"Rethinking conflicts over water: "Sustainable Development" or "Self

Determination"?

Radha D'Souza

Services for All?

Conference organized by Wits University Graduate School of Public and Development Management, Parktown and Diepkloof, Soweto

Johannesberg, May 17, 2002

Over the past few days that I have been in Johannesberg I have heard people speak of "the struggle". It reminded me of my parents and my grandparents who often spoke of "the struggle", by which they meant the freedom struggle. I have seen video documentaries of people in Soweto and elsewhere burning ANC cards and it reminded me of people burning the Indian National Congress cards soon after Independence. I have heard you talk with frustration and despair about the coalition, about the COSATU and the SACP and the ANC and I was reminded of the frustrations and despair with the AITUC and the CPI in the 1960s in my country. And, I hear some of you wonder about "sustainable development" the same way as we wondered about "development" after Independence. And, since being with all of you here, I have asked myself what has changed really? How is "sustainable development" different from "development"? How are the predicaments of the ANC, the SACP and the COSATU different from those of the INC, the CPI and the AITUC some decades ago in my country? What has changed, really?

When my parents' and grandparents' generations participated in "the struggle" just as some of you did here only recently, what did they want? What did they fight for? If I try to remember it correctly, they fought for 'self-determination'. That was their vision, their hope, their aspiration for all of us, the future generation. They did not fight for "development". Then, how did we get swept away by this thing called "development"? As we discovered that "development" was nothing but another term for exploiting us - our labour, our resources - when we started rejecting 'development', claiming it had got us into debt and made the West wealthy, that it was nothing but the old colonialism in new clothing, we are being offered 'sustainable development'.

What I find interesting in language of politics is the way some words fall off the political vocabulary and others get currency. Whereas words like imperialism and colonialism have lost currency, words like "struggle" have gained a new currency with an added shine. Struggles are always inspiring however small. They will continue to be inspiring as long as our minds and hearts continue to be ruled by heroes and villains. It is what Franz Fanon described as the act of assertion and defiance that restores the sense of the self in the oppressed. However, struggles are not new. They have always been part of the lives of the colonized and the oppressed for as long as colonization and oppression has existed. When I think about it now, ever since I can remember we have gone from one upheaval to the next. In the sixties as a child I remember bloody struggles for democratic federalism and demands for reorganizing states on the basis of language and ethnic groups. In the late sixties there were the peasant uprisings in different parts of the country and struggles for land reforms. In the mid-seventies there were famines and the struggles around water. Then, there were the railway strikes, Indira Gandhi's notorious political emergency, the struggles of the urban workers and unions that culminated in the historic textile workers strike where over a million workers lost their jobs in what is perhaps the longest and biggest strike. Then, there were movements for secession in different parts of the country. Struggles per se are not new. What is new is the way they get reinvented. What intrigues me is why some struggles at certain moments and in certain contexts, captures the attention of the so-called "international community" or "international civil society".

If we look at the problem of displacement by dams in my country, the problem of project affected persons in large development projects has always been there. I can remember it going back to my school days when we used to see them protesting outside the state legislature building, I remember them during my student days when we organized solidarity actions during the famines of the seventies. But they go back before my time to the 1920s and 1930s when Senapati Bapat one of our legendary heroes of the freedom struggle organized protests against the Mulshi dam in the western state of the present Maharashtra. What is different now from Senapati Bapat's times seems to be this. Bapat's movement against the Mulshi dam converged with a nation wide movement against the colonial rule and against imperialism. In doing that it became part of a broad national alliance against imperialism and colonial rule that united different sections and groups within Indian society. I am not so sure if we can say the same thing about struggles on similar issues today.

The critique of imperialism and colonization in the early 20th century was inextricably linked to the idea of self-determination. Somehow, somewhere the idea of self-determination was cast off from the critique of imperialism. In the post-Independence era the hiatus between the two concepts became wider. The dominant critique of imperialism was reduced to economics and economic relations primarily. The legal and institutional edifice that underpinned the economics, the scientific and technological pillars on which it rested, the political and ideological premises on which it was constructed remained clouded and tenuous at best. Consequently, we have seen a range of social movements from water issues, to workers to democratic rights, but they appear as disparate struggles, going from one issue to the next and often one region to another, without any systemic linkages that leaves me wondering about the direction of our struggles. Struggle yes certainly, but struggle for what?

A reductionist view of imperialism as economic inequities leaves us with contradictions within social movements. For one, in the post-war era the tensions and conflicts caused by the economic inequalities manifest as ethnic, religious, racial and class conflicts within our societies. If I were to take examples from my country, the disputes over Kaveri waters manifest as disputes between people of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, the disputes over the waters of Ravi-Beas manifest as secessionist movements in the Punjab. The urban-rural divisions in society introduced by the colonial intervention, and entrenched in the structure of the state and constitution create radically different and opposed conceptions of water use and access and conflicting interests in water. All urban populations are not capitalists, they include earlier generations of populations uprooted from land and often due to the same displacement processes that struggles of the day focus on. We critique the neo-liberal policies of international organizations but stop short of the UN system that has provided the institutional umbrella for the international organizations in the post-war era in much the same way as the Empire system provided the institutional umbrella for imperialism in the colonial era.

The reductionist critique of imperialism as economic inequality leads to the politics of 'sustainable development'. The politics of 'sustainable development' keeps us tied to the UN system, the doles and handouts of development assistance and collaborating to find ways and means of sustaining poverty, sustaining injustice and exploitation and sustaining the institutional edifice of imperialism. In the colonial era famines were a recurring feature in India and the death tolls often ran into millions, depopulating entire cities and towns. With 'sustainable development' and poverty alleviation programmes, we have achieved 'sustainable poverty', i.e. low intensity permanent poverty that does not upset the political regimes the way famines destabilized colonial rule. For those in the so-called "Third World" which is the two-thirds world, 'sustainable development' is 'sustainable poverty'. Is that all we can have as a vision for our future?

People in the so-called "Third World" find themselves at crossroads today. We know today, that we cannot become a United States or Europe. Because we know that the United States and Europe was built on land confiscated from indigenous peoples, from slave and indentured labour, from natural resources from the whole world and a military superstructure that spurred their scientific and technological progress. We know today that societies that attempted to go on that path without colonies, slave labour, free natural resources and the militarism came to grief and find themselves on a no-exit dead end street today. Struggles based on borrowed resources, intellectual and material, have also come to a dead end. While there is a sense of celebration about a global movement of resistance, the reality for many in the Third World is that their participation is underwritten by benefactors from North America and Europe without which we would not be seen or heard. Naturally that has implications for who gets heard and seen and who doesn't and has follow on consequences for domestic politics and tensions within our societies.

As intellectuals from the "Third World" our task is onerous and difficult. When at crossroads, a stock-taking of our experiences on the road we have traveled may tell us something about where we want to go from here. The reality for us is, other than the solidarity of enlightened individuals and groups, the West does not offer any emancipatory potential, either by way of conceptual or material resources. We are confronted with the reality of having to develop our own conceptual and intellectual resources that are emancipatory and based on our histories, our struggles, and our stories. The freedom movement for us, was a brief moment when the struggle against imperialism was combined with the struggle for democracy. Today, we have identified what we do not want, what is not good. Do we know what we want? What is good for us? When I revisit the history of our people, our struggles and our stories, the question I find asking myself is: "what is self-determination". Is it at all possible to reinstate the idea of self-determination in our critique of imperialism? And how? Is there no hope for our people beyond "sustainable development"?