Dams and dissent: India's first modern environmental activist and his critique of the DVC project

Abstract

The inner tensions plaguing the political philosophy of ecology in India were captured in the life and times of Kapil Bhattacharjee, South Asia's first modern environmental activist. In the 1950s he courageously fought against a highly popular project, the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC), a huge multipurpose river valley project that included a number of dams, power stations and a barrage. It was being then vended as the harbinger of unforeseen prosperity in Eastern India. As a result, some even denounced Bhattacharjee as a traitor, particularly for opposing the Farakka barrage, which he considered as a fraud on the Indian public. The ambivalence towards him in his society was matched by his own ambivalence. Here was a person who defiantly initiated, virtually single-handedly, environmental activism as we know it in this part of the world. Yet, in other respects he showed remarkable self-censorship. Brought up in the heady atmosphere of the easy rationalism of the inter-war years and in the cold war atmosphere immediately after World War II, Bhattacharjee came close to admitting — and yet shield away from actually doing so — that rivers were not merely economic resources, but also civilisational boons. The sanctity of a river, particularly its right to be itself, was never acceptable to him, except as a popular belief. And though in later life he also became a distinguished human rights activist, he never was adequately sensitive to the way some of the tribes of India bore the major brunt of the DVC. The uprooting and destitution imposed on them do not figure at all in his writings on the subject. One possible explanation of these anomalies is in Bhattacharjee's basic commitment to the urban-industrial vision and to a theory of modern-science-based progress. Between them, they ensured that while he sometimes wrote movingly about traditional knowledge systems dealing with rivers and about the dangers of large-scale intervention in nature, saving the city of Calcutta and India's industrial base always had priority in his philosophy of environmentalism.