South Asia Citizens Web

One now wonders, would the state of the country have been better today had Islamic Modernism been allowed to evolve beyond the 1970s?

It is a countdown towards impounding waters in the 214 km land stretch where more than 40,000 families are residing till date.There are standing crops and massive plantations; thousands of pakka houses, schools, other public and private services erected; hundreds of temples, tens of mosques (as opposed to three temples claimed by the authorities), adivasi gods and worship places, all of which will be submerged. There are lakhs of trees in the submergence area. People are continuing with their daily lives, and except for a few villages in the hilly mountainous region, falling in Alirajpur district, all other villages in the plains, at least 150 have large populations (hundreds of families in each) with functioning panchayats. Farmers, labourers, fish workers, shopkeepers all who have fought the battle for Narmada over last 32 years, will be forced to submerge and evicted if the gates are closed.

The epic, heroic legal battle fought by the barely lettered wife of a small Gujarati cattle trader has caught the imagination of many in the country. The judgement of the Bombay High Court on Thursday – which upheld the life sentence awarded to 11 men convicted by a lower court of raping her and killing 14 members of her family, and also set aside the acquittal of seven policemen and doctors for tampering with and destroying evidence – offers hope not just to her but to us all.

The richest sense of irony I ever felt was evoked by a PTI report, dated 13 May, 1997 from Siliguri, that a bust of Charu Majumdar had been decapitated.