Resisting the State: Grassroots Movement against the Pagladiya Dam Project⁽¹⁾
By MONIRUL HUSSAIN

The proposed Pagladiya Dam Project (PDP) on the river Pagladiya, an impor-tant tributary of Brahmaputra, has been in the pipeline for a reasonably long time. It flows from Bhutan downwards to Assam plains in the northern bank of Brahmaputra. The PDP was originally conceived as a minor flood detention project at an estimated cost of about Rs.12.60 crores based on a report of the Central Water Commission way back in 1968–71, and was duly approved by the Planning Commission of India as a flood control project for Rs.12.80 crores at the 1971–72 price level. Later, it was conceived as a power generating project which would also irrigate a large area. The Government of India kept it in cold storage for a long time and revived it only in 1995. The Technical Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Water Resources, Government of India cleared the project in 1995. Again, the project went into oblivion because of popular resistance against it. However, the Government of India under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance regime cleared the long pending PDP in 2000 at a cost of Rs.542.90 crore. Four years later, it was estimated that the cost of the project had reached Rs.1,136 crore. By now the estimated cost of the project has been increased to Rs.1500 crores.

As per the definition of the World Commission on Dams (2000), this is going to be a big dam in the technical sense. The Brahmaputra Board was entrusted with the implementation of the project. As per the plan stipulation, the project is scheduled for completion in 2007. According to the plan, a 23 kilometre long and 26 metre high dam, in order to retain 446 million cubic metre of water in an artificial lake/reservoir, is to be constructed on the upstream of the river Pagladiya in Assam’s Nalbari district at a place called Thalkuchi. The site is near the Indo-Bhutan international border. The main canal would be 66.2 kilometres long, along with another branch canal of 39.5 kilometres, the total length being 105.7 kilometres. As per official information, the PDP will protect 40,000 hectares of land from flood, irrigate 54,125 hectares of land, and generate 3 megawatt of electricity.

However, the social cost of the project is incalculable. The proposed reservoir will submerge 38 settled villages affecting about 12,000 families directly. However, according to a Guwahati-based researcher Geeta Bharali, the PDP will displace 20,000 families⁽²⁾. The construction of dam, roads, reservoir and canals will lead to the displacement of about 1,05,000 people from their land and homes⁽³⁾. About 34,000 acres of land will be acquired for the project. Land in the proposed project area is highly fertile. Again, most of the potential victims are poor peasants and a large number of them are tribal, mostly Bodos. Besides, the project will submerge four high schools, 13 middle schools and 40 primary schools, several primary health care centres, temples, Naamghars and other places of worship. It must be pointed out that all the high schools were established by the people initially and later on received grants from the state. All these are very important social assets for the people which they cannot afford to lose at any cost like their homes and land.

The government is now proposing to grant Rs.20,800 per displaced families, Rs.1,000 as material grant; and planning to shift the project displacees to a government reserved forest in the same district. However, the site is no longer a vacant place; it is already an “illegally” settled area. The potential victims say that the place has already been occupied by the Bangladeshi refugees and other displaced people of the same district. Nalbari, despite being an overwhelmingly rural district, is one of the densely populated areas. The district has virtually no land to resettle such large number of displaced peasants. Other districts are also unwilling to accommodate such a vast number of displaced persons. The people are convinced that the government is not in a position to resettle such a large number of displaced people in the absence of vacant land in the plains. Now the only option left to the government is to resettle and rehabilitate them in different places. However, this will lead to fragmentation of the community. Hence, the people are against rehabilitating the displaced in different places. They feel such a move would lead to fragmentation of community life which is very dear to them.

The leaders of the movement have a fairly good idea not only about the quantum but also about the quality of land to which government proposes to relocate the displaced. Obviously, the displaced peasants would not only need land for reconstructing their houses but also agricultural land and water to ensure their livelihood. They firmly believe that the government has neither adequate land nor financial resources to provide them a reasonable rehabilita-tion package which at least ensures their present socio-economic status and dignity. An all-encompassing fear of being displaced has severely affected people. Most of the potential displacees are vehemently opposed to the implementation of the PDP because to them it directly attacks their right to land and livelihood. Significantly, this area is not flood-prone unlike the rest of the southern part of the same district. The land is fertile and the density of population is low compared to the rest of the district. To them the project is flawed, non-transparent and rehabilitation would be an impossible task for the state. Hence, they are opposed to the project and its consequent massive displacement. Most of the inhabitants are deeply scared because they do not have proper ownership documents of the land on which they were living and cultivating for decades together under very difficult environmental conditions. They fear that like in many other state-sponsored development projects, only those people who have proper land documents will be resettled and rehabilitated by the government and the others who have no legally valid documents will be left out from the purview of the resettlement and rehabilitation measures. The state obviously looks very mechanically at the legal documents not at the humans/citizens. By this legalistic insensitivity to its own citizens, the state alienates the people who need its protection desperately. The fear of being displaced looms large over the potential displacees of the PDP, and they have collectively refused and successfully resisted the “Gift of Vajpayee” since 2000. It seems the people are determined to oppose tooth and nail the implementation of the PDP. They are convinced that the project goes against their interest and have successfully built up a collective popular resistance movement against the project. Fear of a common enemy/other, i.e. the all powerful state has strengthened the community feeling deeply.

The Brahmaputra Board, the commissioning agency, prepared a Resettlement and Rehabilitation (R&R) package at the cost of Rs.47.89 crores. The number of potential project displacees estimated by the Board is 18,743 persons, and the R&R package aims at covering them. This is a gross underestimation of the number of potential PDP displacees. Some affected people of the same area will be entitled to the R&R package while some will be left out from it. Therefore, the potential displacees irrespective of entitlement and non-entitlement have rejected this R&R package totally. The people who see themselves as potential victims of the PDP have questioned the democratic commitment and also the credential of the state in the face of an all-encompassing common threat.

People of the threatened area protested against the proposal of cons-truction of the dam from the very beginning. A people’s resistance committee known as “Pagladiya Bandh Committee” was formed way back in 1968–69 at the time of first investigation for the PDP. Initially PDP was conceived as a minor flood detention project. Even at that time when such projects were worshipped and the dams were regarded as the “temples of modern India,” these people in the remote villages in lower Assam, most of them illiterates, recognized the hidden negative effects of such projects and started their protest against the all-powerful state and the imposition of its development discourse. The voice of these voiceless people succeeded in pushing the proposal in the cold storage of the state for a reasonably long period of time. However, later on in 1987, the Asom Gana Parishad-led state government pressurized the Government of India to revive the PDP as a permanent solution to the perennial problem of flood in the Nalbari district.

The people living in the flood plains downstream of the river Pagladiya supported the move of the state government while the people living in the plains upstream of the river in the same district vehemently opposed it. The opinion on the PDP remained divided sharply within the district on the perception of “winners” and “losers” from the project. Obviously, the opposition came from the potential displacees of the PDP. In sharp contrast to the supporters of the PDP in the southern part of Nalbari district, the opponents in the northern part of the same district have organized themselves solidly and mobilized support for their cause. And they have shown it through political mobilization and protest actions at the grassroots level.

The resistance against the PDP began alongside the initial stage of investigation for the project in 1968. Once the AGP started the initiative to revive the project in 1987; the simmering restlessness of the people gradually transformed into a popular resistance movement outside the purview of conventional political parties. The potential displacees convened a general public meeting in 1987 and gave an organizational shape to their resistance movement. They formed an organization named “Pagladiya Bandh Prokalpar Khatigrasta Alekar Sangram Samitee.” Since then the Samitee has been successfully leading the movement.

Various social and students organizations, particularly the tribal ones of the area supported the resistance movement. One of the most significant organizations that supported the movement was the All Bodo Students Union (ABSU). ABSU’s support gave the movement an additional advantage and clear edge. With the passage of time the popular resistance against the PDP is gaining momentum. It has been successful in mobilizing the support of the entire people being threatened by project induced displacement. We must point out that the people supporting the movement belong to various communities sharing a common living space harmoniously over a long period of time. Their unity has been further strengthened by an all-encompassing common threat of being displaced from their home and land. The people living in the proposed project area include Hindus, Muslims and Christians. Community wise, the Asamiyas and Bengalis of different castes, Nepalis, Santhals, Rabhas are living side by side. However, demographically community wise, the Bodos are the largest group in this area. The people here have been living harmoniously despite some aberrations in the wake of the Assam and Bodo movements. Most of these people are peasants and they reflect the fundamental characteristics of a peasant society. Hence, for them land is the only resource that sustains their lives and livelihood.

Emotionally too, they are very deeply attached to their land. Unlike any modern society, the sense of community is very strong and cuts across the class and ethnic divide. Resistance against the PDP has further strengthened the inter as well as intra community relations. It would be important to state here that most ethnic/tribal movements in Northeast have been by and large, exclusivist in nature, however, this anti-dam movement has remained highly inclusivist in nature wherein the tribal and the non-tribal are fighting shoulder to shoulder for a common cause. The multi-ethnic character of the popular resistance has been reflected in two recent publications⁽⁴⁾.

These two publications were in fact souvenirs of the 17th and 18th biannual conferences of the Samitee. Each souvenir was published in English, Assamese and Bodo in a common binding. These two souvenirs reflected the reasons, anger and aspirations of the threatened people of the PDP. It provides a critique of development paradigm of the state.
Collective efforts of all the ethnic groups living in the area invigorated the movement at the grassroots level and its capacity to resist the state-sponsored project. Now, this area falls under the jurisdiction of the newly created Bodoland Territorial Autonomous District (BTAD). Here, political structure and the arrangements are somewhat more decentralized and autonomous compared to the non-tribal areas of Assam. It is difficult for the centre and the state (the Delhi-Guwahati nexus) to impose their dictates at will. These political factors also helped the resistance movement to successfully resist the implementation of the PDP. However, the all-powerful state and its agency, the Brahmaputra Board, have not remained inactive. It made all efforts to weaken the resistance movement on one hand, and resorted to coercive measures in order to start implementing the project at hand, on the other.

The potential displacees as a part of their resistance movement planned a peaceful dharna at the state capital complex Dispur within the city of Guwahati on 29th October 2002. Thousands of villagers came to Guwahati to register their protest and demand the scrapping of PDP. On their way to Dispur, they were stopped at Amingaon, the western outskirt of the city. The police resorted to lathicharge and used tear gas to stop the people from going to Dispur. A large number of people including women and children were injured in the police action. However, though the police stopped a large number of protesters through blatantly coercive means from entering the capital complex, yet a large group of people gathered at the Last Gate of the capital and demonstrated against the PDP on the same day.

Repressive measures and threat of repression continued for a long time. On 17th September 2002, when some young people were engaged in wall-postering against the construction of model houses for resettlement built by the Brahmaputra Board near the project site, the police resorted to selected target firing. The use of brute force by the state angered the people very deeply. They were protesting because they were convinced that the Brahmaputra Board officials were involved in corruption colluding with contractors and politicians. As per the package, the Board spent Rs.12,462 in the construction of each model house. However, the people believed that the kind of house the Board was building would never cost more than Rs.3,000. According to them, the Board officials inflated the cost to more than four times the actual cost. The people could not accept the kind of small and absolutely low quality houses that the Brahmaputra Board wanted to offer them in their R&R package. A field enquiry has found that the houses of even the poorest sections of the people in the proposed project area were far better than the model R&R house in terms of quality and bigger in terms of its size. The people said that such houses were absolutely inadequate to accommodate even a small family properly; and they would not accept such R&R package.

The biggest protest action against the PDP took place on 29th January 2004 and continued up to 4th March 2004 for 35 days without any interruption. On 29th January 2004, a big contingent of officials from the district adminis-tration and the Brahmaputra Board arrived at Thalkuchi, the proposed site of the project, in order to conduct the land survey and to assess the compensation requirements of the people. They also set up a big camp to accommodate the officials and the staff of the revenue department for the purpose. They were also backed up by a large police contingent. This created a situation of confrontation; between the government bent on going ahead with the project and the people determined to resist the project. Realizing the danger coming their way, all the villagers came out from their homes and blocked all the roads, barring the officials from entry into the villages in order to stop the survey work. The government officials first tried to convince the people to allow them to do the work assigned by the government. When they failed to do so, they threatened the people with dire consequences if they continued to block the official work of the government. The people refused to listen to the government officials’ order to remove the blockade. On the next day, 30th January 2004, the police resorted to blank firing to scare the people away and detained a few leaders of the movement in the camp and tried to transport them to the district headquarters at Nalbari in a police vehicle. People stopped the vehicle from moving and pressurized the police into releasing them all. The impasse continued for days together – no one was in a mood to give up. At last the officials attempted to do the survey of a few families to which the people did not agree. Ultimately, the government officials and the police had to go back without completing the assigned task after 35 days of face to face confrontation with the people. This was a landmark success of the popular resistance movement against the state-sponsored development-induced displacement. This gave a tremendous boost to the morale of the people who had been fighting for a long time to stop the PDP.

During the field visit, the potential displacees told us that the Brahmaputra Board had indulged in floating two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the affected areas to mobilize the support of the people in favour of the construction of PDP. The name of these two NGOs are according to the people – Assam Council for People’s Action and Manab Seva Sangh. Under the initiative of these organizations a meeting was held at Guwahati in August 2002 between the Brahmaputra Board and the members of the NGOs. In the same meeting, a co-ordination committee was formed for furthering cooperation of the people of the affected areas in constructing the dam. The leadership of the movement soon cautioned the people against such fake NGOs. Both the NGOs failed in their missions in the face of popular support against the construction of the dam. The people also alleged that the press and the elite in Guwahati have not given adequate attention to their problems and protests. Only a very few papers in Guwahati covered the popular resistance and the events of 30th January 2004 and the so-called “national press” remained totally silent on the event. Hence, the voice of the subaltern did not reach much beyond their small and peripheral territory. To hear the voice of such subalterns one needs to have a pair of very sensitive ears. The people lamented that those who run the country from the state capital Dispur and national capital Delhi do not hear the voices of the people living at an interior as well as a frontier area located near the Indo-Bhutan border. Centralization of the decision-making process has blocked its access to the voice of the subalterns living at the margins of the society and geography. However, the formation of the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) has significantly transformed the equation between the state and the people’s movement. The autonomy granted to the Bodos has given some cushioning effects to the encounter between the state and the movement. This is a positive step in making the polity gradually more decentralized. All the 38 villages of the affected area fall under the jurisdiction of the BTC. And for implementing any developmental project the consent of the BTC is a must now. As a result, the state and the central government are unlikely to succeed in implementing any state-sponsored developmental projects including the PDP without the consent of the BTC. As the majority of the people living in the area are Bodos, it is essential for the BTC/Bodo leadership to remain sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the people in general and the needs of the Bodos in particular. Because of this factor, the state may find it extremely difficult to go ahead with the PDP.

Now the people of the area have realized the importance of political decentralization for the people living at the margins of the society. This is likely to act as an inclusionary political process ensuring popular participation at the grassroots level and empowering the disempowered people. The resistance of the subalterns has strongly interrogated the post-colonial development paradigm and its regime from a location far away from the centre of power. The response of the state to the interrogation, will to a large extent determine the nature and future of the movement that is struggling for the last 37 years for a democratic, dignified and human space within a larger political society.

Now, the resistance movement is somewhat dormant, the state too is silent. However, for the threatened people the movement continues to exist and for the state the project is still in hand. All this does not reflect the end of the long-standing contestation. The state is again trying to revive the PDP. It is still very much a part of the state agenda. It seems that the state is exploring an alternative route which avoids confrontation with the threatened people by shifting the location of the water reservoir further upstream of the river, i.e. very close to India-Bhutan border. This is likely to help in reducing the quantum of displacement of the population and at the same time avoiding the submergence of prime agricultural land. The Assam government, the Brahmaputra Board and the contractors: all want this project to be implemen-ted. They find it absolutely unreasonable not to utilize the fund that the Government of India has offered for the commissioning of the PDP. Very significantly, the Bodoland People’s Political Front (BPPF) which was vehemently opposed to the project in the past, is now a partner of the Congress-led coalition government in Assam. Their role is going to be crucial in commissioning or abandoning the PDP. At the present juncture, they are not in a position to decide whether to go with the state government or to go with the threatened people who voted for them decisively to be a part of the state government in the elections of 2006, to the state legislature. It seems they have no alternative than to look for a middle path because the history has placed them in situation of duality, one being the part of a grassroots movement in the past and the other being the co-opted member of the state at present.

To sum up, the contestation between the state as a development giver and the people at the grassroots level as the development takers is continuing. This contestation is going on for nearly four decades, of course with periodic lull. The Government of India wants to build a mega dam aiming at impounding water in a large reservoir in order to protect the people from recurring flood, to irrigate the agricultural land and to generate electricity. However, the people living at the area which is likely to be submerged if the project is commissioned by the state, have been resisting the project successfully through collective mobilization of the people outside the conventional political party system. And the state is attempting at commissioning the project. Now one of the powerful constitutive elements of the grassroots movement has become part of the coalition of the state government. This has induced some kind of possibilities of transformation of the movement and alteration of its goal.