Medha Patkar was on Wednesday night removed to AIIMS, in New Delhi, under protective medical custody to save her life. She was on the eighth day of a fast unto death to stop the Sardar Sarovar dam being raised from 110.64 m to 121.92 m, even as a ministerial delegation left Delhi for the Narmada valley to make a rapid appraisal of the rehabilitation situation. The ministers had vainly implored Patkar to give up her fast on the assurance that everything possible would be done to ensure that all affected families were properly rehabilitated.

The Narmada Bacaho Andolan (NBA) supporters and environmental activists have reacted with sullen rage, even hysteria. Patkar has gone on fast time and time again to get her way. While such self-inflicted suffering arouses concern and sympathy, democratic governments have a wider ineluctable social and political responsibility, and cannot abandon due process in favour of any one set of demands through emotional blackmail. This is not Gandhian. The Mahatma was pitted against constitutionally irresponsible and unrepresentative alien rule. The situation today is very different. The water resources minister has promised a review of the Narmada Control Authority’s (NCA’s) decision to permit further raising of the dam. Moreover, an NBA petition on this very issue before the Supreme Court will be heard on April 17.

Patkar’s insistence on immediate stoppage of work on the dam is perverse. Work on the SSP dam has been suspended off and on for approximately six or more years at the instance of the NBA. This itself has complicated issues by weakening the oustee’s resolve to move, swelling numbers and preventing rehabilitation, which entails steady emotional adjustment to the new dispensation after the initial phases of relocation and resettlement. In the confused parlance of R&R debate, the last phase is treated as coterminous with the first two. Ask even a sophisticated family how long it takes to settle down when it moves house, to say nothing of moving station. It is fallacious to imagine that R&R in the case of many tens of thousands of villagers, spread over three states will be instantly accomplished without a glitch.

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