Down With The Dam
_________________________

The Sri Ganga Raksha Yatra carried out in the last week of July against
the Tehri Dam Project was actually an attempt by the organisers
to consolidate their own constituency, reports MUKUL SHARMA

It is morning, as morning can only be at Har Ki Pauri, Haridwar. Yet, on July 26 there is something distinctly different too. As the sun makes an appearance to sparkle over the holy waters, a few hundred sadhus begin to arrive at the VIP Ghat, carrying water pots, tridents and cloth bags as close as possible to a small stage that has been erected beside the Ganga. Nothing unusual there but soon, among the devotees can be sighted Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Ashok Singhal and sants and mahants such as Kaushal Kishore Das, Ramvilas Vedanti, Mahamandaleshwar Bhakti Hari, Swami Vishwamitranand, Kalyanand and others. Presently, the worshipping of the river begins.

Amidst slogans, like Bharat Mata Ki Jai! Sri Ram Janmabhoomi Ki Jai! Kashi Vishwanath Ki Jai! Sri Ram Jai, Ram Jai Jai Ram! Jaikara Hai Veer Bajrange! Har Har Mahadeo!, Ashok Singhal takes the stage. He declares the vow of the VHP, Bajrang Dal, Ganga Sabha, Dhramyatra Mahasangh and Ganga Raksha Samiti not to allow the construction of the Tehri dam. The 260.5 metre-high earth and rock-filled dam under construction, near the confluence of Bhagirathi and Bhilangana rivers, downstream of Tehri town in the Uttar Pradesh, then is the issue.

‘‘The Tehri dam is a betrayal against the country, against the Hindus and the Hindu culture. The dam will ruin the free and pure flow of Ganga. The sants-sadhus have virtually ensured the construction of the Ram Mandir at his birthplace. Now they will only ensure the survival of Ganga,’’ Singhal sets the tone, to be echoed and amplified by the others to follow.

The six-day-long Sri Ganga Raksha Yatra (March for Protection of Ganga), from Haridwar to Delhi, via Bahdarabad, Roorkee, Purkajee, Muzzafarnagar, Khatauli, Modipuram, Meerut and a number of villages and kasbas, takes off from here. Three well-carved raths, carrying an idol of Mother Ganga and the earthen pot of the holy Ganga water, lead the caravan of over two dozen vehicles. During their route, which is otherwise totally closed to any vehicular traffic in this particular season, they pass through thousands of devotee kanwarias, who at this time mostly travel on foot, carrying the Ganga water on their shoulders. The priests, sitting in the raths, offer food and blessings to all on the way. The loudspeakers blare popular bhajans and devotional songs in Hindi. These performances and processes of ritualisation continue throughout, and produce a ritualised body of Mother Ganga.

This body blurs the boundaries between the few hundred VHP sants-sadhus, primarily from Uttar Pradesh, and thousands of pilgrims across the country, allowing the yatra to broaden its canvas and strengthen its appeal. Thus the strategically-timed, placed and routed yatra simultaneously produces a particular kind of holy Hindu body in this process. So speaks Ashok Singhal, in a meeting at the Sanatam Dharma Prakashchand Girls College, Roorkee: ‘‘I am here not to talk about the seismicity of the dam, or the cost-benefit of the project. I am talking about Gangatva. Gangatva is Hindutva. Hindutva is Rashtratva.’’

The Raksha Yatra for the Holy Hindu Ganga has to embody information, beliefs and values which can influence events, not just environmentally, but more so locally and politically. Thus, the ritualised Ganga, and the issue of construction of a dam over it, since the very beginning carry the political soul they inhabit as a result of this ritualisation. The yatra, the prayers, the meetings, the announcements move in with the spiritual, the sacred and the pure, but often conveniently also inhabit the sphere of the material, the political and the national. For Ram Vilas Vedanti, a mahant from Ayodhya, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is like Ram and the sants-sadhus in the yatra are like his Lakshman. He addresses a meeting in a village temple at Budhana on July 28: ‘‘It was after Sri Ram’s victory over Sri Lanka and his coronation that Lakshman came to worship his brother. The guard informed Lord Ram, but Ram forgot who Lakshman was. After being reminded of his brother, he came down from his throne to receive him. Our Vajpayee will do the same thing with us sadhus.’’

It occasionally comes down to specifics — a particular state, a territory and certain societies. In an evening meeting at Roorkee, the VHP leader makes a special and detailed announcement of how the UP Chief Minister has repealed the UP Religious Act. How he came a long way to Haridwar, to assure the sadhus. How some of them dared to doubt the integrity of the RSS people, and decided against participation in the yatra.

Environmental myths are to be created, which are some (re)-presentations of reality on Ganga and the Tehri dam. They are carved to encompass day-to-day experiences with the river and the likely impact of its taming, and simultaneously anchor these experiences in a continuous medium of Hindu, aggressive, nationalist meaning. The myth contains both facts and fancies. It is none other than the words of Ashok Singhal on the very first day of the yatra: ‘‘After the construction of the Tehri dam, the Ganga will become a rainy river. In places of pilgrimages like Haridwar and Rishikesh, the rainwater will fill the course of Ganga river and only 20 per cent will be the original Ganga water. The Ganga will not remain the same and her capacity for self-purification will be finished.’’

In the following days, through the public announcement system of the rath, and through several renowned speakers, we hear of Ganga turning into a small drain or even a tank. The question is not only ‘is it true?’ but also ‘whose truth is it?’
The myths are portrayed here in specific texts of Sri Ram, which provide a rich readymade source for the production of a particular national ethos and social metaphors. Swami Chinmayanand, a BJP MP, recounts: ‘‘In his journey through Ganga, Lord Sri Ram decided to bow down before Nishad. He could have made a bridge over it, as he did in the case of a sea,’’ and then adds conclusively, ‘‘Those who understand the issue of faith towards Ram can only understand the faith towards Ganga.’’ For Jeeveshwar Mishra, Convenor, Ganga Raksha Yatra, the reservoir of the dam is being built over the place where Hanuman got the life-giving herbs for the dying Lakshman.

‘Fear’ and ‘conspiracy’ are some of the strongest elements in VHP-Bajrang Dal attitudes towards Tehri dam. The fear has many components. There is a fear of the wild effects on people and places, exposed to the dam’s influence. ‘‘In case of Tehri dam being damaged, from Gangotri to Gangasagar, more than 1,000 cities, including Calcutta, Patna and Kanpur, will be drowned completely in 700 feet water,’’ pronounces Vedanti, in a meeting at Khatauli. The fear involves and reflects a concern for those maths and ashrams that are making large sums of money in places of pilgrimages. Says Swami Chinmayanand: ‘‘Ganga flow ensures enormous cash flow in our ashrams of Haridwar-Rishikesh. If something goes wrong to this flow here, the money flow will dry up.’’

The yatra focuses on the conspiracy theory, through the use of the ‘other’ and oppositional archetypes. It is kept afresh by use and reuse. Listen to Ashok Singhal, Kalayanand Jee, Kaushal Kishore or, in fact, anybody else and you hear that the Tehri dam is a conspiracy of the West in general and communist Russia in particular to destroy our great Hindu culture and our Hindu country. The logic is simple: first, the dam will be built, then it will be destroyed either by an earthquake or by a bomb installed through an ISI agent of Pakistan, and this will wipe out our religious places and people, and will lead to the death of a Hindu country.

To stop this conspiracy, Tehri dam has to be stopped. The ways for it go through remembering and reminding the heightened phase of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the destruction of the Babri mosque. ‘‘The way we decided to demolish the mosque and build a temple there, we are now deciding to stop the dam,’’ announces a local VHP leader in Roorkee. The rest is done by the wall-writings of Bajrang Dal, here and there, near the meeting places: In Roorkee, for example, Pukarti hai Maa, pukarti hai Bharti, khoon se tilak karo, goliyon se aarti! (Calls Mother, calls Bharat, mark your forehead with blood and worship with bullets). In Bahdarabad: Jis desh mein shastr aur shaastr ki puja hoti hai, woh kabhi parajit nahin hota! (A country where arms and religious scriptures are worshipped, can never be defeated).

The yatra takes the form of a distinct cultural politics, as in the whole course, it tries to bind only certain religious and social groups, while at the same time threatening to sideline others to the point where their views can no longer be heard. The yatra leaders are not even ambivalent; they are clearly one-sided. In response to a question of the presence of a sizeable Muslim population across the yatra route and their likely response to a Hinduised campaign, MahaMandaleshwar Swami Bhakt Hari, a prominent figure of the yatra, says, ‘‘Ganga is our mother. How can those accompany us, who do not consider Ganga their mother? They are unworthy, bad sons. Even then, Ganga blesses them equally.’’ Thus within the VHP campaign, feelings for the river Ganga crystallise around the form of an ethnically and culturally homogenous, naturally existing nation. Hindu national identity is the pre-eminent sense of belonging, and environmental politics is made synonymous with the protection of elements of that identity.

At times the yatra sympathetically raises the name of environmentalist Sunderlal Bahuguna who has been raising his voice against the dam for several years. Thus Ashok Singhal and others can repeatedly make public statements that they have the support of the existing environmental protests and personalities on this issue.
Holy birthplaces, holy cities, holy temples — how can a river be now turned ‘holy’ in the popular vocabulary of political Hindu nationalism — Ganga Raksha Yatra is a search in this direction. The issue of Tehri dam is a means of combining sacredness with impulse, the gravity of high politics with the solemnity of daily worship, nature with nationalism. How this journey will transform the river water into a political, moral and emotional idea is yet to be seen, but needs to be closely watched.

(Mukul Sharma is a Delhi-based journalist who writes in English and Hindi.
His forthcoming book is Landscapes and Lives: Environmental Clippings
on Rural India, from Oxford University Press, Delhi.)

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