On Arundhati Roy

I am no fan of Arundhati Roy (but I think she is beautiful, though). If she had stuck to fiction, it would have saved me this trouble. I don’t read fiction and our worlds would not have crossed each other. She unnecessarily reads up modern age western thought books and tries to preach it to India.

Wars are made with “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat” (#) and Nations are built with ‘concrete, steel, iron, and will power’. She believes in borderless nations, dam-less rivers, and nuclear free countries. I like those concepts as well. I like a war-less world, caste-less society, race-less civilizations, malice-less neighbors, selfless taxpayers, and so on. That does not mean, I close my eyes, and start believing that’s how the world is.

Without dams, there wouldn’t have been a Silicon Valley or a Hollywood. Without Bhakra Nangal Dam Punjab would never have become ‘bread basket of India’. Without Nagarjuna sagar Dam in South, farmers would have been grappling only with flooding rivers during monsoon, and arid season during spring and summer. And one look at the poverty-ridden Bangladesh will tell you why taming Ganges and Brahmaputra is extremely critical for their farmers. Every year, floods sweep across the plain taking away crops, wealth and people into the Bay of Bengal.

Here’s one of here interviews at The Hindu. Snippets are given below, followed by my comments.

1. “For example, is it right to divert rivers and grow water-intensive crops like sugar cane and wheat in a desert ecology?”

Tell that to Israelis! Their survival depends on it. A country like Israel cannot tell its people- ‘We don’t want to disturb the rivers and natural ecosystem and hence your grandchildren will have no bread and we will have no country’. They have converted a brown desert into a green landscape and survived. That is the story of man. It is the story of man throughout the history- its how we made civilizations, wrote epics and dramas, composed music, created statutes, and discussed philosophies- surviving the nature, the environment, the climate, the wildlife, and surviving other men.

Many people shout- ‘Save Earth!’ They don’t realize that Earth will save itself, no matter what! It has done again and again in the last four billion years. It has induced Ice Ages and long summers many a times in its history to adjust climates, and in the process, losing dinosaurs and 99% of species that ever appeared on this planet, and it will keep on surviving long after mankind vanishes from its face. They should in fact shout- ‘Save Mankind!’ because we may not be able to adjust to the changing climate and have to go bust.

Some of civilizations were wiped out because they didn’t control the floods and droughts and not because they built dams.

2. “It touches a raw nerve, so you have people who know very little about it, people who admit that they know very little and don’t care to find out, coming out with passionate opinions.”

The problem with opinions is that- they are like assholes; everyone has one (its the same quote I use at the top of by blog). I think the same way about her- that she knows too little about it, and that her opinions are borrowed and misplaced in time and place. The luxury of not having a dam is something India cannot afford. It needs dams, it needs roads, it needs canals and it needs nuclear power to generate electricity. Those who oppose should go and live in villages which get two hours of electricity per day, instead of talking and writing from cozy a/c houses (that includes me- just that I don’t have a/c).

3. “…the really vital questions that have not been answered are the ones that question the benefits of dams.”

‘Now, my dear madam, read history! And if you don’t have much time, just read, Jared Diamond’s Collapse!' – was my initial reaction. But she actually she did! She says-“I recommend Jared Diamond’s wonderful book Collapse to all those who wish to take a slightly longer, and less panicked, view of ‘development’”. And she conveniently uses it as an argument for her case. That’s the problem with some fundamental ideas. They can be used by both the opposing parties to further their argument (like me doing here for ‘development’).

Many civilizations got swept away because they could not adjust to the changing climate and natural conditions- including flooding and droughts of many rivers. The civilization became stable only when those civilizations could tame these rivers by building dams. This point is mooted by Jared Diamond in a different context and that is conveniently NOT taken up by Arundhati Roy. In another instance, he talks about how tribals or jungle folks living in so-called ‘harmony’ with nature can actually create situations innocuously by which they get extinct. For example, gathering sticks from the forest for firewood which starts off quite harmlessly can have dangerous consequences when the rate at which the sticks fall from the tree is lower than the consumption rate of that tribals because it may trigger massive denudation of the forests leading to extinction of that tribe. Sometimes, ‘development’ can save that civilization by fencing off forests, and providing alternate method for those tribals to lit fire. Dams have been vital part of our civilization- many rivers in monsoon climates, swell, shrink, meander and take a different route, and this can lead to death of a civilization (as it happened to Indus Civilization when Indus started meandering away from the inhabited towns and cities).

May be, what she is referring to is the ‘big dams’ instead of just dams. Yes, big dams are very disruptive and cause changes to nature. But we can’t stop making dams. The US and others have built their huge dams and now the liberals in that country go about preaching to others not to build one. And UBIs (‘Unfortunately Born in India’) like Arundhati Roy, who aspires to be in that club, borrow their ideas and make a mega-fight out of it.

China is currently building one of the biggest construction sites on the planet- the Three Gorges Dam, once completed will improve the lives of tens of million Chinese. China sees itself ahead of India in all respects- in roads, better hospitals, in electricity, in steel, etc, because they don’t have Medha Patkars and Arundhati Roys.

Narmada river will have a series of dams, not just one massive dam, and of this series Sardar Sarovar happens to be a big one, but definitely not as massive as Three Gorges of China and Hoover Dam of US.

4. “Even vast parts of the command area of our favourite dam – the Bhakra is water-logged and in deep trouble.”

There are some negative effects to everything we build. One should weigh the positives against negatives. Is there ‘deep trouble’ in Punjab because of Bhakra Nangal Dam? Really? I see people happily buying cars and sending kids to US and Canada, thanks to Bhakra Dam, not worrying over death of Punjab civilization because of water logging.

If Medha Patkar and Arundhati Roy were alive during those days of this dam’s construction, we would not have that dam, and we wouldn’t have the food to eat as well- which is of course irrelevant to these women.

5. “The tragedy is that if they would only use more local, effective, rainwater harvesting schemes, for less than 10 per cent of the cost of the Sardar Sarovar, every single village in Kutch and Saurashtra could have drinking water.”

Lot of people make lot of stupid arguments- just like the above. ‘If only more wind turbines are put across the whole of Karnataka, then we wouldn’t need to burn coal or nuclear fuel’, ‘if only we could collect all the cow dung on the planet, then we can run electricity to the whole city of Patna’, and so on. All the alternate sources of energy, from wind, from sea waves, from solar energy, etc, are important contributors but they do not generate enough energy to keep a nation going. Oil, coal and nuclear fuel for all its ills are still the reliable sources of energy at present. Our nation cannot run on windmills (and when the wind stops, the whole population, including Arundhati Roy, can then pray to God Vayu, the Wind God). Even if it runs on wind energy, the whole landscape will be filled with windmills, and imagine the deforestation and other ill effects. Any source of energy when utilized on mega scale will have some negative effects.

Rain harvesting should be encouraged, but it will never give the reliable source of water supply to millions of people for drinking and irrigation. These are all small contributors but not the main sources. When there is no rain, there is no harvesting, and millions may die because some inane author championed the obstruction of a dam which could have provided the lifeline.

All in all, her argument is farcical (as such any argument can be proved to be farcical, including mine in here). She cites silly reasons, like money for rehabilitation being given to men who blow it away in drinking, and that IT parks are created by throwing poor people out at gun point, etc. Such trivialities cannot stop a nation from launching space rockets, building mega roads, building software parks, and building dams. Just because certain people are not getting compensated or rehabilitated properly does not meant that work should be stopped. If such was the case, no project will ever get done in India. No matter who it is, people in India (or any where in the world) are not happy when moved from their abode, and no matter what compensation they get, they will always be dissatisfied and seek more. Citing reasons that the rehabilitation was inadequate is a good reason to strengthen the fight, but not stop the work. If that was the case, my hometown of Warangal would never have got wide roads, and city of Hyderabad would never have got good infrastructure.

Making sure the environment doesn’t get affected badly is our duty, and we have to take extra precautions to do that, not stop development. People benefit from infrastructure on the long run, though some people may suffer briefly- and that is true for any project anywhere on the planet. And that, for some reason, Arundhati Roy fails to understand- because she opposes ‘development’ in all forms. May be, she would like us all to go back to caves- which is not a bad idea, because then, all we could do is hunt, make war, eat meat, drink beer, and have sex!

(#) Quote from Winston Churchill.

Links:
Arundhati Roy's Interview in THE HINDU