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News From
Bangladesh News Paper
River-linking a state vs
people conflict: Patkar
Shahidul Islam Chowdhury
New Age
Sun, December 19, 2004
The people of South
Asia must unite to fight the battle against the controversial plan to
interlink trans-boundary rivers to withdraw water and to cordon rivers by
constructing dams, said Medha Patkar, a celebrity activist leading the
Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) of India.
‘You [people of Bangladesh] have to take the lead in the battle as you
are the biggest victims since you are in the downstream,’ she told New Age
on Friday morning at the Osmani Memorial Auditorium in Dhaka.
‘We also will continue to raise our voices in India as the project
creates concern for people living in the river valleys there [India]’, Medha
said.
She is visiting Bangladesh to attend a three-day international conference
on ‘Regional Cooperation on Transboundary Rivers: Impact of the Indian
River-Linking Project’ that began on December 17. Later, on Friday evening,
she addressed a general session of the conference at the auditorium of the
Institution of Engineers of Bangladesh.
Medha Patkar spearheads the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the 20-year-old
struggle against the dam project that threatens the right to life and
livelihood of the people of India’s Narmada valley, which has grown into one
of the world’s largest non-violent social movements. She has been at the
centre of the struggle, gaining worldwide renown for sharp analysis and
courageous activism that has included long fasts, police beatings and jail.
The Narmada Sagar, one of the 30 major dams on the Narmada and one of the
two biggest dams, is likely to submerge 254 villages.
Medha said that interlinking of rivers to divert one-third of the water
of the river Brahmaputra, 60 per cent of which is used for irrigation and
maintaining the ecosystem of the Brahmaputra basin, should not happen unless
Bangladesh is consulted. ‘Bangladesh should raise its voice not for
information [about the project] only; Bangladesh should also be involved in
the consultation to determine the feasibility of the project,’ said Medha,
who also leads an influential network of over 150 mass-based movements
across India called the National Alliance of People’s Movements.
Medha, a former faculty member of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences,
also emphasised the need to involve other neighbouring countries, that are
sharing the same river systems, in the movement against the
much-talked-about project which, in her words, ‘is the worst project one
could ever think of’.
‘The project is going to cause devastation, which many people are not
able to understand, to the people of the region, many more times than the
Farakka Barrage caused in Bangladesh and the Narmada Dam in India,’ she
said, in her warning about the dangers of the $120 billion project.
‘It will destroy the ecosystem, which really supports the human habitat,
the fish and also the forest. In Bangladesh, for example, the very large
number of people who live in the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Megna deltas, may
lose their life support system, that has already been disrupted by the
Farakka Barrage, by destruction of aquatic wealth and causing huge floods
without really supporting the flood-plain,’ she said.
‘Intra-state conflict will come up within India and regional conflict
will be emerging within South Asia too,’ Medha warned.
Medha, however, was less enthusiastic about the ‘government-level
dialogues’ to resolve disputes regarding sharing the water of common rivers.
‘I don’t believe that a state can initiate a genuine dialogue as the
nation-states in South Asia are more influenced and controlled by the global
powers than the people in the countries.’
‘The people to people dialogue can create the alternatives that could
compel the states to include the issue in their political agenda and give
rise to the right kind of intervention in ongoing politics which is
exploiting the people,’ she said.
‘Unity of the civil society of South Asia has to be strengthened. River
valley organisations of the region will have to come together to unitedly
fight the battle,’ Medha said. ‘It should also be the concern of the human
rights organisations and those who are fighting [against] the
globalisation-liberalisation paradigm.’
‘I think, at the moment, we only can take a strong position against the
impractical plan [river-linking], which is in a way the manifestation of a
colonial tendency within the country [India] and within the region [South
Asia] where people have always been and are being exploited,’ she said.
Medha told, ‘We are facing the same kind of challenges, which have come
up because of the states’ wrong approach to natural resources management and
at the cost of the common people — in favour of urban industrial societies
within our own nation-states.’
She warned that the ‘conflict’ should not be seen as an “India versus
Bangladesh issue” at all. ‘Rather it should be seen as “states versus people
conflict” caused by the governments’ wrong and anti-people position and
‘state versus science, experience and conscience of the civil society at
large’.
Questioning the directives of the president [APJ Abdul Kalam] and the
chief justice of India, Medha asked, ‘How can our president and chief
justice take such a position when the feasibility studies have not been
completed yet?’
‘The stand taken by the president was unfortunate,’ Medha complained.
‘Courts are the means of providing justice,’ she said, ‘but the court’s
order, which affects people’s life badly, should be challenged.’
When asked about another one of India’s controversial project, the
Tipaimukh Dam, a multipurpose barrage on the river Borak upstream of the
Meghna, a major river system of Bangladesh, Medha said, ‘We are against the
Tipaimukh dam.’
‘The north-east of India has become the target now…which is clear because
during the World Water Forum, held in the Netherlands, all of those who
represented the Indian government were talking more about the north-east and
the north-eastern rivers than anything else,’ said Medha, also a
commissioner of the World Commission on Dams, the first independent global
body formed to examine the water, power and alternative issues related to
dams across the world.
‘It is because many of the bilateral and multilateral agencies want to
invest in the water sector in South Asia, although this kind of dam will
ultimately destroy the natural ecosystem and the human population which is a
part of that,’ she said.
Taking in hand a ‘sealed’ bottle of water provided by the conference
organisers to the delegates to drink during the programme, she said, ‘A
number of companies want to tap the rivers.’
‘They want to commercialise, corporatise and market the drinking water,’
she said. ‘The politics of water management is big business.’
She criticised the role of the multinational lending agencies, including
the World Bank, which, in her words, ‘are keen to tap every river’.
‘Whether it is exploiting the Tipaimukh or the Ganga or the Brahmaputra,
they [lending agencies] will be involved in it,’ Medha predicted.
‘Are we really for this kind of privatisation of rivers?’ she asked. ‘Are
we selling out our rivers, which will adversely affect the people’s
sovereignty?’
‘SAARC [South Asian Association for Regional Conference] and all other
cooperative efforts must go on…no doubt about it,’ said Medha, adding
however that the common people should be heard during the SAARC summit
[scheduled to be held in Dhaka in early January next year] if they [SAARC
leaders] want to really represent the people of the region who feel ‘not
quite safe’.
‘That kind of security is of much more importance than any kind of
insecurity caused by the so-called terrorists,’ said Medha. ‘The politicians
should not stick to the agenda of George Bush or WTO. Their agenda should be
to use the resources within the region more effectively and efficiently and
democratically. And that would have been discussed if the SAARC leaders
believed in people’s sovereignty, not in their own nation-states’
sovereignty.’
In her first day in Dhaka on Thursday, on the 34th Victory Day, Medha
condemned the brutal genocide launched in Bangladesh during the Liberation
of War in 1971. ‘I will continue to protest against repression of humanity,
whether it is in Iraq or in Gujarat or Bihar in India’, said Medha.
In her fifty years of life she has received numerous awards, including
the Goldman Environment Prize, BBC’s Green Ribbon Award for the Best
International Political Campaigner, and the Human Rights Defender’s Award
from Amnesty International.
Medha urged Bangladesh to form a civil society body composed of people of
all walks of life, including farmers, fishermen, engineers and
policy-makers, of the co-riparian countries. ‘Your great friends are people
living in the river valleys in India and they will be on your side.’
‘It is because we have a common cause — and that is humanity,’ Medha
said. ‘We need a common programme.’
Source:
New Age.
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