Skip to main content

Narmada dam affected people begin satyagraha in Bhopal following 'violent' attacks

By A Representative
Around 1,500 people displaced and affected by the backwaters of Sardar Sarovar Dam have reached Bhopal and begun an indefinite protest, demanding adequate compensation and rehabilitation, in front of the Narmada Valley Development Authority’s (NVDA’s) office.
The protestors included people from different districts of Madhya Pradesh, including Barwani, Dhar, Khargone and Alirajpur.
Their satyagraha is led by Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) leader Medha Patkar, who has been fighting for the last 34 years, first against the construction of the dam and now for the dam’s operations to comply fully with the Supreme Court orders, the Narmada Water Dispute Tribunal award of 1979 and the state government’s rehabilitation policy.
“We have been forced to come to Bhopal as there has been a violent attack on our Narmada Valley carried out by the callousness of Gujarat and central government,” Patkar said. “We have come to ask questions related to the human rights and livelihoods of the affected people and will not return unless the government answers them.”

Comments

TRENDING

From margins to microphones: The rise of Dalit hip-hop in India

By Tersina Maria Toppo*  A protest does not always arrive as a slogan shouted from a street corner. Sometimes, it arrives on a beat. A microphone replaces the megaphone, a music video becomes a public square, and the smartphone becomes the space where a history once pushed to the margins is narrated, debated, and shared.

UCC push would lead to state surveillance, erosion of women’s rights: Feminist alliance

By A Representative   The All-India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA) has issued a sweeping condemnation of the push to implement Uniform Civil Codes (UCCs) across 21 BJP- and NDA-ruled states, warning that the legislation masquerades as gender justice while fundamentally expanding state surveillance, criminalizing consensual relationships, and undermining the constitutional and economic rights of women and marginalized communities. 

Xi Jinping’s visit to USA: Recognition that China can't be contained?

By Vijay Prashad   President Xi Jinping’s forthcoming visit to the United States must be understood as more than an encounter between two heads of state, but it must be seen as an encounter between two possible futures. In one future, the United States imposes a spiral of confrontation against China. Trade disputes harden into economic warfare, then economic warfare intensifies into technological blockades, technological blockades produce military encirclement, and finally military encirclement creates incidents, and incidents the danger of becoming an unimaginable war.