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Across the Great Divide

In February last year, I spent a week working in quake-torn Kutch. Most of the people on the team I was with were farmers from the Nimad area of Madhya Pradesh, men whose homes and land will vanish under the waters of the reservoir behind the Sardar Sarovar dam. Horrified by the destruction the quake caused, these men spontaneously came together, bought three truckloads of material -- grain, tarpaulins, vessels, clothes, blankets -- and drove it for three freezing nights and two searing days to a little village in Kutch, devastated by the quake.

They came to reach out to the very people -- farmers too -- who have been told for years that that same dam will bring them water. Who have been persuaded that people like these Nimad farmers and their Narmada Bachao Andolan colleagues want to actually deprive them of that water.

And as far as I know, this was the first time that these two sets of farmers from either 'side' -- in every sense of the term -- of the dam actually met and talked.

And how they talked. Mainly about water.

One morning, a young farmer in that Kutch village took some of the Nimadis to a gentle rise above a dry streambed about a kilometre from the village. He believes implicitly in the Sardar Sarovar dam, but he also knows it will deliver water here -- if at all it does -- only a generation from now. So his dream was to build a small dam across this stream, to make a reservoir so that his village would have water year-round. Listening to him, the Nimadi farmers understood just how much water mattered here, quake or no quake.

Meanwhile, they spoke to him about what they feared the dam would do to their lives. For the first time, this young Kutchi had the chance to understand their concerns, which turned out to be only shades different from his. What's more, he also understood that, far from wanting to keep him starved of water, they wanted to help him find ways to solve his water problems.

And this is why those very Nimadi farmers and the Narmada Bachao Andolan, in close cooperation with the Kutchi villagers, have erected a dam on that stream. Last January, a year after the quake, I visited that village and the nearly complete dam. I have a photograph of the same young farmer, striding along on top of a dream fulfilled. He looks confident, happy and proud.

Two bits of news about Gujarat last week got me thinking about that little dam, about my time in that village ripped apart by a quake.

One was the melee at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad on April 7. Led by Amit Thakkar of the BJP's youth wing, a gang of thugs invaded the ashram. Medha Patkar of the NBA was at a meeting there, discussing peace efforts in the wake of weeks of violence. They called her "anti-Gujarat", "anti-water" (whatever that may mean), accused her of conspiring to keep Gujaratis thirsty, and demanded to know how she had dared come to the state. All this while also trying to pull her hair and bang her head against a wall.

Put aside the sheer crassness of this assault. Put aside it happening in a spot where one Mohandas Gandhi used to live. Think instead of some irony. Patkar has been visiting Gujarat for nearly two decades. In particular, last year she was in that Kutch village after the quake. She was part of the discussions that resulted in that small dam I visited in January. Long before a Sardar Sarovar will send water to Kutch, long before a gang of thugs who hand out "anti-Gujarat" certificates get around to even listening to water-starved, quake-ravaged villagers, Patkar, the NBA and several farmers from Nimad have helped them find an answer to their water needs. No fanfare, no inaugurations at auspicious times. Just an answer that works now, today. Not a generation from now.

What's more ironic, and may prove more important, is that they showed a few hundred villagers that they were not some maniacal eco-terrorists bent on depriving Kutch of water. In turn, they threw away any one-dimensional ideas they might have had about these Kutch villagers. Stereotypes shattered all around: welcome fruits of a simple willingness to listen and discuss. Fruits that years of manufactured hostility and foolish certificates have never allowed before.

And it had to take a tragedy like a quake to produce this.

The second bit of news was about a group of people who are planning a trip to the riot-hit areas of Gujarat. Now any number of people and delegations have travelled to and through Gujarat to see for themselves what happened there: I accompanied one only days ago. I don't know that the outside world has learned anything much from all these visits. But in a time when so little seems heartening, I was greatly heartened when I heard about this planned trip: a team of Kashmiri Pandits will visit Gujarat next week.

Think again about the irony. These are people who were driven from their homes in Kashmir, watched many of their loved ones killed after terror took root there. Too often, it was their once-neighbours and friends who turned on them, driven to this senseless brutality by a perversion of religion. Fleeing Kashmir, Pandits have scattered throughout the country and across the world. Many still live in squalid refugee settlements. One older couple I know in Delhi exists -- that's the word, they seem barely alive -- in a tragic and bewildered vacuum: unable to quite comprehend what has happened to them, longing for the peace and beauty of the valley that once was theirs, wasting away as the years pass.

Truly, the tragedy of the Kashmiri Pandits blots everything India once stood for: justice, fairness, governance, compassion. In many ways, they are our forgotten people; pawns, to be used only to make convenient political points. For one variety of politicians, they serve as a stick to beat governments with, to ask occasionally what those governments have done to repatriate them. For another variety of politicians, they serve as another stick, this one to beat Islam and Pakistan with. For many of the rest of us, they are no more than a test: "Have you spoken about the Pandits?"

And nobody wants to come to grips with the issue of sending them back home. For if that happened, that'd be the end of those sticks, those tests.

Over the years, it's seemed to me that Pandits have themselves realised just how cruelly and cynically they have been used. They see very clearly how that treatment has compounded the brutality when they were driven from Kashmir.

And it is out of all that that they are going to Gujarat. Ashok Pandit, a Pandit filmmaker I know in Bombay who will make the trip, explained it to The Times of India (April 10) far better than I can: "It was hard not to react as reports of one brutal killing after another kept trickling in from Gujarat. In fact, it was the passivity of the entire country when thousands of Kashmiri Pandits were being killed in Kashmir that dealt a death blow to our resolve to stay back in Kashmir. The trauma that thousands whose lives are under threat in Gujarat are undergoing today is not new for us. We felt the same numbness when we read full-page advertisements in local Kashmiri newspapers threatening us with death if we continued to live in our homes... We will be reviewing the conditions in the refugee camps."

In every respect, it should be a sad event, this pilgrimage by the victims of one perversion of religion to meet the victims of another perversion of religion. This meeting of people whom many of us might imagine, unthinkingly, to be on opposite "sides" of a great Indian divide. This meeting of victims of two great Indian tragedies.

Yet why does their trip fill me with hope? Because like the visit of those Nimad farmers to Kutch, this is a demonstration that there are still people who are willing to bridge the divide. Because it will show that when such people get the chance to sit and talk, share their worries and concerns, they find that -- contrary to all they have been fed -- those are not devils on that other "side". And when they find that out, good things can happen.

Like a small dam, with its year-round supply of water, in a small Kutch village.

Dilip D'Souza