Arundhati Roy - The Cost of Living

Table of Contents

To the Narmada
and all the life she sustains.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE COST OF LIVING

Arundhati Roys polemic is necessary and important. She combines brilliant reportage with a passionate, no-holds-barred commentary on two great Indian betrayals masquearading as progress. I salute both her courage and her skill.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

PREFACE

In May 1998, the government of India conducted a series of nuclear tests in the Thar desert and declared itself a nuclear weapons state. Within days the government of Pakistan followed suit.

I was in the United States on a reading tour for my book, The God of Small Things, when this happened. My first response was one of disgust at the condescension, the hypocrisy, and the double standards of the reaction in the western world. (Can the Blacks handle the Bomb?)

I returned to India, and it took a few months for me to stop reacting to the international reaction and to begin to address what we had done to ourselves, to our lives, to our futures. In July 1998, I wrote The End of Imagination. In August, it was published simultaneously in two mainstream magazinesFrontline and Outlook as a cover story. Both publications set aside competing commercial considerations and did this despite the cacophony of nationalism and jingoism that was (and still is) being orchestrated by political parties and much of the press.

Nuclear bombs, we were told, were necessary as a deterrent. A deterrent to what?

Today, a year after the nuclear tests, the hostility between India and Pakistan has spiraled into a flashpoint. Were not supposed to call it war. But both countries are counting their dead.

Oh, but its only a conventional war, I was told by a senior journalist who was interviewing me.

Only a conventional war?

Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a real war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each others heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?

Thank you, government of India, thank you, government of Pakistan. But most of all, thank you, government of the U.S. of A.

Were deeply, deeply grateful.

The second essay, The Greater Common Good (the first in this book), was also published simultaneously in Outlook and Frontline in June 1999.

In February 1999, the newspapers reported that the Supreme Court of India had lifted a four-year-long legal stay on the construction of a controversial megadamthe Sardar Sarovarthat was being built on the Narmada river in central India. It is one of 3,200 dams being planned on a single river. Its proponents boast that this is the largest, most ambitious river valley development project ever conceived in human history.

I began to follow the story. The more I read, the more horrified I became. In March I traveled to the Narmada valley. I returned, numbed. I returned unable to ignore or accept what everybody (including myself) has, over the years, gradually accepted and successfully ignored.

India is the third largest dam-builder in the world. In the last fifty years (since Independence), India has built 3,300 Big Dams. Their reservoirs have uprooted millions of people. Yet there are no government records of howmany people have been displaced. India does not even have a national rehabilitation policy.

These thousands of dams have been built in the name of National Development. Yet 250 million people have no access to safe drinking water. At least 350 million people (more than the countrys population at the time of Independence) live below the poverty line. Over 80 percent of rural households do not have electricity.

Geographically, there has been an increase in flood-prone and drought-prone areas since 1947!

The governmentevery Indian governmentrefuses to address the problem. To even consider that something is amiss.

Even as I write, the monsoon is raging outside my window. Its high noon, but the sky is dark, and my lights are on. I know that the waters of the Sardar Sarovar reservoir are rising every hour. More than ten thousand people face submergence. They have nowhere to go. I have tried very hard to communicate the urgency of what is happening in the valley. But in the cities, peoples eyes glaze over. Yes, its sad, we say. But it cant be helped. We need electricity. The story of the Narmada valley is nothing less than the story of Modern India. Like the tiger in the Belgrade zoo during the NATO bombing, weve begun to eat our own limbs.

Arundhati Roy
July 1999

THE GREATER COMMON GOOD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are two men who fall into the without whom (this essay couldnt have been written) category:

Himanshu Thakker, who first revealed to mebrilliantly, meticulously, almost shylythe horrors of the Narmada Valley Development Projects. To him I owe my first (belated) conspectus of this intricate method of pulverizing a people.

Patrick McCully, whom Ive never met, but whose book Silenced Rivers is the rock on which this work stands. If you want to read a truly dazzling book on Big Dams, drop mine and read his.

Jharana Jhaveri, most tenacious of fighters and gentlest of friends, thank you for traveling with me. All the way.

Shripad, Nandini, Silvie, Alok, Medha, Baba Amte, and their colleagues at NBA. Extraordinary people, fighting an extraordinary war.

Deepak Sarkar and Anurag Singh, for friendship and cool, organized wisdom and advice.

N. Ram and Vinod Mehta, editors of Outlook and Frontline, who first published The Greater Common Good. There arent many like you around.

Jojo Van Gruisen, Golak Khandual, Arjun Raina, Sanjay Kak. Old soul friends. Fellow-travelers on this path.

Finally, Pradip Krishen, without whom my life would not be fully lived.

Thank you.

THE GREATER COMMON GOOD

If you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of the country...

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU, speaking to villagers who were to be displaced by the Hirakud dam, 19481

I stood on a hill and laughed out loud.

I had crossed the Narmada by boat from Jalsindhi and climbed the headland on the opposite bank, from where I could see, ranged across the crowns of low, bald hills, the Adivasi hamlets of Sikka, Surung, Neemgavan, and Domkhedi. I could see their airy, fragile homes. I could see their fields and the forests behind them. I could see little children with littler goats scuttling across the landscape like motorized peanuts. I knew I was looking at a civilization older than Hinduism, slated sanctioned (by the highest court in the land)to be drowned this monsoon [1999], when the waters of the Sardar Sarovar reservoir will rise to submerge it.

Why did I laugh?

Because I suddenly remembered the tender concern with which the Supreme Court judges in Delhi (before vacating the legal stay on further construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam) had inquired whether Adivasi children in the resettlement colonies would have childrens parks to play in. The lawyers representing the government had hastened to assure them that indeed they would, and whats more, that there were seesaws and slides and swings in every park. I looked up at the endless sky and down at the river rushing past and for a brief, brief moment the absurdity of it all reversed my rage and I laughed. I meant no disrespect.