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

The inner tensions plaguing the political philosophy of ecology in India we re captured in the life and times of Kapil Bhattacharjee, South Asia's firs t modern environmental activist. In the 1950s he courageously fought agains t a highly popular project, the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC), a huge mu ltipurpose river valley project that included a number of dams, power stati ons 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 cons idered as a fraud on the Indian public. The ambivalence towards him in his society was matched by his own ambivalen ce. Here was a person who defiantly initiated, virtually single-handedly, e nvironmental activism as we know it in this part of the world. Yet, in othe r respects he showed remarkable self-censorship. Brought up in the heady at mosphere of the easy rationalism of the inter-war years and in the cold war atmosphere immediately after World War II, Bhattacharjee came close to adm itting - 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, e xcept as a popular belief. And though in later life he also became a distin guished 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 th e subject. One possible explanation of these anomalies is in Bhattacharjee's basic com mitment to the urban-industrial vision and to a theory of modern-science-ba sed progress. Between them, they ensured that while he sometimes wrote movi ngly 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 enviro nmentalism. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.