La Narmada è il nome di un fiume indiano (in lingua indi i nomi dei fiumi sono rigorosamente al femminile) sulla quale da 19 anni si stanno costruendo numerosissime dighe (30 grandi e migliaia di dimensioni minori).
Queste costruzioni hanno implicato ed implicano tuttora l'esproprio delle terre dei contadini che popolano la valle della Narmada, tra le più fertili della terra (Narmada infatti significa "il fiume d'oro) e massicce dislocazioni, praticamente senza indennizzo, di migliaia di persone.
Oltre agli spostamenti coatti di intere famiglie (si parla di milioni di persone), il problema si aggrava a causa dell'installazione di industrie, sia nazionali che multinazionali, come Bayer e Pepsi, che aumentano vertiginosamente l'inquinamento ed il costo dell'acqua.
Ma Narmada è anche il simbolo della lotta popolare, diffusa e spontanea contro queste dighe, una lotta condotta in primo luogo dalla resistenza pacifica delle donne della Narmada Valley, guidate dalla biologa indiana Medha Patkar: " Il governo dice che non ha terra da dare agli sfollati, può risarcire solo in denaro. La nostra posizione è chiara: le popolazioni non se ne andranno, se non avranno altra terra a compensare quella persa. Quella che chiamano riabilitazione va basata sulla terra, non sul denaro".
…Let me say at the outset that I'm not a city-basher. I've done my time in a village. I've had first-hand experience of the isolation, the inequity and the potential savagery of it. I'm not an anti-development junkie, nor a proselytiser for the eternal upholding of custom and tradition. What Iam, however, is curious. Curiosity took me to the Narmada Valley. Instinct told me that this was the big one. The one in which the battle-lines were clearly drawn, the warring armies massed along them. The one in which it would be possible to wade through the congealed morass of hope, anger, information, disinformation, political artifice, engineering ambition, disingenuous socialism, radical activism, bureaucratic subterfuge, misinformed emotionalism and, of course, the pervasive, invariably dubious, politics of International Aid.
Instinct led me to set aside Joyce and Nabokov, to postpone reading Don DeLillo's big book and substitute it with reports on drainage and irrigation, with journals and books and documentary films about dams and why they're built and what they do.
My first tentative questions revealed that few people know what is really going on in the Narmada Valley. Those who know, know a lot. Most know nothing at all. And yet, almost everyone has a passionate opinion. Nobody's neutral. I realised very quickly that I was straying into mined territory.
In India over the last ten years the fight against the Sardar Sarovar Dam has come to represent far more than the fight for one river. This has been its strength as well as its weakness. Some years ago, it became a debate that captured the popular imagination. That's what raised the stakes and changed the complexion of the battle. From being a fight over the fate of a river valley it began to raise doubts about an entire political system. What is at issue now is the very nature of our democracy. Who owns this land? Who owns its rivers? Its forests? Its fish? These are huge questions. They are being taken hugely seriously by the State. They are being answered in one voice by every institution at its command - the army, the police, the bureaucracy, the courts. And not just answered, but answered unambiguously, in bitter, brutal ways…
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