TheDaak review

The Greater Common Good by Arundhati Roy,  India Book Distributor (Bombay) Ltd., 1999, 72,  ISBN 10: 8173101213  ISBN 13: 9788173101212

By Ankita Ojha

“It is a war for the rivers, mountains, forests of the world”

– Roy 1999:29. 

The Greater Common Good is compelling, thoughtful and provocative writing that not only problematises the contemporary debates on ‘development’ but also enables us to question the anti-democratic character of the Indian state. The book critically analyses the use of terminologies such as ‘national interest’, ‘common good’, and ‘modern’ as a rhetorical tool to legitimise specific developmental goals. However, its darker, mostly inhumane, anti-democratic site leaves millions of lives deranged. 

Roy captures the struggle against the Narmada dam in particular, although one can draw several parallels with the exhaustive accounts of complex realities of displacement, dispossession and vulnerabilities elsewhere. The book broadly engages with the political economy of dam construction and the politics of developmental aid by taking recourse to interviews, documents, reports, and narratives woven together with utmost sincerity, compassion and affection for the subject. 

Roy argues that there are two broad yet crude categories into which public perception of development is divided. On the one hand, we have “modern, rational, progressive forces of development” in contrast to “Anti-Development resistance fuelled by the arcadian, pre-industrial dream”(Roy 1999:4). On the other hand, there are Nehruvian vs. Gandhian ideological cannons. Roy eloquently keeps a distance from both and asserts her position as ‘no anti-development junkie’ or a ‘city-basher,’ having known “the isolation, inequity and potential savagery in villages,” (Roy 1999:2). Roy insists on focusing on “specific facts about specific issues in the specific valley” (Roy 1999:3). Understanding specificity stands for knowing the history of the space, its geography, its tradition, people’s ways of living and their multiferous-everyday relationship with Nature. She argues that the most effective weapon of ‘specificity’ is constantly dismantled by favouring homogenised big frames catering to the ideas of a handful of activists and emotionally charged media that ultimately forgo the diverse yet specific character of ‘Peoples struggle/resistance’.

Instead of theoretically examining the normative claims of pro/anti-dam supporters, Roy focuses on the ‘details’, ‘chronology’ and ‘parallel histories’ of the big dam construction under the tutelage of development. She argues that development is not a pre-conceived linear idea but always engulfs the question of ‘choices’, and one needs to be simultaneously aware of the accompanying political choices that decide Who wins/loses. What cost is paid by whom? Who benefits from what? 

The debate over the dam cannot be presented as a singular question but as a complex web of substantial issues about the nature of multi-layered Indian Democracy that encircles the faith of millions. The most pressing question in democracies revolves around the claims of ownership, distribution and redistribution of natural resources. Roy wonders, “Who really owns this land, its Rivers, its Forests?” (Roy 1999:3). The State enjoys popular legitimacy by becoming a flagbearer of the principle of the common (however not so common) good. Theoretically speaking, it reflects the aspirations of a Nation, unlike individual interests and enjoys legitimacy through power, dominance and leadership. Therefore, the onus of answering these questions of ownership lies with the state and its emissaries, such as the police, the bureaucracy, and the courts. Surprisingly, these components of the state apparatus produce unambiguous answers in one voice, maintaining the status quo and rewarding/protecting elites, neglecting the complexity and precarity of others. 

Through the dam project, the state apparatus penetrates deep into village life and alters its political economy. Roy provocatively writes, “India does not live in her villages. India dies in her villages”(Roy 1999:15). Villages act as periphery in service of the cities and are consistently exploited to revive the cities. Leaders, through their speeches, have created a delusional mystification and romanticisation of the village as a centre sanatorium of the state. The villagers do not constitute an active category of citizens/stakeholders in decision-making. However, villages are treated as experimental rats whose faith is enclosed in state registers created by Global/National ‘Experts’. The ‘Experts’, however, do not constitute a single group, which Roy fails to recognise. As she mentioned, the World Bank Committee report of experts explicitly stated the ‘exclusion of human and environmental conditions’ in the planning of a Multi-Purpose dam. It was the intervention of specialists that gave concrete examples of the devastating ecological changes these dams can bring. 

She unravelled the irony of Indian democracy, which has a thorough Land Acquisition Act of 1894 (amended in 1984) but does not have a National Rehabilitation policy. Therefore, Roy writes that the Indian Government is not legally bound to provide a displaced person anything but cash compensation, which ultimately gives a clean chit to carry forward accumulation by dispossession. The banal way in which cash compensation is awarded to a minuscule number of formal property holders, discarding a wide spectrum of the tribal populace living there for decades and centuries, is like putting a price tag on a few who have access to legal documents. The otherwise vast populace is stripped of living their natural life in their natural habitat. They are variegated from resources belonging to ‘the nation’, not particularly them as citizens. They are the ‘others’ of the state, unlike those prospering citizens who are the nation’s Real stakeholders. The ‘others’ are the lost, unknown, erased figures in the politics of numbers. Despite having profound-statistically detailed figures about the economy, the government of India failed to estimate the people displaced by Dams or relinquished in the name of ‘National Progress’. Roy asks, without knowing how much it costs and who is paying for it, how can progress be measured?. 

One is moved to question who these displaced people are and where they go after being dispossessed/displaced. The Commission for Scheduled Castes and Tribes reported that almost 60% were tribals among the displaced populace. “The great majority is eventually absorbed into slums on the periphery of our great cities”(Roy 1999:12). They constitute a pool of cheap labour living in poor conditions with heightened insecurity. The ethnic ‘otherness’ of the victims became quite evident. One recognises how these ‘others’ of the nation are subsidising the lifestyles of the richest. 

The myth of ‘local pain for national gain’ has become common knowledge, leading to the abandonment of big dams worldwide. Dams today are not considered as the pinnacle of modern civilisation but rather as a cemetery for the poor, disenfranchised and dispossessed populace. However, despite this, India has emerged as the third-largest dam builder in the world. To answer this puzzle, Roy navigates the politics of development aid. One of the primary reasons to carry forward multipurpose Dam constructions has to do with the availability of easy access to loans from the World Bank in the form of developmental aid. Aid is widely accepted by the sages of neo-colonialism who have extreme faith in linear progression like the West. However, as James Ferguson writes, the net effect of such development is the strengthening of bureaucratic power and “de-politicization” of the questions on resource allocation. The politics of ‘aid’ and ‘debt’ are proportional. Roy argues that India is in a situation where it pays more than it takes from the bank. According to the World Bank Report (1993-1980), India paid $1.475 billion more than it received. The widely served instrumental goal of greater common good served by Aid, often bereft of moral concerns, ends up doing greater harm than good to the general populace however, on the other hand, it increases the net worth of elites, which economists might call as state-enabled capitalism circus.  

Roy contends, “The Indian State is not a state that has failed”-It is a state that has succeeded impressively in what it set out to do”—the redistribution in favour of elites (Roy 1999: 14). Roy argues that the ‘state’ is not the solution but part of the problem or, precisely, the creator of the problem. She moves further and critically examines the concept of an overstretched state and argues that the state in itself is duly responsible for creating structures that not only produce poverty but also act as an instrument to ‘pit poor against the very poor’ while elites reign. They are the Government’s way of accumulating authority “A brazen means of taking a farmer’s wisdom, water, land, irrigation from him and gifting it to the rich”(Roy 1999:7).

Narmada is not a case of isolation or reality of a particular place from which one must take lessons but a part of the alleged development pattern followed throughout the Globe. Unlike scientists, the failed experiments continue to be repeated in the state’s developmental Lab to buttress the ego and pockets of ‘experts’. Millions of people’s lives are straight-jacketed in closed containers of numerical assumptions and technical details based on limited data. Roy engages briefly with the tale of big Dams worldwide, encounters the same stories, and discovers that the same actors are involved everywhere, inflicting the same kind of violence. A Nexus of politicians, bureaucrats and dam construction companies, which Roy calls ‘the Iron Triangle’, cemented by institutions such as the World Bank. The rhetoric remains the same, enshrining the ‘greater common good’ of the nation. She calls upon the hypocrisy of the Western world- who march against human rights violations in countries like China but wipe their hands off while cashing on the mass displacement of millions of people during dam construction. 

The Narmada Valley dam project, widely known as ‘the greatest environmental disaster’, laid naked the inability of our system to provide social and environmental justice. The dam submerged biodiversity, and wide forests comprising of teak, bamboo, and agricultural land and ultimately led to food insecurity, soil erosion, surface water pollution, groundwater depletion and a large-scale disturbance to hydro and geological systems. Despite the historic failure of such projects, the obsession with dams continues to play in the corridors of political leadership. In the era of the Anthropocene, where humans have gained an enormous capacity to impact nature as never before, large dam constructions are causing irreversible environmental damage by making life more vulnerable and risk-ridden. It is high time to rethink theories such as de-growth, feminist environmentalism, sacred ecologies and Buddhist economics laying principles of ‘small is beautiful’ and many more to see the feasibility of ecologically sensible, pro-people development.