Subalternity and Silence

The notion of “the subaltern” emanated from Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist writings on the “subaltern classes”, which deal with the role of the intellectual in the cultural and political struggle of the subaltern (Spivak 1999, p. 283). Ranajit Guha later redefined Gramsci’s term ‘subaltern’ in the context of postcolonialism as “the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite’”, whereby ‘elite’ refers to dominant foreign and indigenous groups (Ranajit Guha 1988, p. 44). In addition to this, regional economic and social developments create what Spivak calls “the floating buffer zone of the regional elite-subaltern”, which includes ambiguous groups extending from impoverished landlords to rich or upper-middle peasants (Spivak 1999, p. 284f.). Conscious of the “essentializing language” used by Guha, Spivak resists an explicit definition of the subaltern in her 1988 essay (Spivak 1999, p. 285). Instead, she introduces the concept of epistemic violence to describe the violence towards non-Western ways of knowing used in the “project to constitute the colonial subject as Other.” (ibid., p. 280f.) In this context, Spivak locates the subaltern subject at “the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silenced center) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat.” (ibid., p. 283)

To clarify the consequences of epistemic violence, Spivak draws on the example of the British abolition of widow sacrifice in India under East India Company rule, laid down in the Bengal Sati Regulation of 1829, which banned “the practice of suttee, or of burning or burying alive the widow of Hindus” (Harlow et al. 2003, p. 361). The fact that the Sanskrit word sati, misspelled by the British as suttee, describes a good and virtuous wife, already traces the bottom line of Spivak’s critique in an ironical way, for “white men, seeking to save brown women from brown men, impose upon those women a greater ideological constriction by absolutely identifying, within discursive practice, good-wifehood with self-immolation on the husband’s pyre.” (Spivak 1988, p. 305) The female subaltern subject in this discourse can either be a victim or the sati who “actually wanted to die” (Spivak 1999, p. 297), but there is no space from which she can speak (ibid., p. 307).

Spivak then presents the suicide of Bhuvaneshwari Bhaduri as “an unemphatic, ad hoc, subaltern rewriting of the social text of sati-sucide” (Spivak 1988, p. 308). The author relates that, in the year 1926, the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Bhuvaneshwari was a secret member of a group involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence and, unable to commit a political assassination, she hanged herself to safeguard the group (ibid., p. 307). Convinced that her death would be reduced to “the outcome of an illegitimate passion”, she waited for the onset of menstruation to disprove an illicit pregnancy (ibid., p. 307). Spivak, who reads this gesture as “a reversal of the interdict against a menstruating widow’s right to immolate herself”, points out that Bhuvaneshwari’s family eventually diagnosed her death as a case of illicit love (ibid., p. 308). The young woman’s (political) attempt to resist misreading—to speak—met with an absolute negation of female agency (Morris 2010, p. 5f.). It is this experience of epistemic violence, grounded here in the British codification of Hindu Law, which makes the subaltern by (non)definition a not necessarily silent but silenced subject (Spivak 1988, p. 307f.).

On the whole, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a critique of the position of Western intellectuals like Foucault and Deleuze, who, according to the author, ignore the epistemic violence of imperialism when they express that “the oppressed, if given the chance […] and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics […] can speak and know their conditions.” (ibid., p. 283) For Spivak, however, to confront the subaltern, the heterogeneous Other, “is not to represent (vertreten) them but to learn to represent (darstellen) ourselves.” (ibid., p. 288f.) This theoretical discourse is broken down in this thesis into an empirical approach to the case of the NBA in order to analyse the anti-dam movement’s interaction with subaltern groups via often urban and intellectual activists and to discuss the movement’s ways of re(-)presenting itself and the subaltern. In this context, I consider the tribal or adivasi population ^[1] in the Narmada Valley as subaltern, for adivasis experience epistemic violence in various forms. An example can be found in the pathway for ‘tribal development’ prescribed by the post-colonial Indian state (Das Gupta 2020).

World Society and ‘the Powerless’

Goals falling under the general rubric of ‘development’ are described by Meyer et al. (1997) as embedded in world-cultural models, which shape world society of the post-colonial era. Following these authors, I make use of the concept of world society to illustrate the global spread of norms and principles that gave rise to conflicts over development in the Narmada Valley. In this view, the institutionalisation of world-cultural models leads to structurally similar, rationalised nation-states as responsible actors in a stateless world society (Meyer et al. 1997, p. 145). Scientists and professionals, seen as “disinterested rationalized others”, are the mediators and cultural innovators of this society, enabling nation-states to implement advanced models like sustainable socioeconomic development (ibid., p. 165). Confronted with often conflicting principles from a variety of dominant models, such as economic growth and environmental protection, rationalised actors like nation-states tend to decouple formal models from actual practices (ibid., p. 153). In consequence, international organisations, together with activist groups and other domestic actors, call attention to gaps and failures in the implementation of world-cultural scripts to enforce conformity of nation-states with “world-approved policies” (ibid., p. 160).

By asking why only a small number of conflicts attract the attention of an international audience, Bob (2002) extends the conclusion of Meyer et al. (1997) that “the growing list of perceived ‘social problems’ in the world indicates not the weakness of world-cultural institutions but their strength.” (ibid., p. 175) The author argues that non-Western local movements must conform to the needs of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to attract support of “potential backers in Western nations” (Bob 2002, p. 40). Accordingly, I assume that the NBA simplifies and universalises the voices of the subaltern to make them relevant to a wider audience (Bob 2002, p. 40). Yet, Lipsky’s (1968) work on protest as a political resource of relatively powerless groups adds to this assumption a more nuanced understanding of movements’ audiences. In this regard, the problem of “the powerless”—groups that do not possess sufficient resources to directly confront their target—is “to activate ‘third parties’ to enter the implicit or explicit bargaining arena” of an objected policy (Lipsky 1968, p. 1145). ‘Third parties’ refers here to the reference publics and interest groups of a protest target, who interact with the protest constituents through communications media (ibid., p. 1153). In the Narmada case, I identify the urban ‘elite’—scientists and professionals who influence public opinion in India’s cities—and international NGOs, embodying the authority of sciences and professions, as the dominant third parties. Both act as the reference publics of the NBA’s protest targets, namely the Indian state and global institutions like the WB. Third parties may also form alliances with a protest group if their value orientation in the conflict is similar (ibid., p. 1146). As will be seen in later chapters, such alliances between the NBA and urban and international actors were the movement’s key to critical bargaining arenas.

Environmentalism and Development

As an alternative to Tilly’s (1986) concept of the “repertoire of contention”, Guha and Martinez-Alier (1997) offer what they term the “vocabulary of protest” to allow for a better description of the NBA’s direct and traditional forms of action. In this way, they add to Tilly’s solely instrumental understanding of direct action an expressive dimension, which emphasises that social protesters not only intend to effectively defend their economic and political interests with their strategies but also to pass judgements in “struggles over meaning” (Ramachandra Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997, p. 13). With reference to Lipsky (1968), I suggest that statements of this expressive dimension are also indirect forms of action, used by the NBA to convey information to third parties via communications media. Furthermore, this concept allows me to identify subaltern statements of purpose and belief in local forms of protest that are seldom part of a larger media campaign. By learning to interpret the protest groups’ vocabularies, it becomes possible to gain a better understanding of their definitions of and positions in the struggle.

In order to compare the expressions of the NBA and adivasis involved in the movement, I use a structure developed by Gadgil and Guha (1994), who analysed the environmental movement in India—including anti-dam movements like the NBA—with regard to its material, political, and ideological contexts. By and large, the authors argue that the country’s economic development (colonial exploitation and planned development) and the social origins of the movement (threats to survival and livelihood options) resulted in an “environmentalism of the poor” specific to India (Gadgil et al. 1994, p. 131ff.). In comparison with its “rich” counterparts, this type of environmentalism is characterised by direct action and traditional forms of protest, a less scientific debate, and more serious consequences of the environmental degradation for human populations. The material, political, and ideological expressions of traditional Indian environmentalism thus emphasise a struggle for livelihood options that is missing in Western movements, which are primarily concerned with the conservation of ‘wilderness’ (Gadgil et al. 1994, p. 130ff.). And yet, I maintain that the authors fail to distinguish between a movement and its subaltern constituents, an imbalance which this thesis seeks to redress.

Displacement of Tribal Populations

Since the Tribunal’s 1979 Award, only twelve major projects of the NVDP have been completed. ^[5] Delays in the formulation and implementation of these projects were in part due to a political and administrative framework at union and state level that complicated decision-making processes; another relevant factor was the growing opposition to large dams (ibid., p. 38ff.). Already in 1976, grassroots mobilisation by the people’s science movement Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad resulted in India’s first successful campaign against a large dam. Together with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), this movement to protect the Silent Valley succeeded in sparking transnational criticism of the hydroelectric power scheme in Kerala’s tropical forest. In 1984, its campaign finally convinced the state authorities to incorporate the project area into a national park (ibid., p. 42ff.). Inspired by this victory, anti-dam movements across India gained momentum during the 1980s. In a primarily tribal area of Chhattisgarh (then part of Madhya Pradesh), opponents of the Bodhghat Project made use of the newly passed Forest Conservation Act, 1980 to bring the construction work at the dam site to a halt. Moreover, domestic as well as foreign NGOs, such as the WWF and Survival International, urged the WB to withdraw its funding offer for the dam in 1988 (ibid., p. 49f.). Even though the state government at that time abandoned Bodhghat in 1995, the current Bhupesh Baghel government moves ahead to resurrect the irrigation scheme (John 2020).

In the Narmada Valley, much attention was focused on Gujarat’s SSD, as the backwaters of its reservoir cause displacement in all three riparian states. ^[6] Thus, the first episode of domestic resistance occurred when the Government of Gujarat entered into negotiations with foreign funding agencies in 1978. Khagram (2004), who highlights the transnational links of the Narmada movement, notes, however, that this resistance “was ultimately unsuccessful because of the weakness of the tribal groups and local nongovernmental organizations involved.” (Khagram 2004, p. 83) Soon thereafter, Arjun Singh of the Congress Party in Madhya Pradesh began to mobilise merchants and middle-class farmers in the severely affected Nimar region against the first orders of the Tribunal, but the resulting movement to “save Nimar” collapsed shortly after Singh won the state elections that same year (Baviskar 2005, p. 202). Another episode of domestic resistance followed in the early 1980s against a Gujarat resolution of June 1979 that—in accordance with the Tribunal’s rulings—excluded oustees without legal titles to their lands from compensation claims (Khagram 2004, p. 87f.). Since this mainly concerned tribal people who lived as “encroachers” on state-owned forest and wastelands, several groups emerged to provide various forms of assistance to affected tribal communities (Wood 2007, p. 133ff.).

One of these groups is ARCH-Vahini, an NGO that was formed in 1980, when Anil Patel, founder of Action Research in Community Health (ARCH), teamed up with young activists of the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini, who worked on rehabilitation issues in 19 Gujarat villages (ibid., p. 135). According to Patel, ARCH-Vahini first approached tribal villages in July 1980. At that time, “[t]he tribals knew nothing about the project and their imminent displacement. The landowners among them were served Land Acquisition notices, but they knew little about their entitlements, or about the place they were going to be resettled.” (Jean Drèze 1997, p. 70) Hence, the activists started to build a campaign for improved resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) of Gujarat’s tribal people. In 1983, they sent a letter to the WB, which was to finance the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) with credits and loans totalling US $450 million. The NGO argued on behalf of the tribals without land titles and thus drew the bank’s attention to a hitherto unknown problem. By mid-1984, ARCH-Vahini extended its campaign to the transnational sphere, with Oxfam-UK becoming the “major link between the concerned officers and executive directors of the World Bank and the tribals.” (ibid., p. 75) Much of this exchange found expression in the 1985 loan agreement, in which the WB set out a resettlement policy that required Gujarat to “give a minimum of two hectares of land to each encroacher and each major son.” (ibid., p. 77) Two years later, ARCH-Vahini’s strategy finally paid off, when Gujarat announced the valley’s most comprehensive R&R policy (Wood 2007, p. 139).

Dams as ‘Destructive Development’

While ARCH-Vahini and other like-minded NGOs in Gujarat started to provide critical support for the implementation of the new R&R policy, similar organisations in the neighbouring states were sceptical about the plans (Dwivedi 1998, p. 146). Moreover, newly formed groups like the Narmada Dharangrastha Samiti in Maharashtra and the Narmada Ghati Navnirman Samiti in Madhya Pradesh also raised environmental concerns, thereby drawing attention to a wider set of issues (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2007, p. 433). Already in mid-1983, a team of Delhi University students around Ashish Kothari, a founding member of the environmental action group Kalpavriksh, ^[7] conducted the first independent study of the NVDP’s likely environmental impact. In their report, the authors questioned not only the possibility of R&R but also “whether the project as a whole […] and the broad policy behind it, are really ‘development’ in the true sense of the word or whether they may not lead to a chain of environmentally destructive consequences which could negate all the short-term gains made by the project.” (A. Kothari et al. 1984, p. 907) This fundamental critique of the scheme was the first step towards a strategic split between the groups in the Narmada Valley that occurred in 1987 and manifested itself in the formation of the NBA between summer 1988 and 1989 (Babu 2010; Wood 2007). ^[8]

Medha Patkar, who left her PhD position at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences to work with tribal people on the Maharashtra side of the Narmada, soon became the leading figure of this movement that demanded a complete re-evaluation of the NVDP (Baviskar 2005, p. 202f.). Similar to activists like Patel, Patkar’s work in the valley began on the issue of R&R in the submergence zone of the SSD, where she exchanged information with WB consultant Thayer Scudder as early as 1984 (Khagram 2004, p. 92). ^[9] In 1986, she met with activists of Survival International and the Environmental Defense Fund, who connected her to WB senior officials in Washington, D.C. (ibid., p. 108f.). During that time, Patkar was also involved in the formation of the Narmada Dharangrastha Samiti and the Narmada Ghati Navnirman Samiti, which—unlike ARCH-Vahini—“announced total opposition to the SSP on environmental, social and economic grounds” in 1988, before joining forces under the banner of the NBA (Dwivedi 1998, p. 147). Added together, the formation of the movement in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh was the expression of a split that loomed since 1987 for three location-related reasons: (i) the environmental impact of the project would be felt mainly in the two upstream states, (ii) many tribal communities there were dependent on the forests that would be submerged, and (iii) the activists considered the R&R of those communities an impossible task due to a scarcity of usable and nearby forest land (Wood 2007, p. 141). This stance was further underpinned by the fact that the right to information and participation of the most adversely affected (tribal) populations was denied, while basic project information was either incomplete or did not exist (ibid., p. 140).

In its initial years, the NBA organised numerous mass protests, with the number of participants rising from 8,000 in February to up to 60,000 in September 1989 (Baviskar 2005, p. 206). One month after this massive National Rally Against Destructive Development in Harsud, Madhya Pradesh, Patkar and two other Indian activists gave a testimony in a subcommittee hearing of the United States House of Representatives on the “serious social and environmental issues which surround the construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam” (USGPO 1990, p. 1). This increased pressure on the WB and other foreign funders of the SSP, since a growing number of activists and politicians from all over the world called for the suspension of project funding (Khagram 2004, p. 119). In response, the WB sent an Independent Review team to the Narmada Valley. It recommended the Bank in a report of 1992 “to step back from the Projects and consider them afresh.” (IELRC 2009b, p. 8) The Indian government decided in March 1993 to cancel the WB financing to avert further damage to the NVDP in the international sphere (Wood 2007, p. 160ff.).

Meanwhile, the NBA continued its protests at the national level, with major events like the day-long blocking of a highway bridge over the Narmada with 10,000 people. In December 1990, a six-day march of more than 8,000 people to the SSD site culminated in a month-long satyagraha and an indefinite hunger strike by seven movement leaders (Baviskar 2005, p. 207f.). From then on, annual monsoon satyagraha led to extensive press coverage and solidarity support from the urban middle-class and intellectuals (Dwivedi 1998, p. 153). International recognition followed in the form of the Right Livelihood Award for the NBA in 1991 and the Goldman Environmental Prize for Patkar in the year after (ibid., p. 156). After an increase of the dam height against existing orders, the movement filed two writ petitions in the Supreme Court of India in 1994 seeking a stay order on the SSD construction and a comprehensive review of the entire project (Khagram 2004, p. 133f.). As a result, work on the already 80.3-metre-high dam remained suspended from 1995 to 1998. ^[10] The Supreme Court gave its final judgement in 2000, permitting to raise the dam to a height of 90 metres and making further raising conditional on the implementation of an action plan providing for environmental safeguards and reviewed R&R measures (NCA 2019, p. 11). Although the NBA upheld its protest in the valley as well as in court, the SSD reached its full height of 163 metres in 2017. Following an unsuccessful hunger strike of Patkar in September 2019, the reservoir reached its highest capacity, flooding the remaining villages in its submergence zone (Yadav 2019). Just one year later, people in low-lying areas of South Gujarat faced an avoidable flood disaster caused by SSD operators who failed to gradually release water from the dam’s overfilled reservoir after increased rainfall in the upper Narmada Basin (SANDRP 2020).

Adivasis and Subaltern Expressions

They told us to leave, “you have no right to stay here” they said. They told us to go anywhere we could. Out of fear we all left. They said they would give us land, but they did not. […] I used to cultivate 20 acres of black fertile land and the produce used to sustain my entire family for the whole year. I had 6–7 heads of cattle; half the land was left for them to graze. After we were driven out, the cattle did not have enough to eat so they died. With the compensation I got I bought 4 acres of land. But the land is not good, I can barely manage to produce enough for 2–4 months. (CAISA n.d.)
Balu, 70, marginal farmer, Ghatakheri (Madhya Pradesh), Bhilala Tribe—1987

Activists and Movement Expressions

Since independence a preference for giganticism has come to dominate our development paradigm. Our planners, politicians and experts have opted wholesale for large dams and gigantic industrial units, and have dug mines and exploited forests in pursuit of their elitist vision of progress and development. The cumulative ill-effects of all this ‘development’ are now assuming disastrous proportions for a large section of the population, particularly for its most depressed strata – the tribals, the peasants and labourers – along with the already depleting natural resource base and our scarce financial resources […]. (Dwivedi 1998, p. 148)
Action Committee for National Rally Against Destructive Development—1989

Governments and the World Bank

Formed as rationalised actors in world society, the union government in Delhi as well as the concerned state governments in Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh take formal responsibility for the dam projects in the Narmada Valley (Meyer et al. 1997, p. 153f.). Together with international financial institutions, most notably the WB, they constitute the protest targets of the NBA and the first audience of the movement’s protest examined in this chapter. In this respect, global organisation like the WB are not just constituents of the states’ ‘reference publics’, which are discussed in the following section (Lipsky 1968). Instead, I regard them as part of an organisational framework that expands “agendas of concern for international society, including economic development,” (Meyer et al. 1997, p. 163) and also as accountable actors involved in the definition and implementation of national policies (S. Kothari 1996, p. 1483). Towards an answer to the question of how subaltern struggles are taken up by movements that claim to defend or even represent subaltern groups, this section takes a closer look at the direct interaction between the NBA and its twofold protest target at the national and global level.

Given that elections are the usual mechanism for influencing state policy in modern representative democracies, it is remarkable that resistance to the NVDP took the form of a non-party movement that ideologically distances itself from the structures of electoral politics. Nevertheless, the NBA also acted pragmatically by “lobbying and pressuring state and central governments directly and through the intercession of sympathetic party politicians.” (Baviskar 2005, p. 225) Perhaps the most direct involvement in party politics occurred when movement leader Patkar joined the Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man’s Party) in 2014. Battling “for land, shelter and water” (Layak 2014), she contested the Mumbai North East constituency in the 2014 Indian general election but lost and left the party the following year because of its “undemocratic” way of functioning (Ranjan 2018, p. 86). Another, more intensively used ‘bargaining arena’ for the NBA’s fight are the courts at the state and union level, which had already proved essential for the previous R&R campaign of activists around ARCH-Vahini (Khagram 2004, p. 95).

Interestingly, the NBA’s most important writ petition (No. 319 of 1994) in the Supreme Court of India, which caused work on the SSD to remain suspended from 1995 to 1998, directly referred to the silencing of the local subaltern by project officials:

The grievance of the Petitioner in this Petition is that a large number of persons, mostly tribals and other marginalised sections of society, are being forcibly displaced and uprooted from homes and lands on account of this Project without giving them any opportunity to be heard and without properly compensating or resettling them and without even properly explaining to them the nature of the Project and seeking their participation. (quoted in ibid., p. 134, emphasis added)

As a consequence, the Court appointed Grievance Redressal authorities for each state concerned, who visited resettlement sites and talked to affected villagers but in fact showed no willingness to understand local problems (Aravinda 2000, p. 4003). Similarly, the final judgement of 2000 recognises only the technical facts presented by the governments as valid, as it follows dominant scripts focused on human progress, national development, and dams as tools of development (Rajagopal 2005, p. 374ff.).

On the one hand, accepting the courts as final arbiters between the NBA and the governments limited the scope of the movement’s vocabulary of protest. The Supreme Court judgement ultimately delegitimised more direct political action, such as hunger strikes or jal samarpan (sacrifice in the water), that the movement had effectively used to pressure the states in terms of SSP-related human suffering (ibid., p. 370). Further, the six-and-a-half year case allowed the governments to justify their “inaction with respect to policy changes by pointing to the sub judice status of all the issues before the court.” (Randeria 2004). On the other hand, pressure to take legal action increased, as protesters in the valley faced severe state repression and regular police brutality in the form of lathi-charges (Sangvai et al. 1991). In July 2007, for instance, police officials violently dispersed a satyagraha in Badwani and arrested Patkar, who then wrote a letter from prison to the National Human Rights Commission (Appendix, l. 500f.). Thereupon, the Commission took cognisance of the complaint and ‘set the law in motion’ (NHRC 2008). In this way, the state and union courts emerged as the last resort to hold the states accountable for gross violations of law and human rights (Rajagopal 2005, p. 368f.).

Another factor that added to the central role of national law since the mid-1990s was the de facto withdrawal of the WB from the SSP in 1993, which reduced the movement’s opportunity structures in the international sphere (ibid., p. 385). Until that point, the NBA leapfrogged the domestic parliamentary arena by making use of a network of Western NGOs that provided access to WB officials and parliaments of influential WB member countries. Although the movement succeeded in pushing the Bank to pull out of the project, the sustained lobbying abroad “led to several unintended long-term structural changes in Washington, DC rather than in India.” (Randeria 2004). In sum, the main legacies of the campaign—a policy that ensures consultation with project-affected people prior to project appraisal, the creation of an independent Inspection Panel, and a review of the R&R aspects of all active projects—originated in the WB structures only after the loan agreement for the SSP had already been cancelled (Wade 2011). Since the Government of India did not abandon the project in 1993, the movement’s successful campaign to make the WB ‘step back’ eventually “left the NBA at the mercy of the Indian state, including the Supreme Court” (Rajagopal 2005, p. 368). Given the desperate situation of the struggle in the valley at that time and the illegal submergence of the first six villages without resettlement, the NBA sought relief in the language of law but in the end deprived itself of its traditional vocabulary of protest.

Urban ‘Elite’ and Western NGOs

The second protest audience of the NBA includes what Lipsky (1968) terms the ‘reference publics’ of the protest target, identified in this case as the domestic urban ‘elite’ and the authority of Western NGOs. Broadly speaking, the former comprises intellectuals and NGO professionals who influence public opinion in India’s cities through communications media and thereby challenge a national development model that depicts the construction of large dams as a means for economic and human progress. Resource-rich NGOs in the West, in turn, use the local movement to raise awareness in world society of environmental and human rights violations in the Narmada Valley, thus urging global actors like the WB to harmonise their policies with norms and principles derived from a world-cultural model of sustainable development. Employing media-effective forms of direct action, the NBA managed to form alliances with both groups constituting the reference publics, which enabled the movement to access new arenas for protest. At the same time, this reinforced the need for a simple and universal framing of the struggle, which consolidated itself as the fight against ‘destructive development’, emphasising the nonconformity of global institutions and the nation-state with world-cultural scripts.

In fact, the emergence of the NBA itself can be conceptualised as an alliance formation of relatively ‘powerless’ rural-based mass movements, which was fostered by Patkar and other leading figures with urban and academic background. Besides, research and publications by city-based NGOs and independent scientists rationalised the ideological diversity of the various groups, integrating them into a larger movement against a project that breaks-up and disempowers local groups through displacement (S. Kothari 1996, p. 1478). Under the umbrella of the NBA, activists in the valley focused from the outset of the movement on coordinating actions with like-minded reference publics of the Indian states and related international institutions. Nationally, the resulting network of NGOs and intellectuals not only facilitated the mobilisation of up to 60,000 people for mass protests like the National Rally Against Destructive Development in 1989 but also catalysed the formation of a broad alliance of people’s movements, which brings together 222 organisations from across India in the NAPM. Headed by NBA leader Patkar, this alliance adopted the struggle against development-induced displacement of subaltern groups and extended it in 2005 with the Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan (Save Homes, Build Homes Movement) from the Narmada Valley to the slum areas of Mumbai (Ranta-Tyrkko et al. 2016).

Moreover, the NBA’s social movement character together with its media-effective forms of protest attracted the attention of urban authors, filmmakers, and celebrities, who were instrumental in influencing public opinion in India’s cities. This led to the release of three major films about the movement between 1990 and 1995, followed by an internationally well-received British production in 2002. ^[14] NBA activists then distributed these films to schools and colleges with National Service Scheme units and started discussions with students and other people outside the valley (Appendix, l. 531ff.). In 1999, shaping of public opinion took on a new dimension when the 1997 Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy dedicated an entire book to the Narmada and leading activists of the NBA. ^[15] However, in the political context of the late 1990s, with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in power in Gujarat and at the union level, this provoked “even greater organization, mobilization, and violence by pro-dam actors, particularly extreme Hindu fundamentalist groups and leaders.” (Khagram 2004, p. 247) Nevertheless, the author’s support for the movement and the colourful “Rally for the Valley” in summer 2000 was widely covered in the international media (Wood 2007, p. 174f.).

When the political winds shifted at the national level, the NBA was able to draw on an international alliance that had been developing since the early 1980s. Remarkably, this period also saw a rapid increase in the number of transnational human rights, environmental, and development organisations, which supported the dissemination of global norms on sustainable development (Khagram 2004, p. 11ff.). In this context, the local movement in the Narmada Valley emerged as a resource for a variety of campaigns by international NGOs that sought to advance their own agenda, for example in the field of multilateral development banks. This gives rise to the question of whether the NBA addressed these organisations on its own initiative or vice versa. In the case of ARCH-Vahini, it was John Clark of Oxfam-UK who convinced Patel in 1984 to raise “this [R&R] issue in the U.K. and at the World Bank.” (quoted in ibid., p. 91) Two years later, Patkar was approached by Marcus Colchester of Survival International and Bruce Rich of the Environmental Defense, who were allied in a transnational campaign on multilateral development banks. Rich then “invited Patkar to the United States to consolidate the transnational anti-Narmada campaign.” (ibid., p. 109) In the late 1980s, the newly formed NBA took on a central role in this ongoing campaign, moving from the outset under the eyes of a transnational elite audience, which needs simple and universal claims that pass through the filter of the mass media.

Dam-Affected People in the Valley

The heterogeneous group of dam-affected people in the Narmada Valley constitutes the third protest audience of the NBA, ranging from subaltern hill adivasis and landless labourers to elite landowners in the plains. In order to create a broad support base at the grassroots, one of the NBA’s main functions at the local level was to unite these disparate communities in a common cause that could be found in displacement. This was facilitated by often socialist rural-based mass movements and tribal unions like the KMCS, which also provided basic resources, such as offices, to activists (Appendix, l. 466). Beyond that, the NBA successfully mobilised large farmers and landowners who feared losing their fertile agricultural land and ended up helping the movement to remain independent of external funding (Baviskar 2005, p. 219). The people in the valley were eventually brought together in demonstrations, where “the release of collective effervescence by the mass of singing, chanting bodies strengthen[ed] their resolve to fight.” (ibid., p. 226) In this way, the NBA temporarily sidelined local conflicts and problems, for example the ecological degradation caused by intensive agriculture, and replaced them with the overarching issue of submergence and associated cultural and material losses.

In keeping with the Gandhian ideology of village self-government, NBA activists sought to link the organisation of resistance to the creation of an alternative political culture in dam-affected villages. By living together with adivasis and consulting them in decision-making processes, they fostered confidence-building among this politically marginalised, subaltern group. Besides, the presence of Patkar and other female activists empowered women to encounter men and the state as citizens at village meetings and anti-dam protests (ibid., p. 217). The organisation of the NBA, however, was usually left in the hands of outside activists (ibid., p. 227), who regularly formed smaller groups of leading activists that were able to make quick strategic decisions in the light of current political developments (Appendix, l. 343ff.). Moreover, NBA activists often served as the sole sources of information for adivasis in remote villages and were thus in a position to set the agenda for action with the kind of information they provided. Not giving villagers the option to fight for more comprehensive R&R policies, they incorporated local struggles of the subaltern into a larger movement against dams and ‘destructive development’.

As the immediate goal of the NBA was “to halt the dam” (Appendix, l. 483f.), most activists left the villages in the submergence zone of the SSD when the dam began to bear the stigma of being a lost cause after the 2000 decision of the Supreme Court (ibid., p. 266). The movement had to channel its limited resources to other dam sites on the Narmada where the projects could still be challenged. At least in Anjanvara, this left the adivasis feeling stranded, neither in a position to speak nor to be heard: “No one comes through any more; there aren’t any meetings. Villagers miss the activists, their spirited energy and their counsel, the news and the connections they brought to the rest of the world. The tide of activity has ebbed.” (ibid., p. 279) In the end, the Bhilala were compelled to abandon their village and forest, together with their small fertile fields and much larger nevad land. Those adult villagers whose names appeared on the list of project-affected persons, which was drawn up in in the late 1980s and never updated again, had to accept either marginal cash compensation or inferior land in Gujarat, which in some cases was unsuitable for living and farming (ibid., p 274f.). The subaltern struggle against outside oppression and for sources of subsistence continues in other places with an even more reduced natural and material base.

A similar picture is visible in numerous partially submerged villages, where seasonal migration emerged as the survival strategy of many adivasi households, drawn into an environment of commodified nature and labour (Mayaram 2019). Yet, in some places along the Narmada, a legacy of the NBA persists in the form of jeevanshalas. The schools that grew out of the playful interaction between activists and children affected by the satyagraha in Manibeli in the early 1990s provided during their heyday an alternative education to several hundred adivasi children in about a dozen tribal villages (Appendix, l. 93ff.). Today, jeevanshalas continue to exist at nine locations in the Narmada Valley, but the rising reservoir levels during the monsoon season put also the remaining schools regularly at risk of submergence (ibid., l. 214ff.). The villagers themselves manage the institutions, whose curriculum was prepared with the help of urban activists and academics (Babu 2010, p. 241). In contrast to the government schools, it gives importance to local tribal languages, histories and cultures. In the Kakrana jeevanshala, education is free for girls, and the children of migrating parents are given the opportunity to stay back in the village and study; one of the graduates is now part of the Water Resources Department in Madhya Pradesh (Mayaram 2019). By knowing how to read and write the dominant scripts, this generation can rewrite its history from a subaltern perspective.