Water heals, it also educates. With nearly three decades of tapasya (meditation) immersed in water education, it has healed a part of me. For years, I strived to turn my tapasya into satyagraha (persuade through truth) to address the gaps in water education around me, amidst the rising water crisis augmented by social crisis.
To turn individual tapasya into satyagraha needs a deeper collective conscience and citizenry backed by science and society. This is where the path of Jal Satyagraha came in, doing water conversations towards water conservation, at the WforW Foundation.[1] The path of Jal Satyagraha is an invisible one, like a thread in a necklace that connects water conservation enthusiasts to collectively work towards their goal where each enthusiast is a drop in the ocean with the potential of the ocean in every drop.
Since water has the capacity to connect, my satyagraha is to connect with others on this issue, drawing on the inspiration of satyagraha and swaraj revered by Mahatma Gandhi, Lal Bahadur Shastri and others in the 20th century which form our early ideas of participatory governance or democracy. That the path to swaraj is through satyagraha was proved during India’s independence movement. Satyagraha, practised as non-violent resistance, involves holding onto a truth and seeking it through peaceful means with prolonged campaigns and persuasions. Satyagraha, as a movement, is not about winning or losing the battle but a tool of dissent against developments at the cost of social-ecological degradation, disasters, displacements, and distresses.
Taking the idea of satyagraha to water has a long history in India. A century of Jal Satyagraha, on the one hand, shows bleak scenarios of top-down water management excluding or tokenising community participation and, on the other, provides bold situations when communities rose against the might of governments or corporates for water. Most Jal Satyagrahas have been anthropocentric. The idea gained scientific and societal ground after the 1987 Brundtland Report, by the World Commission on Environment and Development, identified three pillars of Sustainable Development[2] as economic growth, environmental protection, and social equality.
Protecting and conserving the water bodies rivers, streams, lakes, mangroves, and allied services then became central to Jal Satyagraha. While access to water is divided between the urban and the rural, and further between the rich and the poor, Jal Satyagraha has been largely confined to deprived and vulnerable in rural communities. However, it may become centre stage in cities with the rising water crisis. The top-down discursive hegemony of water management has to be challenged to find solutions to the rising inequity of water access and sanitation but, also because the water crisis is seeping into everybody’s life with recurring flood, drought, and pollution in the cities.
The question is whether communities in cities are ready to stand for their rights to safe and clean water and what can urban areas learn about Jal Satyagraha. I attempt to answer these.
Photo: Mansee Bal Bhargava
Jal Satyagraha around the world
Water is a crucial component of complementing or conflicting relationships between a community and its government which often interlinks with other social-ecological-economic-political dynamics. Conflicts triggered by water corruption also get into religious, traditional, and cultural systems causing unrest in society and making water governance weak.
For example, the water protests in the northern Africa and Middle East[3] in 2018, the tribal clash in southern Iraq[4] in 2018 over water scarcity, the Afghanistan water crisis[5] in 2018 got interwoven with the religious, traditional and formal system, the control of mafia over urban water of Pakistan[6], the lead contamination[7] in the US brought out racial discrimination in 2016, then the demonstrations in 2017 against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) project[8] over land rights became a global headline.
Differences between a community and its government arise due to the lack of trust of the government stemming from poor water governance. Issues like inequitable access, destruction of facilities, weaponising water, control of the decisions over water resources, water contamination, floods, droughts, displacements, urban-rural divide, class divide, water tariffs, privatisation, large constructions projects like dams have been the core issues of water campaigns around the world.
For example, the famous Cochabamba-Water-Wars[9] of 2000 by the Bolivians against its government over the privatisation and rise in water tariffs, the anti-privatisation campaign by Nicaraguans[10] between 2001-07, the Egyptian campaign led to the 2011 famous Egypt/Arab rise[11], the Chinese rose to protest[12] over pollution in drinking water, fishery, waste pipeline in 2012, the 2021 Tunisian Khemir Tribes[13] campaign exposed the breach of tribal rights and services, and the South Africans have been fighting[14] for their rights to water for decades.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Jal Satyagraha in India
In the last century, among the many Jal Satyagrahas are the famous Kandel Nahar Satyagraha[15] of Chhattisgarh led by Pt. Sundarlal Sharma and Babu Chotelal Shrivastava against the high irrigation tax imposed by the British Raj, the first anti-dam Mulshi Satyagraha[16] in 1920 in Pune led by Pandurang Mahadev Bapat or popularly known as Senapati Bapat, and the Mahad Satyagraha of 1927[17] in Maharashtra on the inclusion of untouchables (in principle, this nomenclature is unacceptable to me but quoting as written) for their right to water from the village pond.
The success of Kandel Nahar Satyagraha is the genesis of the 1930 Civil Disobedience Movement. The Mulshi Satyagraha was lost to the Tata group over providing electricity to Mumbai and was the beginning of capitalistic development and urbanisation over rural lives, but generations of villagers still cry for their lost land. The Mahad Satyagraha fought by Babasaheb Ambedkar[18] in court, for nearly 10 years, was won but the win over caste (and class) division in the society, which denies access to water and sanitation to the poor and vulnerable, is still afar.
Jal Satyagraha has resisted dams and hydropower projects such as in Tehri, port projects such as in Ennore creek and Vadhavan port, river pollution such as in Ganga and Yamuna rivers, sand mining from river beds like in Ganga and in Shivnath besides mishandling of money and poor compensation and rehabilitation across large and small infrastructure projects such as in Sardar Sarovar dam and Omkareshwar dams. Despite the overwhelming imposition of dams and ports post-independence, there were several iterations of Jal Satyagraha across the country which governments succeeded in intimidating. The anti-Tehri dam movement from 1980 till 2004[19] led by Sunderlal Bahuguna included the famous Chipko movement led by women, street protests, and more. The relevance of such local wisdom is brought home during environmental disasters that are becoming frequent now.
The four-decades old Jal Satyagraha of Narmada displacements[20] led by the Narmada Bachao Andolan and Medha Patkar is well documented. The campaign for the rights of the river and the people in its basin seems to be going from bad to worse with people suffering upstream to downstream of the Sardar Sarovar dam.[21] Similarly, most of the interstate rivers like Ganga[22], Yamuna[23], Brahmaputra[24], Mahanadi[25], Godavari[26], and Cauvery[27] and people in their basins have undertaken several Jal Satyagraha and Jal Panchayat in the past decades.
Another Jal Satyagraha, over two decades, against the pollution, corruption, sand and stone mining in the Ganga, led by Matri Mandir Haridwar and Shivanand Swamy, has been documented. This satyagraha at Matri Sadan[28] was also about ecological conservation – saving the Ganga for the river as well as related social-ecological aspects. Resistance through ‘fasting’ has been used to advocate for free flow and cleanliness of the Ganga called as, ‘Aviralta (free/uninterrupted flow) and Nirmalta (clean)’ which is now the tagline of most Ganga campaigns.
Photo: Counterview
Jal Satyagraha in urban settings
Much of the urban population is complacent about water and indifferent to the rural water crises. Urbanisation is an outcome of mega water infrastructure and big economic dreams. However, there is a lack of reflection of how it is achieved. Water-guzzling cities grab the rural/hinterland water needs and there is an asymmetric distribution of water between the rich and the poor.
With the rising water crisis, spreading water awareness, and environmental stewardship, the urban population is slowly taking to Jal Satyagraha. For example, the 2019 protest in Chennai[29] when the city ran out of clean drinking water; the movement against the displacement at Barwani’s Rajghat in Madhya Pradesh[30], the 2021 campaign in Mahanadi by the people of Sambalpur and Cuttack[31] over possible displacement, and the march for the revival of the Vishwamitri by the people of Vadodara[32].
Targets and tools of Jal Satyagraha
Satyagraha for clean water, access to water and equity in water governance is the result of poor water management where a community, pushed to the wall, adopts it as a last resort for its rights. The implicit demand is on community consultation and participation in a water project besides the explicit demand for transparency in transactions. As Medha Patkar once said, in a conversation, satyagraha is a continuum and, if it is a pursuit for truth, then it is also a way to unearth lies.
Among the many tools used in Jal Satyagraha, the ‘fast unto death’ is the strongest. The Jal Satyagraha of Matri Sadan by Professor GD Agrawal,[33] (also known as Sant Swami Sanand and Sant Swami Gyan Swaroop Sanand), eventually took his life. Walking like the people of Vadodara did for reviving Vishwamitri River, immersing oneself in water like the residents of Gogalgaon village and neighbouring hamlets in Khandwa district did in Narmada River for days to protest the height increase of Omkareshwar Dam are common tools. Dharna, occupying space with speeches, hoardings, and signposts, in front of authorities or offices is also a popular approach. The judicial route and writing joint letters as campaigns are tools used across all forms of Jal Satyagraha.
What makes Jal Satyagraha resistance distinct is its sustenance over time. Short-duration protests or campaigns are often for immediate relief and, sometimes, politically motivated. The recent ‘Kale Pani Da Morcha’ (War Against Water Pollution) is a fight for the ‘right to clean water’ by environmental activists, farmer unions, and civil society groups from Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan against the unchecked contamination of Punjab’s rivers and of the Sutlej. A recent example of water politics is the Congress party taking to Delhi’s streets against water scarcity by staging a ‘Matka Phod’ (breaking earthen pitchers) protest and hunger strike by the Delhi’s water minister.
Such events are aplenty in India’s cities but they are episodic while Jal Satyagraha spans over time, as a movement. And water issues become part of the political discourse. Once this gains momentum, the demands for transparency and participatory water planning, management and governance – fundamental to Jal Satyagraha – may also get addressed. A recent instance was a 36-hour Satyagraha in the Narmada Valley which concluded with the authorities agreeing to engage in dialogue with residents.[34]
Way forward
Is Jal Satyagraha a successful tool? Success matters for those concerned about water resources and those dependent on them to stand or rise for justice. Successful completion of such campaigns, from Mahad, Mulshi to Matri Sadan, matter. Each Satyagraha is an epic in its own virtue. It is crucial to reflect on the give-and-take in these micro-economic and materialistic negotiations apart from the moral-spiritual journey of those who conceptualise and lead. The anti-dam and anti-port movements may have been subject to suppression by governments backed by judiciary but the subsequent recurring negative impacts are testimony that those who resisted these projects had arguments which should have factored in these large projects.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The continued pursuit of Jal Satyagraha to express disagreement is a testimony of its effectiveness. Also, since resistance or protest is important in a democracy as an alternative voice, Jal Satyagraha has been accepted as an approach to make water governance accountable and pro-people. The irony of Jal Satyagraha, as of environmental movements, is that people have to fight for the protection of the environment against their own governments.
As long as there is a lack of substantive public participation and transparency in decisions and management of large development projects, Satyagraha is here to stay. Also, because the engineering-technical solutions of mega water infrastructure projects continue to fail to factor in the social-ecological components, resulting in negative impact on society and biodiversity, it has relevance. Jal Satyagraha will continue to make people aware, to mobilise them. More Jal Satyagrahas are anticipated in the days to come as cities are beset by rising water crises.
Water education will play its part in this social engineering movement for pro-humanity and pro-biodiversity, for sustainable water management and governance. Cities are connected, through water and otherwise, to the hinterland. With this article, I invite all urbanites to also stand for the SaveHasdeo[35] forest movement with the Hasdeo Aranya Bachao Sangharsh Samiti, the forest which is home to nearly 15,000 Adivasi people and the Hasdeo River that sustains them.
Mansee Bal Bhargava is an architect, listener and learner based in Gujarat. Her nearly three decades of engagement in the built environment (architecture design, development, planning, management, and governance) has led to her interest in water and wisdom, besides women’s issues. She does her satyagraha on water issues as the director of WforW foundation https://wforw.in/ – a citizen’s collective for water conservation and management.
Cover photo: Counterview
