Barun Roy: God's chattel

ASIA FILE

Is there another country except India, where hunger strikes must be used to both press for and oppose basic human rights, where courts must prod the government to ensure that these rights are duly upheld?

Those memorable one-liners that often adorn the tail-ends of our buses never fail to impress me with the sheer wittiness of their messages. But the one I remember most is a quip I once saw on a bus speeding ahead of my car on a highway. " Krishna bolo, sangey chalo," it said, rather philosophically "" "Hail Krishna, go His way."

I remember it because it kind of sums up the Indian attitude to life and living. Nothing is more important, this attitude seems to suggest, than to live for Krishna, meaning God, and die for Him, too. He will lead and we will be led towards a better future, so let's sing His praise, follow Him, and be happy with the way we are, rich or poor, Brahmins or outcasts.

And I remembered it all the more when Medha Patkar and her fellow activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan went on a hunger strike to draw the government's attention to the fate of villagers displaced by the river's damming. The dams have been built and the reservoirs filled, but the villagers haven't been given a decent rehabilitation elsewhere. In a country where human lives have no independent value and human beings are regarded as God's chattel, for which God alone should be responsible, it's not a surprise.

The Indians' lack of concern for human lives shows up in many different ways. Excuses justifying it are equally many. We have been told that farmers' suicides in Maharashtra were caused by depression, not indebtedness. When starvation deaths were reported from Amlasol, a tribal area in Marxist-ruled West Bengal, it was said the victims had been eating leaves, so they were not exactly starving. The Godhra killings were only an act of natural revenge. At the Meerut fair ground, where at least 60 people died in a blazing inferno, safety regulations had been ignored with impunity, as they had been in the terrible schoolhouse fire in Tamil Nadu two years ago in which 83 children were burnt to death. In God's India, nothing changes. No lessons are learnt. Thousands get killed in road accidents every year, but drivers just couldn't care less. An poor woman in Kolkata had to deliver her baby on an open sidewalk because the hospital she went to wouldn't accept her. So what? These things happen.

Nobody denies that economic development will uproot people. It does all the time as cities spread, industries expand, rivers are dammed, highways are laid, and new townships come into being. That's why rehabilitation is now a big part of development projects that multilateral development banks fund, and most countries take this obligation seriously.

But fulfilling an obligation is not their only motivation. These countries have a more genuine concern: to give themselves a better image and their people a better life. Viet Nam, for example, pursuing far-reaching policies to clean up Ho Chi Minh City, has removed some 70,000 squatters since 1993 from the banks of the city's canals to new, planned residential areas, where they have apartments with better sanitary facilities, improved living conditions, and, above all, a legal status. In the South Korean capital of Seoul, squatters have been moved to outlying areas, 10 km to 14 km from the City Hall, but the authorities never stopped adapting existing policies and introducing new ones to make the resettlement exercise an acceptable one.

In China, construction of the gigantic Three Gorges Dam is proceeding hand-in-hand with the equally gigantic task of rehabilitating some 1.2 million people displaced by the project. The very size of the resettlement budget, about $10 billion, means that the exercise is not a mockery but a sincere, all-round effort, involving the building of townships, roads, communications facilities, industries, schools, hospitals, and everything else that's necessary, to make rehabilitation as comprehensive as possible.

If the human issues of development were as important to us, Medha Patkar wouldn't have to resort to hunger strike in the first place. She had been pressing her cause for years, but nobody cared. And even as she lay wasting from her fast, political counter pressures were unleashed in full force and Narendra Modi, the Gujarat chief minister, went on a so-called hunger strike himself to befuddle the issue. He succeeded. The government hurried to reach a compromise "" work on the Sardar Sarovar dam will go ahead while a committee directly under the prime minister will investigate the resettlement issue.

A typical Indian approach to problem solving: appease and promise. In the end, the Supreme Court had to intervene, and a third element was added: prepare reports. Hail Krishna! Is there another country where hunger strikes must be used to both press for and oppose basic human rights, where courts must intervene and prod the government at every step to ensure that these rights are duly upheld?