IDENTITY politics in western capitalist democracies is said to have been associated with the advent of post-materialist values – a shift of priorities from matters of livelihood and security to ‘belonging, self-expression, and the quality of life.’¹ But in the rest of the world identity politics has not been about that. Material concerns have been central to Northeast India’s identity politics. Even those who are militant about their independentist political agendas are no radicals when it comes to lifestyle choices: many are unabashed about embracing the accoutrements of modern consumer society.

Development as an ideology – i.e., developmentalism – evokes ‘much more than just a socio-economic endeavour; it is a perception which models reality, a myth which comforts societies, and a fantasy which unleashes passions.’² There is surely an element of fantasy in former Mizoram Chief Minister Zoramthanga’s promise that a new World Bank financed road would be ‘smooth and sleek like a snake.’³ A policy document of the Arunachal Pradesh Government has a similar note of fantasy when it proclaims that the state could be ‘floating’ on ‘hydro-dollars’, as oil-producing Middle Eastern countries presumably do on ‘petro-dollars’.⁴ 

Arguably, developmentalism has been the shared ideology of Indian nationalists, regionalists and identity activists alike: they all desire ‘development’. Some identity activists may emphasize the unevenness of development as a process and argue that Northeast India’s natural resources are exploited to benefit the wealthier parts of the country. Others may accuse regional political elites of ignoring the developmental needs of poorer sub-regions. Yet, identity politics in Northeast India has been mostly about getting a better deal: to ‘close the development gap’ or to ‘catch up’ with more ‘developed’ areas. There are no obvious tensions between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution: the two have coexisted quite comfortably. But this political paradigm that fuses identity politics with the ideology of development is under strain today.

Developmentalism has had such a hold on the imagination of Northeast India’s political classes that even in activist circles, with rare exceptions, there isn’t much critical thinking on the subject. Ideas such as Amartya Sen’s, that development is about ‘expanding real freedoms’⁵ – and the implication that without proper vigilance development projects may promote freedom for some and un-freedom for others – have had very little impact. Phrases like human development and sustainable development have made their way into the public discourse. But there is little evidence that they have had an impact on the way most people think about development.

 

The Assam Accord of 1985 is a remarkable illustration of the complicity of identity politics with developmentalism. The agreement ended the six-year old Assam Movement driven by the fear that the identities of the region’s ‘indigenous’ peoples were under threat. Since the violence in western Assam in the summer of 2012, the Assam Accord’s failure to do much about ‘illegal immigration’ – the cause célèbre of the Assam Movement – has come up for scrutiny. But the Assam Accord also committed the Indian government to providing ‘constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards… to protect, preserve and promote the culture, social, linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people’ and to ‘the speedy all round economic development of Assam, so as to improve the standard of living of the people.’

To give effect to these commitments, the Indian government subsequently funded a number of major projects in Assam, including the Numaligarh refinery, the Bogibeel bridge on the Brahmaputra River, and of all things, the Assam Gas Cracker Project, apart from cultural and educational institutions such as the Sankardev Kalakshetra cultural complex, and the Indian Institute of Technology in Guwahati, and two central universities.

Historically, the shared ideology of development had made ethno-national discontent in Northeast India politically more manageable. It enabled the appeasement of leaders of identity movements – including militant ones – and the cooptation of their platforms. The ‘magnitude of popular awareness and interest in development’ in Assam is ‘a rare social force’, says a committee of the Indian Planning Commission. If used ‘constructively… it can be the most precious capital for the development of Assam.’⁶ It is perhaps not surprising that at a time when global manufacturing was beginning to move aggressively to areas that were once called the ‘third world’, the logic of capital and the ideology of development would converge so neatly.

 

According to a 2007 report, India’s power demand is expected to rise by 350 per cent in the next two decades.⁷ That would require the country to triple its power generation capacity.⁸ Hydropower has a significant place in India’s energy strategy. Much of India’s untapped hydropower potential is in the fast-moving rivers of the Eastern Himalayas. This has been known for a while. But till recently, the massive engineering projects necessary to tap into those reserves were not considered feasible because of Northeast India’s poor communication infrastructure. That situation has now changed, partly because of the success of development-oriented protest movements in Assam. Over the years, they led to significant government investments in the region’s communication infrastructure – improved roads and railways tracks, as well as bridges, especially on the Brahmaputra, that were at one time or another the explicit demand of Assamese protests.

 

According to the estimates of the Central Electricity Authority, Northeast India could generate as much as 58,971 megawatts of hydropower. Arunachal Pradesh alone has the hydropower potential of about 50,328 megawatts – the highest in the country.⁹ Developing the infrastructure to tap into those reserves has now become a major priority. As of October 2010, there were 132 memoranda of understanding signed between the Government of Arunachal Pradesh and potential developers of hydropower projects with a total capacity of 40,140.5 mw. 120 of those memoranda are with private companies.¹⁰ A news report of September 2011 puts the number of memoranda of understanding signed at 148.¹¹ According to one estimate, in a ten-year period, Arunachal Pradesh proposes to add hydro-power capacity which ‘is only a little less than the total hydropower capacity added in the whole country in 60 years of independence.’¹² But while the state of Arunachal Pradesh expects to make windfall gains from hydropower, there is growing anxiety about the downstream impact of large dams in the plains of Assam.

Northeast India is a seismically active region where earthquakes impact the hydrologic characteristics and morphology of rivers and water bodies.¹³ Such changes occur in this region not just in the vastness of geological time, but in the time-scale of ordinary humans. Historical sources are replete with references to earthquakes – including catastrophic ones. Thus following the 8.7 earthquake of 1950, massive landslides had blocked the downstream flow of the Dihing, Dibang and Subansiri rivers. When the trapped water burst through in cascades a few days later, it caused catastrophic floods downstream. These are among the rivers on which major hydropower dams are being built or planned today. The earthquake and the floods of 1950 are deeply etched in the collective memory of the people of the Brahmaputra Valley and large dams evoke a raw sense of danger and foreboding.

 

Moreover, Northeast India’s own energy needs are quite modest. The per capita energy use is a third of India’s national average, and the industrial use of energy is less than one per cent of India’s total. Fewer villages have access to electricity compared to the rest of the country. Yet the hydropower that the new projects will produce is meant almost entirely for use elsewhere. Project design documents include a section on ‘power evacuation’: the transmission arrangements that would take electricity from power generation facilities to the national power grid.

The primary implication for Northeast India seems quite clear: the region is entering the era of late capitalism in a familiar role – as supplier of a key natural resource to fuel the engines of economic dynamism elsewhere. But the people of the region will have to bear a disproportionate burden of the costs and the risks of large dams in the Himalayan rivers. Fundamental ambivalence about the risks and the distribution of risks has shaken the people’s faith in development. Suddenly, solidarity from anxiety has become a potent social force.

 

The economics of hydropower is quite simple: the fuel for hydropower production is moving water; and if society chooses to define property rights in a particular way, the owners of hydropower plants get the basic fuel almost free of cost. Given the ‘free’ source of fuel, unlike thermal power plants using coal, oil or natural gas, hydropower plants require huge initial investments, but once they are built, the operational costs are minimal. Hydropower is attractive also because of assured security of supply for countries that depend on foreign sources for fossil fuels. But even though hydro-power may be attractive to environmentalists because it is a low-carbon source of energy, hydropower development, especially when it is large-scale, reeks of unsustainability.

Most large hydropower dams in Arunachal Pradesh – under construction, or currently on the drawing board – are sure to destroy the health of rivers and their ecosystems, with potentially devastating consequences for the livelihood of communities that depend on them and on the aquatic and terrestrial habitats of numerous plant and wildlife species. The potential negative effects will be especially widespread in Northeast India because millions of people rely on the water commons for their livelihood. They fish in the rivers, streams and other water-bodies and fish is central to the people’s diet, and a major source of the caloric intake of poor people. Flood-recession agriculture in the flood plains depends crucially on the nutrients from sediments that the rivers bring.

 

There is a fundamental difference between the hydropower projects being currently built or planned in Northeast India and an earlier generation of multipurpose river valley projects. In the mid-20th century, the spirit of decolonization itself drove multi-purpose river valley projects. The ‘development of rivers’, in Rohan D’Souza’s words, had ‘charged decolonizing nations with a new technological mission: the giant quest to transform fluvial powers into national assets – hydroelectricity, navigation, irrigation, and flood control.’¹⁴ The model behind those projects was to use resources generated by hydropower to finance public goods such as flood mitigation, irrigation and navigation as part of a comprehensive strategy to develop a river basin region. Indeed, till recently, the focus of all policy thinking about rivers in Assam was flood control.

The Government of India had constituted the Brahmaputra Board in 1972 with flood control as its primary mandate. Previous investigations on dams on rivers of the Brahmaputra river basin under the auspices of authorities such as the Brahmaputra Flood Control Commission and the Brahmaputra Board were all for multipurpose projects. But none of these plans got off the ground because of resource constraints. Those plans have now all been abandoned in favour of single-purpose hydropower dams with power to be produced and sold for a profit by private as well as public sector companies.¹⁵ 

The 2000 megawatts Lower Subansiri Hydro Electric Project – India’s biggest so far – is the first among the very large hydropower projects to get to the construction phase. The 116 m high concrete gravity dam under construction is located in 2.3 km upstream of Gerukamukh village in the Dhemaji district of Assam. Protests against the project started as soon as the process of granting clearances under India’s environment, forest and wildlife laws began in the early 2000s. Initially, it was primarily environmental activists who had voiced opposition on grounds that the dam site and submergence area includes a region known for its rich wildlife and biodiversity. They pointed out serious flaws in the Environmental Impact Assessment and other project documents submitted for obtaining clearances, arguing that they underestimated the project’s potential adverse impact on biodiversity. They raised procedural objections as well.

 

But the protests gained strength when construction began in earnest in 2005, and two influential organizations, the All Assam Students Union (AASU) and the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) – led by Akhil Gogoi, who had developed a nation-wide reputation as a right to information activist – got involved. Soon the state’s main opposition party, Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) also joined in. The protests were focused on the issue of dam safety, and on the potential adverse impact on downstream communities.

The uneven distribution of the costs and vulnerability of the project has also become a major area of contention. As the anti-dam agitation gained strength, and the April 2011 elections to the state assembly drew near, the Lower Subansiri dam emerged as a major political issue in Assam. In July 2009, the state legislative assembly debated the issue and members of the ruling Congress party joined opposition MLAs in expressing concern about the dam’s potential adverse impact on downstream communities.

 

A critical step in the controversy was the constitution of an expert group to study the downstream impact of the dam. It was the result of an agreement in December 2006 between the Assam state government, the public sector company building the Lower Subansiri dam, the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation or NHPC, and AASU, which by then was playing a major role in the protests. The expert group was constituted with eight academics – professors of civil engineering, environmental science, geography, geology, life sciences and zoology at three of Assam’s most prestigious academic institutions: Gauhati University, Dibrugarh University and the Indian Institute of Technology in Guwahati. The NHPC later indicated that it was a reluctant party to the agreement. It ‘was constrained to award the study’ to this group of academics, says an NHPC statement, and that the composition of the committee was ‘suggested by AASU.’¹⁶ 

The expert group submitted its report in June 2010. It confirmed that the fears expressed about the dam’s safety and adverse impact on downstream communities were not unreasonable. The report recommended that the dam be redesigned: its height reduced and other changes made to increase the river flow and help flood moderation, but changes that would cut into its power producing capacity and profitability. The expert group’s report, coming as it did months before the 2011 elections, galvanized the protests in Assam. In the autumn of 2010, the political stakes were high enough for the then environment minister, Jairam Ramesh to come to Guwahati and hold a ‘public consultation’ on the issue of large dams. In keeping with an assurance he gave to that audience, Ramesh wrote a letter to the prime minister conveying the sentiments expressed in that meeting. On the Lower Subansiri project, he said ‘the dominant view in Assam appears to be that this project will have serious downstream impacts’ and that they want the ‘project to be scrapped completely.’ He also made note of ‘the feeling in vocal sections of Assam’s society’ that ‘"mainland India" is exploiting the North East hydel resources for its benefits, while the cost of this exploitation will be borne by the people of North East.’¹⁷ 

 

Right from the beginning of the controversy, vernacular knowledge based on experience had presented a challenge to expert knowledge. But the expert group’s report added a new dimension to the controversy: there was now a contest over the authority of two rival bodies of expert knowledge. The NHPC’s response to the expert group’s report asserted that ‘the geological and seismological’ aspects of the project were all ‘thoroughly examined by specialists’ during the approval process. Top specialists of government agencies such as the Central Water Commission, the Geological Survey of India, Central Soil and Materials Research Station, and the Central Electricity Authority were involved in the process.

The dam’s location, said the NHPC, was cleared by the Indian government’s ‘highest authorities’. The seismic parameters of the design were approved by the National Committee on Seismic Design Parameters of River Valley Projects – ‘the highest level committee’ of the Indian government based on ‘site-specific seismic design parameter studies’ done by experts at the Department of Earthquake Engineering of the Indian Institute of Technology in Rourkee – ‘one of the renowned institutes which has specialization in this field.’¹⁸ 

 

In January 2012, a paid advertisement by NHPC appeared in many newspapers in Assam under the heading ‘Clearing the Myths by Presenting Facts on Subansiri Lower Hydro Power Project.’ The advertisement juxtaposed a number of ‘myths’ against ‘facts’. Rather arrogantly, the arguments made in the expert group’s report, with the words often lifted from the report itself, were presented as ‘myths’. The first ‘myth’ listed was the expert group’s argument that the site of the dam was inappropriate. The so-called ‘fact’ was as follows: ‘The siting of the dam at the present location has been cleared by the designated authorities of Govt. of India, after satisfying themselves with the existing geological, seismological and tectonic set-up at the site and adequacy of investigations.’ Against the ‘myth’ that ‘the dam may break’ was another ‘fact’: ‘NHPC has so far constructed 12 dams in different parts of the Himalayas, all of which are performing satisfactorily. In 36 years of NHPC history, there is no case of distress on any dam.’¹⁹ 

Whatever the prestige of the technical experts in India’s top-level official agencies, their stamp of approval has failed to carry the day with public opinion in Assam. The expert group that included geologists and civil engineers who teach in some of the region’s best academic institutions has much more credibility in Assam. As a group they are seen as having more stakes in the safety of those dams than anyone living in Delhi or Rourkee. The debate has turned into an instance of, what Dutch social theorist Annemarie Mol calls ontological politics.²⁰ The impasse is a reminder of sociologist Ulrich Beck’s argument that experts can only presume the ‘cultural acceptance’ of risks; they cannot produce that acceptance. The people of the Brahmaputra Valley seem to believe that they intuitively understand that there may be unintended risks to these large dams that are incalculable and uninsurable.²¹ To a significant degree, that feeling seems to be shared by experts and laymen alike.

 

The debate has now entered a disturbing new phase. There is growing talk of Maoists ‘infiltrating’ the protests against large dams. Assam’s Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi cites ‘Intelligence inputs and Home Ministry reports’ to support his claim.²² An internal memo of the Ministry of Home Affairs warns of a ‘new "Red Terror Corridor" along the Assam-Arunachal border’,²³ a geographical belt that includes the construction site of the Lower Subansiri project which has been the focus of anti-dam protests. In May 2012, security forces arrested many protesters and forcibly removed barricades and other impediments blocking the transportation of construction material to the dam site.

 

It has been said of China that rule by an ‘unconstrained technocracy’ has not been conducive to ‘good ideas or decisions’ in matters such as the Three Gorges dam, the SARS epidemic or the high-speed rail network. At one time, the Chinese Politburo’s nine-member Standing Committee had as many as eight professional engineers.²⁴ Democracies should be able to better engage the public in matters of ontological politics. The memories of devastating earthquakes, the lived experience of frequent floods, and the knowledge of the region’s own scientists, technologists and intellectuals have brought together a remarkably well-informed regional public around the issue of large hydropower dams in Assam.

One hopes that India’s democratic institutions will find a way of meaningfully engaging that public instead of mobilizing the coercive apparatus of the state against protesters. If a democracy has advantages over an unconstrained technocracy in delivering ‘development as freedom’ it is because at least in principle, it can make critical agency – the freedom to act and the freedom to question and reassess – ‘a great ally of development.’²⁵

 

Footnotes:

1. Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 66.

2. W. Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. Zed Books, London, 1992, pp. 1-2.

3. Cited in Lipokmar Dzuvichu, ‘How Many Roads Must the State Build?’ Biblio, New Delhi, May-June, 2008, p. 30.

4. Government of Arunachal Pradesh, ‘Hydro Electric Power Policy.’ http://www. arunachalhydro.org.in/pdf/State%20Mega% 20Hydro.pdf

5. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999.

6. Planning Commission, Report of the Committee on Clause Seven of Assam Accord, April 1990, p. 1.

7. Some of the points made in the following sections of the essay are expanded in ‘Whose River is it Anyway? The Political Economy of Hydropower in the Eastern Himalayas’, Economic and Political Weekly 47(29), 2012.

8. Development and Growth in Northeast India: The Natural Resources, Water, and Environment Nexus – Strategy Report (Report No. 36397-IN, South Asia Region). The World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2007, pp. 55-56.

9. Mission 2012: Power for All, Powering India’s Growth. Ministry of Power, Annual Report, 2003-2004. New Delhi, p. 37. http://www.powermin.nic.in/reports/pdf/ar03_04.pdf

10. Neeraj Vagholikar and Partha J. Das, ‘Damming Northeast India.’ Kalpavriksh, Aaranyak and ActionAid India, 2010.

11. ‘MoU Virus hits Arunachal Pradesh’, Down to Earth, 9 September 2011. http://www.downtoearth.org.in/content/mou-virus-hits-arunachal-pradesh

12. Independent People’s Tribunal on Dams in Arunachal Pradesh: Interim Report. Human Rights Law Network, New Delhi, 2008, p. 3.

13. Dulal C. Goswami, ‘Managing the Wealth and Woes of the River Brahmaputra’, Ishani (Guwahati) 2(4), 2008. https://www.indian folklore.org/journals/index.php/Ish/article/view/449/514

14. Rohan D’Souza, ‘Framing India’s Hydraulic Crisis: The Politics of the Modern Large Dam’, Monthly Review 60(3), 2008.

15. Of the 147 hydropower projects for which the Arunachal Pradesh government has signed memoranda of agreement with developers only one is for a ‘multi-purpose’ project – the 3000 mw Dibang project is referred to as ‘multi-purpose’ because it has a flood moderation component. The rest are all single-purpose hydropower projects.

16. National Hydroelectric Power Corporation, ‘Counterpoint: The NHPC’s View Point’, in Mrinal Talukdar and Kishor Kumar Kalita (eds.), Big Dams and Assam. Nanda Talukdar Foundation, Guwahati, p. 33.

17. Jairam Ramesh, Letter to the Prime Minister of India, Reprinted in Big Dams and Assam, pp. 96-100.

18. ‘Face Off: The Expert Group versus NHPC’, in Big Dams and Assam, pp. 52-53, op cit.

19. National Hydroelectric Power Corporation, ‘Clearing the Myths by Presenting Facts on Subansiri Lower Hydro Power Project,’ Advertisement, The Telegraph (Guwahati), 21 January 2012.

20. Annemarie Mol, ‘Ontological Politics: A Word and Some Questions’, in John Law and John Hassard (eds.), Actor Network Theory and After. Blackwell, Oxford, 1999, pp. 74-89.

21. Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 58, 160n.

22. ‘Maoists formed body to oppose dams: CM,’ Assam Tribune, 13 January 2012.

23. Cited in Ajai Sahni, ‘The Northeast: Troubling Externalities’, South Asia Intelligence Review, Weekly Assessments and Briefings, volume 10, no. 38, 26 March 2012. http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/sair/index.htm

24. ‘Technocrats: Minds like Machines’, The Economist (London), 19 November 2011.

25. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, India: Development and Participation. Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, p. 274.