetration of different spatial locations and social agency, as well as the mobility of discourses, practices and images, is stressed throughout this article. By sketching out state intervention and mass-based opposition, how can we conceptualize the complex spatial and social links existing between practitioners of development and actors involved in resistance? Second, I examine how social choices such as lending money, implementing a rehabilitation programme, accepting compensation, or participating in a rally are encapsulated within a framework encompassing various gradients of power. In what ways can actions of the state, social movements and tribal communities be seen as dominance or resistance? And how are these concepts realized in practice? Conceptualizing development, conservation and globalization in India A central concern within the social sciences has become the analysis of contemporary macrologies (Gupta 1995) and globalisms (Tsing 2000), including systemic processes such as development and globalization. These processes come to be consistently deployed throughout the world, yet they are differentially manifested in each locale. Increasingly, analysts are encouraged to stress far-reaching and systematic consequences of macrologies at the same time as their different forms in multiple locations arise from contestation, reworking, and rearticulation (Gupta 1995: 24). Tsing s formulation of globalisms echoes this notion: Cultural processes of all place making and all force making are both local and global, that is, both socially and culturally particular and productive of widely spreading interactions (Tsing 2000: 352). These processes can simultaneously reproduce existing political and economic structures, be integrated with existing cultural practices in a hybrid formation, and contest the hegemony and legitimacy of dominant structures and discourses. Contemporary political changes in India, especially those brought forth by the mobilization of social movements such as the NBA, offer an opportunity to examine these ideas within the context of development. A growing body of research has utilized poststructuralist concepts in the analysis of development, drawing often on Michel Foucault s work on discourse, power and subjectivity (Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1990; Foucault 1972, 1979, 1980, 1983; Gupta 1998). Commentators have traced the ascendance of development as a unique mode of global regulation in the postwar period (Escobar 1995), while others have emphasized its articulation with pre-existing power regimes and local hierarchies (Moore 2000). I am more sympathetic to the latter formulation, which highlights that development was laid on top of already-existing geopolitical hierarchies; it neither created north south inequality nor undid it but instead provided a set of conceptual and organizational devices for managing it, legitimating it, and sometimes contesting and negotiating its terms (Ferguson 1999: 248). Indeed, the British colonial apparatus significantly shaped the post-independence Indian development regime. With exceptions such as the village-republic ideology of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian nationalists who led the drive for independence in 1947, and who afterwards shaped the formation of the development state adopted the colonialist teleology of modernity. This included the attendant notion of unidirectional social and environmental evolution, irreversible progress, and affirmation of the centralized nation-state s authority (Gupta 1998; Ludden 1992). Indian agrarian 482

3 Developing compliance and resistance and environmental history has begun to examine how this colonial apparatus was both inflected by, and was itself constitutive of, transformations in development regimes, environmentalist discourse and social and natural landscapes (Agarwal and Sivaramakrishnan 2000; Arnold and Guha 1995; Gadgil and Guha 1992; Gilmartin 1994; Grove et al. 1996; Ludden 1999; Sivaramakrishnan 1999; Skaria 1999). Development s purported ability to control and transform both cultural and material environments guided post-independence interventions. The most prominent of these was the Green Revolution beginning in the 1950s, involving the intensification of Indian agriculture through high yielding seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and mechanization (Anderson et al. 1982; Gupta 1998). Such interventions have been more recently criticized for disrupting social relations, causing environmental degradation, and deepening political stratification (Shiva 1988). Certainly, development has been an important vehicle for structuring political relations, producing knowledge and transforming material environments in postindependence India (Brass 1994; Gupta 1998; Ludden 1992; Parajuli 1991; Visvanathan 1997). Yet development interventions do not uniformly structure, but are refracted, reworked and sometimes subverted in particular localities particular interventions articulate with deeper histories of government attempts to regulate and discipline landscapes and livelihoods (Moore 2000: 655). More recently, theorists have reflected on recent transformations in development, especially as shaped by economic globalization. A global financial architecture, composed of free trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), multinational corporations, nation-states and institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), is changing patterns of mobility, production and consumption. Through free trade, corporations are able to take advantage of weaker labour markets, diminished tariff barriers, simplified regulatory conditions and greater resource access (Klein 2000). Many actors dissenting from these processes and articulating the negative social and environmental effects of globalization have been termed new social movements (NSMs), the cross-border networking of which constitute transnational advocacy networks (TANs) (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Klein 2000). In India over the past two decades interconnected environmentalists, tribal rights and feminist movements have become increasingly important in shaping development interventions (Agarwal 1998; Parajuli 1991). Their political presence has become heightened as globalization articulates with conventional development schemes. The Narmada conflict Before proceeding towards an analysis of the Narmada conflict, I shall briefly outline the trajectory of state, adivasi and activist relations in the region over the past two decades. 1 The Narmada River is located in central and western India, its 800-mile journey to the Arabian Sea passing through three states, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. This region is home to several distinct, though interrelated groups; the smallest population in this region is comprised of several adivasi groups, such as the Bhil, Bhilala, Gond and Korku, living primarily in the forested land further downstream from the riparian plains. These tribal groups are differentiated from other inhabitants of the region through their marginal economic and political status, their 483

4 Ajay Gandhi subsistence resource use and their distinct cultural and religious practices, and they constitute the focus of this article (Baviskar 1995; Paranjype 1991). As currently conceived, the Narmada Valley Damming Project (hereafter, the NVDP) includes 30 large, 135 medium and 3000 minor multipurpose dams on the Narmada river and its tributaries. The centrepiece of the project is the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) in Gujarat, which has been constructed to over 90 feet of its projected final height of 130 feet. Gujarat is the prime beneficiary of the Narmada project, despite the fact that most of the dams and their environmental and social impacts occur further upstream in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. Gujarat s position over the past two decades has been that, despite displacement and submergence, the project s benefits such as irrigation water and electricity will alleviate widespread problems of drought and poverty (Sangvai 2000). Against this position, the NBA came into being through the effort of activists and researchers in the early 1980s, some of who were advocates in adivasi communities in and around the Narmada Valley. Its initial focus was on obtaining adequate rehabilitation and resettlement provisions for displaced persons. These measures vary significantly between the three states, usually involving one or two hectares of new land per affected family. Furthermore, such provisions were earmarked only for those in the catchment area, ignoring thousands of families to be displaced by the project s canal infrastructure (Dwevedi 1998; Fisher 1995). Evidence mounted in the 1980s of systematic government duplicity in providing resettlement (on waterlogged or arid land, for example), and illegal and coerced removals. For this reason, in 1988 the NBA moved beyond lobbying for adequate rehabilitation and demanded that the project be shelved. Its conflict with the state parties to the NVDP has since been manifested in various ways. 2 Direct action and protest, principally through the satyagraha, 3 but also by physically refusing officials entry into villages (gaon bandhi) and blocking roads into the valley (rasta rako), has been one method of countering displacement (Dwevedi 1998). Legal action by the Andolan and state parties has resulted in both dam construction and stoppage at various points. Furthermore, the intervention of actors such as the World Bank or the central government has shaped the project s realization (Baviskar 1995; Drèze et al. 1997; Dwevedi 1998, 1999; Fisher 1995). The NBA argues that a massive and technically unwieldy water transport and energy distribution infrastructure cannot be achieved without incurring significant foreign debt and loss of sovereignty. It also opposes the displacement of 400,000 people from adivasi and other communities in the three states, mostly without adequate rehabilitation and resettlement provisions. Finally, the Andolan has resisted the NVDP s large-scale environmental effects, mainly the result of reservoir flooding, which includes over 37,000 hectares of submerged land and the loss of large tracts of forests (Dwevedi 1998). Because of these various complaints, the NBA has deployed environmentalist and anti-globalization rhetoric, although its primary concern is displaced communities, including adivasis in the Narmada Valley. In the autumn of 2000, the Indian Supreme Court ruled against the NBA s public litigation lawsuit filed against Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. After six years of deliberation, during which time a stay order was issued on the construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam, the court decisively ruled in favour of the project s continuation, allowing construction to proceed immediately. In the period afterwards, the 484

5 Developing compliance and resistance NBA has maintained vigorous opposition to the project, mainly by monitoring the impact of the NVDP s rehabilitation and resettlement provisions, upon which further construction hinges. Due to a paucity of legally mandated resettlement land in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, and the NBA s tenacious monitoring of rehabilitation measures, further large-scale displacement has been avoided. Afforestation and corruption in the Narmada Valley I am concerned in this section with conceptualizing interactions that occur in tribal villages and small market towns in the Narmada Valley between state forestry, police and revenue bureaucrats, and tribal inhabitants and NBA activists. One of the most contentious aspects of the NVDP is the compensatory afforestation programme designed to replant more than double the estimated 20 million trees to be submerged (Brieger and Sauer 2000: 2). On the part of the state, compensatory afforestation represents the progressive nature of the NVDP, a unique marriage between the goals of development and conservation. As a former Gujarat Narmada and Major Irrigation Projects Minister wrote, the Sardar Sarovar Project was the first major river valley project in India to assimilate the philosophy of development with environmental awareness (Vyas 2001: 50). Afforestation involves forestry department officials travelling to villages both within and outside the submergence zone to plant trees. Legally, such actions fall within the purview of colonial-era laws giving the state ownership and management rights over most forested land (Sivaramakrishnan 1999). Yet, because of traditional adivasi encroachment on these lands for grazing and harvesting activities, villagers see them as confiscation of their resources. Indeed, such interventions are highly charged affairs and have turned into one of many points of contention between the NBA and the state. Here, I recount my conversations with adivasis on this topic, which illustrate their complex reactions and responses to government intervention. It is a warm July 2000 evening in Domkhedi, an adivasi village in Maharashtra that serves as the base for the yearly NBA satyagraha. A small group of men have arrived from Turkheda, an adivasi village in Gujarat further downstream from Domkhedi and towards the Sardar Sarovar dam. We begin speaking about adivasi relationships with the state (sarkaar), with Pravin, an Andolan activist, translating from Pawri to Hindi. The men recount how officials demand bribes in exchange for silence about forest encroachments made for grazing and cultivation that are illegal under state regulations. The conversation quickly turns to the compensatory afforestation programme. A senior member of the group, Dedla-Bhai, begins speaking: The land is our village (gaun). The government doesn t know how to manage the forests properly, the trees [planted] will not grow properly. Another man chimes in, invoking the ever present issue of government corruption when he says: The government contractors wouldn t let the forests even grow, they quickly uprooted the saplings and used the land for farming so that they and their cronies would benefit from the produce other times we would not let them get even this far. We would pay the forester so that the plantations would not go ahead and we could continue using [the land]. What seems especially frustrating is that there was no consultation or discussion with local villagers about the implementation of this programme. A younger man from the group says: they didn t even ask 485

6 Ajay Gandhi us which species to plant, or how to take care of them; they planted foreign species which are alien to the environment and they die. I ask about responses to these officials and am told that villagers initially confronted officials when they arrived in Turkheda and refused them entry onto village land. Later, officials threatened violence, backed up by the presence of police contingents. Interestingly, mention is made of dissension within the village about afforestation. Some adivasis are said to be clearly in favour of afforestation, even with the knowledge that such practices are likely to destroy economically productive land, simply because government officials implement afforestation by employing adivasis from the village itself. The money to be made from such labour is increasingly valued insofar as adivasis in many parts of the Narmada Valley depend on regional markets to buy fertilizer, pesticides, food grains and other items. Furthermore, other communities are unable or unwilling to risk further bureaucratic harassment or violence if opposition is shown. And last, some communities have not resisted such programmes but accepted them in return for official promises of future benefits such as improved resettlement conditions or cash payouts. This conversation illustrates that villagers in Turkheda understand state development in terms of prevailing relations of patronage, coercion and corruption with government functionaries. Adivasis would have to pay bribes to forest officials to prevent them planting trees on productive farming and grazing land, or facilitate such activities after official tree planting had occurred. Such negotiation of state development is not limited to compensatory afforestation. Similar dissension about participation in the NVDP s resettlement and rehabilitation programmes is detailed in the next section. As such, adivasis whose land was intervened upon and confiscated in the name of conservation were not united in a single show of opposition to the compensatory afforestation programme. Rather, the complexities of their disempowerment can result in tribal communities if grudgingly and unenthusiastically further entrenching state power. Such conditions illustrate that the complex interweaving of dominance and resistance occurs simultaneously in the same field of power: social actors manoeuvre amidst crosscutting fields of force, and resistance emerges not from an originary site but rather through oppositional practices (Moore 1998: 353). Resistance is a process of negotiation between actors who operate from particular positions along a spectrum of power relations. Complex, horizontal engagements of convergence and disengagement rather than static relations of dominance from above and resistance from below characterize the relationship between the state, adivasis and activists. 4 Negotiating national development In this section, I examine how negotiations of dominance and resistance over development manifest themselves at the regional and national level in India, and how this zone of conflict is inflected by and, in turn, shapes actions at the local and transnational level. 5 By regional and national levels, I refer to sites such as towns and cities as well as the social and organizational modalities, including government courts and the media, through which the conflict is represented and reported to wider audiences. As explained earlier, the NBA has repeatedly articulated the various political, social, financial and scientific risks inherent in the Narmada project (Dwevedi 486

7 Developing compliance and resistance 1998). The movement has been able to leverage this articulation of risk through nonviolent resistance strategies. To illustrate this, I recount a public NBA demonstration that occurred in August The Indian Supreme Court had appointed Grievance Redressal Authorities (GRA) in each dam-affected state to independently investigate resettlement and rehabilitation problems. In practice, each GRA conducted short, often-incomplete studies of village conditions that supported the government and project authority s position (Aravinda 2000). During July and August 2000, the Maharashtra GRA did his rounds in a limited set of villages in Maharashtra. He visited Manibeli, the first village behind the Sardar Sarovar dam to face submergence, and the satyagraha site of Domkhedi. Both of these meetings were cursory, with the GRA acting condescendingly to both the NBA activists facilitating these meetings, and the adivasis who had arrived to voice their complaints about resettlement and compensatory afforestation. The government authority attempted to stifle the adivasis complaints by refusing to see more than a small fraction of adivasis from Narmada-affected villages in Maharashtra; by demanding quantitative answers in a language (Marathi or Hindi) most adivasis do not understand; by claiming that the activists were romantic and determined to keep adivasis backward; and by being accompanied by a large caravan of more than 100 police officers and state officials. For NBA activists and regional adivasis, such behaviour is symptomatic of longstanding and widely practised state corruption. Despite this, the adivasis who spoke repeatedly challenged the GRA s authority and, through him, that of the government. Dedli-Bhai, an adivasi from Maharashtra, expressed his frustration with resettlement and surveying: What are we going to get in compensation? If the land really was there, everyone should have been resettled by now. Noorgi Padir, a villager from Manibeli, echoed this complaint: Basically, the government has no land. In my village, three people were allotted the same piece of land! Can the government give us all that the jungle gives us? Later, Dhamenia, one of the few adivasi women activists to speak, said: We went in to [the resettlement site of] Auli for rehabilitation. The same land allotted to us was shown to others from [the village of] Pipalchop. We kept approaching the government with problems but they were not resolved. They continue to show the same land to others with the use of police force. The government has made lots of promises but we have been tricked. They gave us rocky land and others from Auli have also decided to come back [to their home villages], because they haven t been given good land. In response to these meetings, the Andolan felt it necessary to conduct a dharna (solidarity protest) in early August when the Grievance Redressal Authority would further interrogate tribals. More than one thousand activists and adivasis from Maharashtra walked several hours through the hilly Satpura Range to Dhadagaon, the regional town where the GRA was holding court. The protest begins with a parade through town, where NBA activists and adivasis shout the movements slogans: Hamara gaon ma amra raj (Our rule in our villages!); Adivasi ekta Zinadabad (Adivasis united in victory!); Hindi, Marati, aur Gujarati, Larne Hum ek hi jati (Hindus, Marathis and Gujaratis, we fight as one!); Vikas chahiya, vinash 487

8 Ajay Gandhi nahin (Development is needed, not destruction!); Dubenge par hatenge nahin (Even if flooded we will not move). After settling down at the police compound serving as the government authority s base, NBA activists begin calling up representatives of project-affected adivasi communities who have become key opposition figures. One of these adivasi leaders, Vesta-Bhai from the village of Sikka, speaks about the government attempts to divide village solidarity by offering different levels of resettlement and compensation. He notes how many families who have accepted relocation have found that their new land is waterlogged or unsuitable for grazing or agricultural activities: We are here to be with those inside that are being interrogated by [the GRA]. We all have had the same experiences of suffering because of Sardar Sarovar. The government will not do proper surveying to give us the pataa [ownership papers] so then we are not resettled because we are encroachers [on state lands]. If we complain about resettlement or stop afforestation, the officials come with their thugs and get bribes. Almost every NBA rally I attended consisted of a similar set of speeches. They seemingly represent experiences throughout the Narmada Valley, implying unbroken solidarity within and between affected adivasi communities on the Narmada issue. Yet, support for the Andolan is fractured, continuously negotiated and highly dependent on class and other striations. For example, there is much intra-village and inter-village dispute about whether to accept resettlement and rehabilitation provisions. Each adivasi s relationship to development is shaped by his or her position within the village hierarchy, and resultant relationship with state functionaries such as lower level punerwasen (resettlement) bureaucrats. A village s geographical proximity to and cultural integration with government and market actors, and its status within state boundaries is also important. According to the NBA, the government s aim is to gain legal consent from villagers, while simultaneously withholding resettlement and compensation provisions. Higherranking village leaders with patronage relationships to bureaucrats will often manage to obtain above-average resettlement terms while others in the same villages cannot. In adivasi villages, this has resulted in some families refusing to leave, other families living in new government sites and in urban slums, and still others who had been relocated but who have returned due to poor land conditions at these sites. Given that such variegated experiences are present within villages, resettlement has produced pockets of compliance and resistance within adivasi communities in attitudes toward the Narmada project. This has found its clearest expression in adivasi communities that have distanced themselves from the NBA, and instead become allies of those NGOs that support the Narmada project. Some of these organizations act as important functionaries of state power, by employing adivasis in installing hand-pumps and building roads (Sangvai 2000). Other NGOs such as ARCH-Vahini are more independent of state agendas but have nevertheless aligned themselves with the government s position on the overall benefit of the dams, and only became involved to facilitate adivasi resettlement. These realities contrast markedly with the automatic resistance to the project implied in activist and some academic literature, as well as the government s own view that 488

9 Developing compliance and resistance adivasis support the NVDP because of their greater access to modernity and progress. 6 It can be argued further that NBA protests are not only practices with resonance in regional and national sites. Rather, they are events situated between, and in negotiation with, international discourse and local actions. Development discourse becomes articulated and contested in such sites, drawing from adivasi narratives that often reveal disjuncture between state claims of munificence and grassroots expressions of corruption. Conversely, state and activist actions implicitly involve other levels of engagement, with foreign donors who demand the participation of civil society in making damming projects sustainable, and with local tribals who are invoked in international projects of environmentalism and globalization. Globalizing local resistance The NBA has opposed a damming project being implemented by three regional governments and affecting remote tribal villages in western India. Yet enclosing our analytic frame solely around these actors and sites would elide the importance of transnational influences in shaping such a conflict. Despite a rhetorical emphasis on national development and a peoples struggle, systemic processes operate through a variety of scales, and are mutually implicated with the remote or local (Beck 2002; DeFilippis 2000). This is especially true of a conflict involving transnational lenders and activists, national managers and lawyers, and village-level tribals and bureaucrats, all contesting the essential meaning and realization of development. In this section, I examine how the three riparian states supporting the Narmada Valley Development Project, and resistance of adivasis and activists, is inextricably bound up with a diverse set of transnational actors. I begin by recounting a particular example of Western activism, and then move on to examine different forms of transnational advocacy. It is a windy November 2000 evening on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. Ten students, teachers and activists, mostly of Indian origin, have converged on the Indian consulate beside Central Park. Most of the people present are in the Narmada Solidarity Coalition of New York, formed after a senior NBA activist visited North America in The purpose of this demonstration, as with others held in the United States and England in the fall of 2000, is to protest against an Indian Supreme Court ruling that supported the implementation of the damming project with little concession to the NBA s claims. Soon after, NBA allies initiated letter-writing campaigns and organized NBA solidarity demonstrations at Indian consular offices in London, New York and San Francisco. As late afternoon turns into evening, several activists converge at the side entrance of the consulate, a fortunate spot as a continuous flow of people enter and leave the consulate s visa office there. After an initial argument with two New York policemen who have been instructed by the consulate to quell the demonstration, they relent. A series of NBA chants and songs are sung out, placards of opposition mounted and flyers distributed to passers-by. Some of the Indian activists at the New York demonstration have been to previous NBA satyagrahas and they begin to sing some of the Andolan s protest songs. After 90 minutes, during which time a consular official emerges to write down the group s demands, and a couple of elderly Indian men 489

10 Ajay Gandhi accuse them of mischief, the demo is stopped and the group retreats to an activist s apartment to discuss their efforts. Besides the Narmada group in New York, the NBA has articulated its resistance through environmental groups such as the International Rivers Network (IRN), Environmental Defense Fund, and Friends of the Earth. Human and indigenous rights organizations such as Survival International and Amnesty International, and development organizations, such as the Association for India s Development, have also been allies (Udall 1998). Several coalitions have been formed solely around the Narmada issue, such as the Narmada Action Committee and Friends of the River Narmada, a predominantly North American and European collection of activists. These constitute transnational advocacy networks (TANs) (Keck and Sikkink 1998) or globally linked collectives of social movements. Such networks are comprised of relays or nodes that exert pressure on state and corporate actors and produce a boomerang pattern whereby international contacts can amplify the demands of domestic groups, pry open space for new issues and then echo back these demands into the domestic arena (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 12 13). 7 International protests and lobbying against the Narmada project has changed the character of negotiation between the state and domestic actors in complex ways. Although the impact of public protest is difficult to measure by any calculus, they are part of a complex and interwoven series of practices that can be traced to the grassroots level. For example, significant lobbying by international NGOs against the Narmada project s World Bank and Japanese aid occurred in the 1980s and early 1990s. The NBA formed alliances with legislators and aid bureaucrats in the USA and Japan whom in turn controlled World Bank funding activities. A network of actors in the West worked closely with activists in India, and courted sympathetic legislators and World Bank bureaucrats through letter-writing campaigns and symposia. This accumulated activity led to pressure on the World Bank and Japanese government, both of which eventually withdrew their support for the Narmada project (Udall 1998). In turn, this lack of major donor funding has repeatedly stalled the government s progress on dam construction. NBA allies have also emerged as signs of political unrest that magnify towards lending institutions and foreign investors. In this sense, social movements not only succeed in articulating the financial, environmental and social risks produced by development (Dwevedi 1999), but also by creating political and economic risks and disturbing the stable investment climate that states are expected to provide: the power of the state is not undermined through conquest, but deterritorially, through the weightlessness and invisibility of withdrawal (Beck 2002: 34, emphasis in original). Transnational advocacy networks are fluid entities with changing participants, sources of funding and projects. They expand and contract spatially and temporally, and utilize hybrid discourses and practices to achieve their ends (Dwevedi 1998: 137). Within the Friends of the River Narmada, there are organizations with differing financial resources, political visibility and organizational strengths, and the makeup of this loose alliance has changed with new institutional priorities and personnel turnover. This fact is unsurprising, given that transnational alliances involve diverse organizations and agendas, and that the dominant sources of funding and legitimacy derive from the West. Such alliances also undermine notions of civil society that imply greater organizational equality and political leverage vis-à-vis hegemonic 490

11 Developing compliance and resistance institutions, such as multilateral financial institutions, than actually exists (Fox and Brown 1998). That resistance networks are contingent, mutating entities prone to conflict and divisive approaches should not be surprising given that they depend most critically on individual human agency to actualize advocacy agendas. Many analyses of cross-border activism have placed emphasis for their success on the increased access to information technology (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Certainly, a crucial component of transnational advocacy is rapid information circulation that spreads messages of dissent, builds sympathy and material support, and mobilizes other organizations. For example, the New York demonstration recounted above was the immediate result of an Indian Supreme Court decision that was discussed on electronic discussion lists. Among the most important of these electronic forums has been the Narmada Samachar, a weekly compilation of Narmada news. Other important vectors for electronic mobilization and education have been mailing lists operated by AID and the IRN. 8 Yet collectives such as the Friends of the River Narmada are not transnational in nature because of the availability of cheap communication, nor do these technologies signify a dramatic shift in power relations. Instead, I suggest that social movements are constituted and transformed through acts of agency and imagination (Cunningham 2000). As Appadurai (2000: 6) notes, terms such as international civil society do not entirely capture the mobility and malleability of those creative forms of social life that are localized transit points for mobile global forms of civic and civil life. Such a perspective, emphasizing both the constitutive nature of global networks and their dependence on human agency at critical moments, was often articulated during my conversations with NBA activists. As a senior NBA worker said to me in Maharashtra in July 2000, The NBA has not always been so large or well known. We were simply a few scattered social workers working on adivasi and dalit [lower-caste] oppression. We were lucky that people like Patrick [McCully of the International Rivers Network] came along when they did. And also that the Review Team [of the World Bank] had sympathetic people. Conclusion I began this article through an interest in how macrologies (Gupta 1995) and globalisms (Tsing 2000) interface with different modalities of culture, history and power. By examining the Narmada project s constitution and contestation at the local, regional, national and finally international level, I have attempted to explore these concerns and made two substantive points. First, I have highlighted the constant and frequently fractious interconnection of actors, histories and locales in the conflict over the Narmada dams. Development can neither be said to be a Western process imposed by elites from the first world nor a project resisted by grassroots communities in the third world. The multitude of Narmada actors locked in unstable contests over power have been situated at points ranging from adivasi villages in the Narmada Valley to New York street corners. Western discourses of development find their realization in state practices that frequently have left tribal communities victims of land confiscation, bureaucratic harassment and forcible displacement. Among these government projects are compensatory afforestation and resettlement programmes. 491

12 Ajay Gandhi Conversely, adivasi and activist practices, such as non-violent disobedience and their insertion into human rights and environmental lobbying come to be important catalysts in World Bank deliberations, national government proceedings and state compensation frameworks. Each situation is inscribed in and by different scales, including discourses that are village-level manifestations of allegiance and hostility. The second substantive point unfolds out of my first. The conflicted negotiation of actors who wish to implement or oppose the Narmada project has highlighted the contingent nature of power. There is a spectrum of choices that actors undertake, in some cases enhancing state hegemony and subjugation. In other cases, these acts of agency open up spaces for increased subaltern voice and power. Importantly, dominance and resistance are interrelated in complex ways that can articulate or diverge. For example, in a number of ways, the discourses, policies and actions of the state can be complementary with those of the NBA or its tribal constituents. Adivasis can readily participate in state afforestation and resettlement programmes that expropriate their use of village land, while others may vigorously oppose such policies. In sum, the state-nba-adivasi nexus is characterized by complicated discursive interactions of both complicity and disarticulation, of political complementarity as well as conflict. Ajay Gandhi is at the Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, USA. Acknowledgements An award from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and supplemental research funds from Quebec s Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l Aide à la Recherche supported this research. I am grateful to Colin Scott, John Galaty, Lyla Mehta, and Minakshi Menon for comments on earlier drafts of this work. Ali Rogers and two anonymous referees provided useful comments that strengthened this piece. Any mistakes rest with me. Notes 1. This analysis is based on interviews with former and current NBA activists in Maharashtra and Gujarat, and ethnographic fieldwork in the Narmada Valley in There, I travelled to several tribal villages in Alirajpur tehsil (district) and conducted interviews with adivasis. I also observed many rallies, cultural programmes and protest marches in the area as part of the monsoon-long satyagraha (protest) called by NBA activists against the Narmada project. Participation during in NBA solidarity activities in North America constituted an integral part of my fieldwork, such as at a public rally in New York mentioned later. 2. While the dominant framework of this analysis is couched as an opposition between the state and a social movement, it is important to recognize that social movements and NGOs can be as easily configured into conventional power matrices, and thus further state governmentality (Ferguson 1999). Further, important fissures in both the state and activist position over the Narmada issue have been evident. The NBA is conventionally thought to represent the entire gamut of advocacy efforts, but there are other social movements whose postures diverge in whole or part from the NBA s insistence that the project not be undertaken (Dwevedi 1999; Sangvai 2000). Moreover, periodic differences between the three state proponents of the project, mainly due to Gujarat s disproportionate benefit from 492

13 Developing compliance and resistance the dams, have been provided opportunities for furthering the NBA s agenda (Dwevedi 1998; Fisher 1995). 3. Satyagraha literally means soul-force, as coined by Gandhi to denote non-violent protest that is a quest for truth; it is not a passive form of protest, insofar as Gandhi envisioned satyagraha as a strategic tool to extract concessions coercively (Fox 1997: 70). The NBA s satyagraha has for the past decade been the centrepiece of their opposition to the Narmada project. While it refers in this article to a collective process of resistance, satyagraha is also a site for action, carried out in designated base villages. In 2000, these were Domkhedi, Maharashtra, and Jalisindi in Madyha Pradesh, both adivasi villages that will be submerged by the NVDP. 4. Such a conception of power borrows from Foucault s notion of the microphysics of power, where power is seen as a continually unfolding set of strategies, positions and conflicts (Foucault 1980: 174). My argument also benefits from a reading of the heterogeneous subaltern studies project. This work has traced out aspects of insurgency and conflict in pre-independence India that move beyond state-centric and centre-periphery models. Instead, they emphasize the autonomous realm of subaltern groups, as evinced in the contingencies of local politics and the fissures marking hegemonic discourse (Guha 1997; Guha and Spivak 1988). 5. I focus in this section on the negotiation of development by adivasis and activists, but it is important to highlight the state s own strategizing and that its actions are not equivalent to, but rather structure, others decisions. The state s own negotiation of a movement that exceeds its purview yet shapes its actions deserves fuller examination than can be provided here. I do believe that the often violent assertion of autochthony is an important tactic of postcolonial states responding to external threats to their authority (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). For example, the Gujarat government has consistently invoked nationalist rhetoric to silence dissent and catalyse repressive police action against NBA and adivasi agitators. In its formulation, the NBA is a foreign conspiracy supported by Western intelligence agencies or environmentalists trying to keep India backward (Sangvai 2000). 6. It should be no surprise given the variance in NBA-adivasi relations that the movement has come under criticism for usurping and essentializing adivasi voices (Baviskar 1995; Dwevedi 1998). Other Indian social movements composed of diverse agents and interpreters, and whose efficacy depends on deploying multiple ideologies, face similar critiques (Linkenbach 1994; Sinha et al. 1997). 7. It is important to qualify any suggestion that NBA alliances with international activists are either seamless or without dissension. Certainly, there are activists who pledge loyalty to the NBA s goal, but disavow its methods. Others who have raised awareness on behalf of the movement believe in more modest aims (such as improved resettlement for displaced persons) but dislike the movement s insistence on the project s stoppage. These differences in opinion are constantly debated with NBA activists, even when solidarity exists on specific actions. 8. The AID web site is and IRN s is The NBA s official web site ( run by Andolan supporters abroad, maintains an extensive database of press releases, relevant documents, images and photos, and links. References Agarwal, A. and K. Sivaramakrishnan (2000) Introduction: agrarian environments, in A. Agarwal and K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds) Agrarian environments: resources, representations and rule in India, Durham: Duke University Press,

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