Volume 4, No. 7, July 2003

Just into the third year since the carving out of a separate hill state from an excessively large Uttar Pradesh and less than a year since the installation of an elected government led by a Congress veteran, the hard-working peasants of Uttarakhand – especially the women – are already crestfallen on finding the fruits of their struggle appropriated by the same set of exploiters – big companies, mafias, landgrabbers, imperialist agencies and other moneybags from the developed parts of the country. The hopes they may have cherished during their immensely popular statehood movement of regaining control over their own lands, forests and water resources that they lost by and by ever since the advent of colonialism, and of asserting their right to develop their state according to their own needs and priorities, were lost in the glitter of power surrounding the Vidhan Sabha, Secretariat and Police Headquarters in Dehradun and the High Court in Nainital. Undeterred by the rising aspirations of common Uttarakhandis, the state government of Uttaranchal has carried forward with increasing speed the process of deprivation and displacement witnessed for the last 55 years.

This unfortunate process is best mirrored in the two decades old saga of sorrow that has been unfolding with increasing poignance since the last two years around the 260.5 metres high Tehri dam project which would have a reservoir spread over an area of 44 sq. km., submerging the most fertile, irrigated lands and beautifully built traditional houses of not less than 125 villages and an entire historical town that has now being reduced to rubble by demolition squads; resettling a small proportion of the affected people in alien and under-provided geographical, economic and socio-cultural environs; causing untold hardships to well over 200 more villages that are likely to be cut off and rendered unsafe and unstable for those who stay back or are left out of the ambit of the government’s rehabilitation policy and possibly leading to serious disruptions of the weather cycle and the related crop cycle on either slope of the nearly 70 km. long valley that would hold a massive column of water.

Who would like to leave behind the free, secure and uncomplicated environment of the idyllic hill hamlets, where life’s material and spiritual needs are generally far more easily met than in the densely populated plains? If the endowments of nature itself and man’s relentless labour on it are not sufficient to fulfill one’s needs, it is the traditional spirit of sharing, characteristic of communities more or less insulated from the market, that caters to the essential needs of the old, disabled and incapacitated. Well over 80% of the rural population in these parts comprise of poor peasants who manage to produce crop, that provide for barely 2, 4, or at most 6 to 8 months each year. Jobs are scarce to come by and unemployment is rife even in the faraway metropolitan centres. And yet, such is the social fabric of the hills that seldom does the poorest of the poor have to face starvation. This social fabric that breeds simplicity, honesty and straightforwardness is being torn asunder by the inhuman, insensitive, undemocratic processes of land acquisition which involves evaluation of assets, calculation of compensation amounts, payments and allotment of alternative sites. The bureaucratic handling of the rehabilitation process has led to unfathomed corruption among officials on the one hand and on the other, misery and dehumanization, even greed among the affected population.

The old town of Tehri — built at the confluence of two tributaries of the Ganga, the Bhagirathi and the Bhilangana, as the seat of power of the truncated princely state of the Garhwali Trojan horse, King Sudershan Shah, who actively cooperated with the British when the latter trounced the Nepalese feudal army that controlled most of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh in the early 19th century — grew to witness the magnificient overthrow of the king in 1948 soon after Manvendra Shah’s enthronement in a mass peasant upsurge following the martyrdom of two Communist revolutionaries, Nagendra Saklani and Molu Bhardari and the nationalist local hero Sridev Suman. This historic and densely populated town was until recently the centre of opposition to the Tehri dam project formulated by the Indian comprador-feudal state under the overall guidance and technical and financial assistance of the Soviet Social imperialists and partial collaboration with the German MNC Siemens and a few other foreign companies. In December 2001, after the ‘famed’ environmentalist Sunder Lal Bahuguna abandoned his "Ganga Himalaya Hut" set up along the banks of the river, the fig leaf of his token protests was ripped apart. There was no hurdle left to the government’s plan of impounding the river by blocking two diversion tunnels just beneath the dam and causing panic among the recalcitrant town dwellers.

A special package of "rehabilitation allowance" was announced for shopkeepers, whereupon many of the rich businessmen fell to the bait and complied to orders to shift out to New Tehri town. Yet, the middle class landholders and a section of rentiers held fort and began a dharna demanding a similar allowance. This dharna may be a weak and passive form of protest, but it remains as a significant token of resistance being offered by the townsfolk. With most of the town devastated by demolition squads, this 16 month old dharna of about 250 landholders remains as a token of their refusal to accept crumbs as the price of eviction.

Apart from the townsfolk, thousands of rural families have refused to move out of their homes. Even after being allotted land and accepting 80 percent of their due compensation amounts, scores of villagers continue to stay in their traditional homes, tilling their ancestral land. Most have some grievances about the rehabilitation, but the underpinning to these grievances is the fact that they would rather pay back their compensation amounts as the price of being allowed to stay back, if given half a chance to do so. Many still hope that the government would have to grant land and compensation rights to all 18 year-olds, as recommended by a Parliamentary committee in 1996. Instead of accepting this recommendation, the authorities have refused to give rehabilitation rights to any family member other than the person who was the head of the family when land acquisition for the project began in the valley way back in 1976. Since then, the second and even the third generation of families have come into existence, and yet their existence is squarely denied. Is it their fault that the project could not be completed in time? Moreover, the plots allotted for resettlement are given to the oustees not on a ownership basis but on lease, whereas the plots they were ousted from were held as ownerships. Even after forcing peasants to occupy land which is no match to their own land, the authorities have the audacity to make them live like refugees without the status of a revenue village and without the right to demand proper water, electricity, road, transport, hospitals and other facilities from the government of the day.

The rehabilitation policy provides for a job to every oustee family. However, this crucial promise has shamelessly been shelved, thus making it clear that many important provisions of such reformist measures are more often than not a mere eyewash aimed at creating illusions that the exploiter state can deliver justice to the exploited classes. Asking families from the hills of Tehri Garhwal, where much of the food, fuel and fodder requirements are fulfilled by sheer labour and do not require cash payment, to settle down in the plains of Hardwar or Dehradun districts, where not even a blade of grass can be obtained without paying money, could be justified only if one of the family members was provided a job as a means of earning a livelihood. Backtracking from the promise of employment, therefore, amounts in this case to be nothing short of denying the oustees their right to earn a livelihood, and reducing them to a state of penury. Such are the devilish designs of the compradors. They uproot peasants from their land so as to amass huge profits from that land and, in the same breath, refuse to offer them the opportunity to earn a living even through wage slavery in a capitalist enterprise. The displaced poor peasants of the Tehri valley would have no option but to face increasing pauperization or eventually join the teeming millions serving as daily wage labourers in the domestic sector or become part of the unorganized and often migrant construction crews spread all over the country.

Another glaring lacuna in the rehabilitation process is the categorization of about 85 of the 125 affected villages as "partially affected". Those villages, in which less than 75 % families have 50 % or more of their total landholdings falling within the area of submergence, are described as partially affected villages. In such villages, only the "fully affected" families (those having more than 50 % of land under submergence) are allotted land for resettlement. The rest are expected to continue staying where they are even if that means living at the edge of the vast reservoir with a major portion of the village having shifted elsewhere. The categorization of villages as "partially affected" is an inhuman mathematical consideration which ignores the actual ground situation and the real effect the dam and the reservoir would have on the villages. Thus, demands were raised to change the definition of fully affected villages. Some social activists demanded that villages and families that are even partially affected by the reservoir must all be treated as fully affected. The government has fixed mathematical criteria to differentiate between "fully" and "partially affected" for the simple reason that in this way it would have to provide rehabilitation sites to only a small proportion of the 125 directly affected villages. This lapse on its part is also indicative of the extent to which the policy makers of the comprador state happen to be divorced from the specific realities of life in the area which they aim to exploit.

The construction of the dam, power house and other components of the project continue unabated with the government consistently ignoring recommendations of experts and expert committees to conduct thorough investigations on all its environmental aspects.

Among these was a recommendation to study the stability of the rim area, particularly in view of the impact the huge body of water would have on the fragile slopes comprising a huge overburden of land mass. Initial geological studies of just 3 villages on the sensitive slopes have reportedly enhanced the cause for concern. And yet the dam authorities, who have to provide the finances, have creating innumerable hurdles instead of facilitating the geological studies. By neglecting this environmental aspect, the dam companies could be laying the basis for both minor and major catastrophies along the villages of the rim area extending upto 600 metres above the reservoir surface. These geological studies as well as studies to determine what impact the anticipated extra-ordinarily foggy weather all around the reservoir would have on the weather cycle and consequently on the crop cycle, should be a precondition for going ahead with the project construction. If the fog happens to prevent crops from maturing in time, then the entire valley, well above the area of submergence would be rendered unfit for agricultural operations. This would drastically increase the number of villages to be affected by the dam project.

Finally, it must be mentioned that it is not only the lacunae and injustices of the rehabilitation process that makes such dam projects unpopular and unwanted propositions for the local population. The Tehri project is designed to produce 2,400 MW power to the country’s grid and additional water for irrigating the sugarcane fields of western UP and providing drinking water supply to meet the increasing needs of tourist resorts in Delhi. Obviously, none of these products are meant to benefit the districts of Tehri Garhwal and Uttarkashi and the Uttarakhand region as whole, from which they would be generated. This is thus an ideal case of colonial type exploitation, wherein the exploited region and its people have to bear with all the losses and hardships to run the project and most of the benefits are reaped by the exploiting region. In this case, Uttarakhand and the Tehri valley, in particular, are exploited and the Centre as well as the owners of sugar mills of western UP and the owners and clients of big hotels and luxurious resorts would be the ones to reap the benefits. The state government has staked claim to 12 percent of the electricity produced in the form of royalty, but it remains to be seen whether their UP and Delhi counterparts would agree to even this small proportion of power sharing in the case of this joint UP-Centre venture. Given the unresolved asset distribution issue and the expected intervention of both the all-imposing Centre and big-brother UP, Uttaranchal’s claims may not go uncontested. Whatever its claims, the hill state would have no right to decide its share of power without the consent of the Centre, at least not under the present dispensation of Centre-State relationships. As far as water-sharing is concerned, the dam project has inbuilt provisions that refuse to give the adjoining villages, patties and blocks any share of the water flowing into the reservoir. Thus the already irrigated plains in the sugarcane belt would receive more water, but the hill slopes that need every drop of water to prevent recurrent droughts and failed crops are denied even their own share.

The dam project is now in the later stages of completion. Only the last 30 metres of the 260.5 metres rockfill dam remains to be erected. Moreover, work is yet to start on laying huge slabs of riprap stones to form a protective layer over the slopes of the dam. Swedish Volvo dumpers and shovels have arrived in large numbers to carry the stones from a nearby village of the Bhilangana valley to the dam site, though this work often gets held up by villagers of the valley causing obstructions in the hope of getting their rehabilitation demands fulfilled. With the first 1000 MW stage of the three-stage power house due to be ready for generation early next year, the two main construction companies Jaiprakash Industries and Thapar and Sons, working for the THDC (Tehri Hydro Development Corporation, a joint venture of UP and the Centre), appear to be in a great hurry to get the German Siemens turbines rolling and the Russian steel pipes channelizing water from the top of the proposed reservoir. The entire district administration of Tehri Garhwal, all the arms of the state from the local police stations to the intelligence sleuths and from the local courts to the media, the ministers of the state and their counterparts at the Centre and representatives of all bourgeois and revisionist parties are at the beck and call of these companies to suppress the democratic voice of the affected people.

All over Uttarakhand, it is the same story today. Various pro-imperialist projects executed earlier by the UP Government are being continued with renewed anti-people vigour by the Uttaranchal Government. Be it the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve in the upper reaches of Garhwal or the Rajaji National Park and the Corbett National Park at the foothills, or the Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary in central Kumaon, the rural population settled in over 13 % of the total forest area of the state are sought to be evicted or deprived of their right to enter the forests at will to collect their means of sustenance. And on the precious non-forest lands which make up just about 33 % of the total land (this figure is much lesser in the hill districts), plus the mere 10% cultivable land, more than 90 dams of various sizes are to be constructed. Of these, well over a dozen dams would have a height over and above 100 metres. These dams are likely to submerge the best irrigated lands.

While on the one hand, the compradors ruling the country are out to extract huge profits out of these projects and please their imperialist and big capitalist masters by buying their machinery, technology and other auxiliary equipment, for the people of Uttarakhand on the other hand, the proposed big dams, national parks and wildlife sanctuaries spell increasing disaster and deprivation. Not less than 20 % of the population is reported to have been targeted for displacement, and well over half the population is expected to be adversely affected by these projects in some way or the other. This is not to suggest that the remaining half of the population would not become victims of such policies, for their fate would be at the mercy of a new forest law that was enacted less than a year after state formation. This law aims at preventing access of villagers to their own woods, which successive governments have been categorizing as reserved forests etc. Among the draconian changes incorporated by the enactment, Divisional Forest Officers have assumed the powers of a magistrate, whereby they now have the right not only to prosecute, but also to pass judgement against alleged offenders. Minor violation of forest regulations is moreover liable to be treated as a non-bailable offence. Considering that the real forest mafias, who operate hand-in-glove with officials, are hardly ever prosecuted or sentenced, this piece of legislation would certainly infringe upon the people’s rights over their forests.

While imperialist agencies have peddled their lop-sided conservationist arguments to serve as a smokes-creen for their offensive aimed at usurping whatever little control the rural people of Uttarakhand could exert over their forests, the state government has coined phrases like the "Oorja Pradesh" (Energy State) in order to promote colossal hydro-electric projects such as the one at Tehri in western Garhwal and another at Pancheshwar, close to the Nepal border. Currently, the so-called "energy state" ends up in buying electricity from the grid at about three times the cost at which it sells to the grid. However more wattage the state may produce, this would be surplus for the state, and this would have to be sold at the cost of production in accordance with the prevailing colonial-type relations between Uttarakhand’s power generation and the power drawn from the grid.

Chief Minister, ND Tiwari, in a recent interview published in the Hindi "Dainik Hindustan" sought to shrug off his government’s responsibility for the injustice being done to the Tehri dam-affected people, by sounding as if he was helplessly bound to implement a Centrally-administered project. This posture of a servile agent of Centrally-imposed policies occupying the seat of power at Dehradun stands in sharp contrast to the emergent strivings and aspirations of the Uttarakhandis who braved police bullets and lathi blows during the statehood struggle for self determination. Indeed, it were this CM and his Director General of Police Prem Dutt Raturi who sent out police sleuths to harass and torture all those social activists and democratic individuals who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the people of the Tehri valley in their struggle for a just deal in the rehabilitation process. Betraying their eagerness to serve the big Indian and foreign companies involved in the dam project, the Uttaranchal government and the ruling Congress party have been looking for ways and means to go ahead with the project unhindered, even while denying the affected people the minimum rehabilitation rights won after past struggles that are spelled out in the project’s policy statement.

Gauging the mood of the people as they were stirring up once again last year to agitate on their rehabilitation rights, one part of the faction-ridden district level leadership of the Congress conducted a series of "mahapanchayats" since July last. Therein, the party allowed its cadres to raise the rehabilitation issue. Whatever may have been the tone and tenor of the speeches and statements of these political crooks, they cleverly ensured that there would not be the slightest move to hamper work on the dam project. Bourgeois newspapers spun stories about infighting in the ruling party as another faction opposed the mahapanchayats, but the promised showdown between the two factions failed to come off. Soon, the dam-affected people grew weary of the pronouncements and counter-pronouncements of the two factions. The BJP was never expected to fill the gap. Having ruled prior to the Congress, the principal opposition party, the BJP stood already discredited due to the brute force it had used to crush a spontaneous agitation in 2001 the in Bhagirathi valley over rehabilitation rights. Meanwhile, an independent peasant organization working for the cause of a new democratic revolution in Uttarakhand, launched concentrated efforts to organize the affected villagers. Organised dharnas, chakka jams and work stoppages were subsequently witnessed in the valley. However, neither did any of the established politicians of the area partake in the struggle in any way, nor did the NGO luminary Sunder Lal Bahuguna, who had earlier abandoned his post of nominal protest, lend support in any way. Under these circumstances, as the people’s struggle for rehabilitation rights was taking on an organized shape, the district administration, acting at the behest of the construction companies and the Uttaranchal government, came down with a heavy hand. Some of the activists were arrested and tortured and a propaganda campaign was unleashed to confuse and terrorize the supporters and sympathizers of the organization. All agreements on guaranteeing rehabilitation rights made with representatives of different villages during the last few weeks of agitation were promptly brushed side. The district administration has, for the moment, succeeded in granting the construction companies a temporary reprieve, though now and then inhabitants of one village or the other have been blocking the transportation of riprap stones from the quarry to the dam site.

Going by the sheer scale of the huge profits, rampant corruption and widespread money-laundering involved in the project, the fact that the project is in an advanced stage of construction, coupled with the fact that it is part of a larger scheme of power and forest projects spread all over Uttarakhand, the Uttaranchal government, regardless of which party controls it and which opposes, does not in the least seem to be prepared to bend under demands to abandon such projects or to accede to demands for important changes in the rehabilitation policy. Instead, true to their class character, they seem to be eager to bare their fascist fangs and introduce the draconian POTA in the state as soon as possible to please their imperialist masters and the compradors whose interests are at stake in these parts of the middle Himalayas. The stark injustice, which the path of comprador development has been breeding in Uttarakhand through the colonial and semi-colonial periods, is bound to lead to increasingly antagonistic conflicts under the smaller state.

Not only displacement and deprivation by such Centrally-administered and imperialist-imposed projects, but an all-out crisis in Uttarakhandi society has created numerous avenues for the stirrings of revolutionary outbursts. The persistent and neglected agrarian crisis; the consequent migration of youth at an ever-increasing pace; the absence of local employment for the local youth; the rise of the land mafia, the forest mafia and the liquor mafia; the continuing neglect of rural development works; privatization of education; the growing oppression of women; the ever increasing criminalization; spreading vices; caste prejudices; religious intolerance; the political-ideological bankruptcy of the ruling classes; the disillusionment with the fake representative character of Parliament, the Assemblies and the Panchayat bodies; the all-round corruption; the absence of democratic values and democratic rights in every sphere of life – all these factors are bound to ignite the flames of yet another spate of popular movements in Uttarakhand. The region has a rich tradition of anti-feudal, anti-imperialist and anti-comprador people’s movements. The Tehri valley itself has been witness to tremendous upsurges with inspiration from Communist and nationalist martyrs and the district has given the Uttarakhand statehood movement two immemorable women martyrs – Hansa Dhanai and Belmati Chauhan. If such glorious traditions are revived through consistent and patient work among the toiling masses and liberal democratic sections of the society, the ground can be prepared for overthrowing lock, stock and barrel the yoke of the comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie, the imperialist agencies and companies and smashing the deep-rooted fetters of the prevailing semi-feudal owner-peasant production relations, social traditions and culture. Only then the ongoing people’s struggles against the impact of the comprador CBB-controlled and imperialist-sponsored anti-people, anti-Uttarakhand projects reach their culmination.

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