FAME is a funny thing. Apart from my friends and family and of course some old enemies (what's life without a few old enemies?), most people who know of me now, know of me as the author of that very successful book - The God of Small Things.

Many are familiar with the public story that surrounds the publishing of The God of Small Things. As stories go, it has a sort of cloying, Reader's Digest ring to it - an unknown writer who spent secret years writing her first novel which w as subsequently published in 40 languages, sold several million copies and went on to win the Booker Prize.

The private story, however, is a less happy one.

When The God of Small Things was first published I truly enjoyed accompanying it on its journey into the world. I had a high old time. I spent a year travelling to places I never dreamed I'd visit. I was exhilarated by the idea that a story writte n by an unknown person could make its way across cultures and languages and continents into so many waiting hearts.

At readings, when people asked me what it felt like to be a writer who was published and read in so many languages, I'd say "The opposite of what it must feel like to be a nuclear bomb. Literature hugs the world and the world hugs it back."

After a year of travelling, I decided I wanted to go back to my old life in what was now the New Nuclear India. But that proved impossible. My old life had packed its bags and left while I was away. As the Indian Government gears up to spend millions on nuclear weapons, the land it seeks to protect moulders. Rivers die, forests disappear and the air is getting impossible to breathe.

Delhi, the city I live in, changes before my eyes. Cars are sleeker, gates are higher, old, tubercular watchmen have made way for young, armed guards. But in the crevices of the city, in its folds and wrinkles, under flyovers, along sewers and railway tr acks, in vacant lots, in all the dank, dark places, the poor are crammed in like lice. Their children stalk the streets with wild hearts. The privileged wear their sunglasses and look away as they glide past. Their privileged children don't need sunglass es. They don't need to look away. They've learned to stop seeing.

A writer's curse is that he or she cannot easily do that. If you're a writer, you tend to keep those aching eyes open. Every day your face is slammed up against the windowpane. Every day you bear witness to the obscenity. Every day you are reminded that there is no such thing as innocence. And every day you have to think of new ways of saying old and obvious things. Things about love and greed. About politics and governance. About power and powerlessness. About war and peace. About death and beauty. Thi ngs that must be said over and over again.

While I watch from my window, the memory of the years of pleasure I had writing The God of Small Things has begun to fade. The commercial profits from book sales roll in. My bank account burgeons. I realise that I have accidentally ruptured a hidd en, mercantile vein in the world, or perforated the huge pipeline that circulates the world's wealth amongst the already wealthy, and it is spewing money at me, bruising me with its speed and strength. I began to feel as though every emotion, every littl e strand of feeling in The God of Small Things, had been traded in for a silver coin. As though one day, if I wasn't very careful, I would turn into a little silver figurine with a gleaming, silver heart. The debris around me would serve only to s et off my shining. These were my thoughts, this my frame of mind when, in February (1999) there was a ripple of news in the papers announcing that the Supreme Court of India had vacated a four-year-long legal stay on the construction of the controversial , half-completed, Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river in central India. The court order came as a body blow to one of the most spectacular, non-violent resistance movements since the freedom struggle. A movement which, those of us watching from a dis tance thought, had more or less already achieved what it set out to. International attention had been focussed on the project. The World Bank had been forced to withdraw from it. It seemed unlikely that the Government would be able to cobble together the funds to complete the project. Then suddenly, with the lifting of the stay, the scenario changed. There was gloom in the Narmada Valley and dancing on the streeets of Gujarat.

I grew interested in what was happening in the Narmada Valley because almost everyone I spoke to had a passionate opinion based on what seemed to me to be very little information. That interested me too, so much passion in the absence of information.

I substituted the fiction I intended to read in the coming months with journals and books and documentary films about dams and why they're built and what they do. I developed an inordinate, unnatural interest in drainage and irrrigation. I met some of th e activists who had been working in the valley for years with the NBA - the extraordinary Narmada Bachao Andolan. What I learned changed me, fascinated me. It revealed, in relentless detail, a Government's highly evolved, intricate way of pulverising a p eople behind the genial mask of democracy. I have angered people in India greatly by saying this. Compared to what goes on in other developing countries, India is paradise, I've been told. It's true, India is not Tibet, or Afghanistan, or Indonesia. It's true that the idea of the Indian Army staging a military coup is almost unimaginable. Nevertheless, what goes on in the name of 'national interest' is monstrous.

Though there has been a fair amount of writing on the Narmada Valley Development Project, most of it has been for a 'special interest' readership. Government documents are classified as secret. Experts and consultants have hijacked various aspects of the issue - displacement, rehabilitation, hydrology, drainage, water-logging, catchment area treatment, passion, politics - and carried them off to their lairs where they guard them fiercely against the unauthorised curiosity of interested laypersons. Socia l anthropologists have acrimonious debates with economists about whose jurisdiction R&R falls in. Engineers refuse to discuss politics when they present their proposals. Disconnecting the politics from the economics from the emotion and human tragedy of uprootment is like breaking up a band. The individual musicians don't rock in quite the same way. You keep the noise but lose the music.

In March I travelled to the Narmada Valley. I returned ashamed of how little I knew about a struggle that had been going on for so many years. I returned convinced that the valley needed a writer. Not just a writer, a fiction writer. A fiction writer who recognised that what was happening in the valley was perhaps too vulgar for fiction, but who could use the craft and rigour of writing fiction to make the separate parts cohere, to tell the story in the way it deserves to be told. I believe that the sto ry of the Narmada Valley is nothing less than the story of Modern India.

The Narmada Valley Development Project is supposed to be the most ambitious river valley development project in the world.

It envisages building 3,200 dams that will reconstitute the Narmada and her 419 tributaries into a series of step-reservoirs - an immense staircase of amenable water. Of these, 30 will be major dams, 135 medium and the rest small. Two of the major dams w ill be multi-purpose mega dams. The Sardar Sarovar in Gujarat and the Narmada Sagar in Madhya Pradesh, will, between them, hold more water than any other reservoir in the Indian subcontinent.

For better or for worse, the Narmada Valley Development Project will affect the lives of 25 million people who live in the valley and will alter the ecology of an entire river basin. It will submerge sacred groves and temples and ancient pilgrimage route s and archaeological sites that scholars say contain an uninterrupted record of human occupation from the Old Stone Age.

The Sardar Sarovar project belongs firmly in the era of the great Nehruvian dream. But before I come specifically to the story of the Sardar Sarovar, I'd like to say a little about the raging Big Dam debate.

For a whole half-century after Independence, Nehru's footsoldiers sought to equate dam-building with Nation-building. Not only did they build new dams and irrigation schemes, they took control of small, traditional water harvesting systems that had been managed for thousands of years and allowed them to atrophy. To compensate the loss they built more and more dams. Today, India is the world's third largest dam-builder. According to the Central Water Commission we have 3,600 dams that qualify as big dams , 3,300 of them built after Independence. A thousand more are under construction.

Nehru's famous statement about dams being the Temples of Modern India has made its way into primary school textbooks in every Indian language. Big dams have become an article of faith inextricably linked with nationalism. To question their utility amount s almost to sedition. Every school child is taught that Big Dams will deliver the people of India from hunger and poverty.

But will they? Have they? Are they really the key to India's food security?

Today India has more irrigated land than any other country in the world. In the last 50 years the area under irrigation increased by about 140 per cent. It's true that in 1947, when Colonialism formally ended, India was food-deficient. In 1951 we produce d 51 million tonnes of foodgrains. Today we produce close to 200 million tonnes. Certainly, this is a tremendous achievement. (Even though there are worrying signs that it may not be sustainable.) But surely nobody can claim that all the credit for incre ased food production should go to Big Dams. Most of it has to do with mechanised exploitation of groundwater, with the use of high-yielding hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers.

The extraordinary thing is that there are no official figures for exactly what portion of the total foodgrain production comes from irrigation from Big Dams.

What is this if not a state's unforgivable disregard for its subjects? Given that the people of the Narmada Valley have been fighting for over fifteen years, surely the least the government could do is to actually substantiate its case that Big Dams are India's only option to provide food for her growing population.

The only study I know of was presented to the World Commission on Dams by Himanshu Thakker. It estimates that Big Dams account for only 12 per cent of India's total foodgrain production!

12 per cent of the total produce is 24 million tonnes. In 1995 the state granaries were overflowing with 30 million tonnes of foodgrains, while at the same time 350 million people lived below the poverty line.

According to the Ministry of Food and Civil Supplies, 10 per cent of India's total foodgrain production, that is 20 million tonnes, is lost to rodents and insects because of bad and inadequate storage facilities. We must be the only country in the world that builds dams, uproots communities and submerges forests in order to feed rats. Clearly we need better storerooms more urgently than we need dams.

Similarly, in the case of electricity, planners flaunt the fact that India consumes 20 times more electricity today than it did 50 years ago. And yet over 70 per cent of rural households have no access to electricity. In the poorest States - Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa and Rajasthan - over 80 per cent of Adivasi and Dalit households have no electricity. Electricity produced in the name of the poor consumed by the rich with endless appetites.

Official estimates say that 22 per cent of the power generated is lost in transmission and system inefficiencies. Existing dams are silting up at a speed which halves and sometimes quarters their projected life-spans.

It seems obvious, surely, that before the government decides to build another dam it ought to do everything in its power to maintain and increase the efficiency of the systems it already has in place. What happens, in fact, is the reverse.

Dams are built, people are uprooted, forests are submerged and then the project is simply abandoned. Canals are never completed... the benefits never accrue (except to the politicians, the bureaucrats and the contractors involved in the construction). Th e first dam that was built on the Narmada is a case in point - the Bargi Dam in Madhya Pradesh was completed in 1990. It cost ten times more than was budgeted and submerged three times more land than engineers said it would. To save the cost and effort o f doing a survey, the government just filled the reservoir without warning anybody. 70,000 people from 101 villages were supposed to be displaced. Instead, 114,000 people from 162 villages were displaced. They were evicted from their homes by rising wate rs, chased out like rats, with no prior notice. There was no rehabilitation. Some got a meagre cash compensation. Most got nothing. Some died of starvation. Others moved to slums in Jabalpur. And all for what? Today, ten years after it was completed, the Bargi Dam produces some electricity, but irrigates only as much land as it submerged. Only 5 per cent of the land its planners claimed it would irrigate. The Government says it has no money to make the canals. Yet it has already begun work downstream, o n the mammoth Narmada Sagar Dam and the Maheshwar Dam.

Why is this happening? How can it be happening?

Because Big Dams are monuments to corruption. To international corruption on an inconceivable scale. Bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, environmental consultants, aid agencies - they're all involved in the racket. The people that they prey on are the poo rest, most marginalised sections of the populations of the poorest countries in the world. They don't count as people. Therefore the costs of Big Dams don't count as costs. They're not even entered in the books. What happens instead is that international consultants on Resettlement (global experts on despair) are paid huge salaries to devise ever more sensitive, ever more humane-sounding, ever more exquisitely written, resettlement policies that are never implemented. Like the saying goes - there's a lo t of money in poverty.

When I was writing "The Greater Common Good"* - my essay on the Narmada Valley project - wading through the fusillade of 'pro-dam' and 'anti-dam' statistics, what shocked me more than anything else was not the statistics that are available bu t the ones that aren't. To me, this is the most unpardonable thing of all. It is unpardonable on the part of the Indian state as well as on the part of the intellectual community.

The Government of India has detailed figures for how many million tonnes of foodgrains or edible oils the country produces and how much more we produce now than we did in 1947. It can tell you what the total surface area of the National Highways adds up to, how many graduates India produces every year, how many men had vasectomies, how many cricket matches we've lost on a Friday in Sharjah.

But the Government of India does not have a record of the number of people that have been displaced by dams or sacrificed in other ways at the altars of 'National Progress'. Isn't this astounding? How can you measure Progress if you don't know wha t it costs and who has paid for it? How can the 'market' put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the real cost of production?

Unofficial estimates of the number of displaced people have swung from an unsubstantiated 2 million to an unsubstantiated 50 million, and everything in between. There's plenty of scope for bargaining.

When I wrote my Essay, I thought it necessary to try and put a figure on how many people have actually been displaced by Big Dams. To do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. A sort of sanity check. The point was to at least begin to bring some pers pective to the debate. As my starting premise, I used a study of 54 Large Dams by the Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA) based on field data from the Central Water Commission. The reservoirs of these 54 dams, between them, displaced about 2 .4 million people. The average number of people displaced by each dam came to 44,000. Correcting for the fact that the dams the IIPA chose to study may have been some of the larger of the Large Dam projects, I pared down the average number of displaced p eople to 10,000 people per dam. Using this scaled-down average, the total number of people displaced by Large Dams in the last fifty years worked out to a scandalous 33 million people!

Recently N.C. Saxena, Secretary to the Planning Commission, said he thought that the number was in the region of 40 million people.

About 60 per cent of those displaced are either Dalit or Adivasi. If you consider that Dalits account for 15 per cent and Adivasis only 8 per cent of India's population, it opens up a whole other dimension to the story. The ethnic 'otherness' of the vict ims takes some of the strain off the Nation builders.

What has happened to these millions of people? Where are they now? How do they earn a living? Nobody really knows. When history is written, they won't be in it, not even as statistics. When it comes to resettlement, the government's priorities are clear. India does not have a National Resettlement Policy. Displaced people are only entitled to a meagre cash compensation. The poorest of them, Dalits and Adivasis, who are either landless or have no formal title to their lands, but whose livelihoods depend entirely on the river - get nothing. Some of the displaced have been subsequently displaced three and four times - a dam, an artillery proof range, another dam, a uranium mine. Once they start rolling there's no resting place. The great majority i s eventually absorbed into slums on the periphery of our great cities, where it coalesces into an immense pool of cheap labour (that builds more projects that displaces more people)... and still the nightmare doesn't end. They continue to be uprooted eve n from their hellish hovels whenever elections are comfortingly far away and the urban rich get twitchy about hygiene. In cities like Delhi they get shot for shitting in public places, like three slum dwellers were, not more than two years ago.

On the whole there's a deafening silence on the politics of forced, involuntary displacement. It's accepted as a sort of unavoidable blip in our democratic system. In Kargil, while the Indian Army fought to regain every inch of territory captured by Paki stani infiltrators, hundreds of people in the Narmada Valley were being forcibly flooded out of their homes by the rising waters of the Sardar Sarovar Reservoir. The nation rose as one to support the soldiers on the front. Middle-class housewives held co oking festivals to raise money, people queued up to donate blood, they collected food, clothing, first aid. Actors, sportsmen and celebrities swarmed to the border to bolster the morale of the fighting forces.

There were no such offers of help for the people in the Narmada Valley.

Some of them had stood in their homes in chest-deep water for days on end, protesting the Supreme Court's decision to raise the height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. They were seen as people who were unwilling to pay the price for National progress. They wer e labelled anti-national and anti-development and carted off to jail. The general consensus seems to be "Yes it's sad, but hard decisions have to be made. Someone has to pay the price for development."

I often wonder what would happen if the Government was to declare that in order to raise funds to complete these mammoth projects, it was going to commandeer the assets and bank accounts of a hundred thousand of its richest citizens. I have no doubt that it would become an international scandal. Banner headlines would appear in newspapers announcing the death of democracy. Suddenly the ecological and human costs of Big Dams would be Page One news.

In a flash there would be phenomenal, imaginative solutions for irrigation and power generation. Cheaper, quicker, more efficient. Nuclear hawks would suddenly realise they could drastically scale down the number of bombs they need for a minimum credible deterrent.

So far I have only discussed the human and social costs of Big Dams. What about the environmental costs? The submerged forests, the ravaged ecosystems, the destroyed estuaries, the defunct, silted-up reservoirs, the endangered wildlife, the disapp earing biodiversity, the millions of hectares of land that are either water-logged or salt-affected. None of this appears on the balance sheet. There are no official assessments of the cumulative impact Big Dams have had on the environment.

What we do know is that a study of 300 projects done by an Expert Committee on River Valley Projects reported that 270 of them - that's 90 per cent of them - had violated the environmental guidelines laid down by the Ministry of Environment. The Ministry has not taken action or revoked the sanction of a single one of them.

The evidence against Big Dams is mounting alarmingly - irrigation disasters, dam-induced floods, the fact that there are more drought-prone and flood-prone areas today than there were in 1947. The fact that not a single river in the plains has potable wa ter. The fact that 250 million people have no access to safe drinking water. And yet there has not been an official audit, a comprehensive, honest, thoughtful, post-project evaluation of a single Big Dam to see whether or not it has achieved what it s et out to achieve. Whether or not the costs were justified, or even what the costs actually were.

"This is exactly why the Sardar Sarovar Project is different," its proponents boast. They call it the 'most studied project' in the world. (You'll notice as we go along, that the story of the Narmada Valley is full of this sort of superlative - the most studied project, the most ambitious river valley project, the best rehabilitation package... etc.) One of the reasons the Sardar Sarovar is so 'studied' is because it's also so controversial.

In 1985, when the World Bank first sanctioned a 450-million-dollar loan to fund the project, no studies had been done, nobody had any idea what the human cost or the ecological impact of the dam would be. The point of doing studies now can only be to jus tify what has become a fait accompli. So costs are suppressed and benefits exaggerated to farcical proportions.

The politics of the Sardar Sarovar Dam are complicated because the Narmada flows through three States - ninety per cent of it through Madhya Pradesh, it then merely skirts the northern border of Maharashtra and finally flows through Gujarat for about 180 kilometres before it reaches the Arabian Sea.

In order for the three States to arrive at a water-sharing formula, in 1969 the Central Government set up a body called the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal. It took ten years for it to announce its Award. Geographically, the Sardar Sarovar Dam is located in Gujarat. Its reservoir submerges 245 villages, of which only 19 are in Gujarat. All the rest are in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. What this means is that the social costs are borne by Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, while the benefits go to Gujarat . This is what has sharpened the controversy around it.

The cost-benefit analysis for the Project is approached in a friendly, cheerful way. Almost as though it's a family board game.

In 1979, when the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal announced its award, the official estimate for the number of families that would be displaced by the Sardar Sarovar Reservoir was about 6,000. In 1987 the figure grew to 12,000. In 1992 it surged to 27,00 0. Today it hovers between 40,000 and 42,000 families. That's about 200,000 people. And that's just the official estimate. According to the NBA, the actual number of affected families is about 85,000. Close to half a million people.

The huge discrepancy between the Government's estimate and the NBA's has to do with the definition of who qualifies as 'Project Affected'. According to the Government, the only people who qualify as Project Affected are those whose lands and homes are su bmerged by the reservoir. But when you tear up the fabric of an ancient, agrarian community, which depends on its lands and rivers and forests for its sustenance, the threads begin to unravel in every direction. There are several categories of displaceme nt that the Government simply refuses to acknowledge.

The Sardar Sarovar Project envisages bending the last 180 km of the Narmada and diverting it about 90 degrees north, into a 75,000-sq-km network of canals that planners claim will irrigate a command area of 1.8 million hectares. The government has acquir ed land for the canal network. 200,000 families are directly affected. Of these 23,000 families, let's say about 100,000 people, are seriously affected.

They don't count as project affected. Not in the official estimates.

In order to compensate for the submergence of 13,000 hectares of prime forest, the Government proposes to expand the Shoolpaneshwar Wildlife Sanctuary near the dam site. This would mean that about 40,000 Adivasi people from about 101 forest villages with in the boundaries of the park will be 'persuaded' to leave. They don't count as project affected.

In addition to the sanctuary, the other mitigating measure is the extraordinary process known as Compensatory Afforestation in which the government acquires land and plants three times as much forest as has been submerged by the reservoir.

The people from whom this land is acquired do not count as project affected.

In its plans for what it is going to do with its share of the Narmada water, the Gujarat Government has allocated no water at all - 0 million acre feet - for the stretch of river downstream of the dam. This means that in the non-monsoon months there will be no water in the last 180 km of the river. The dam will radically alter the ecology of the estuary and affect the spawning of the Hilsa and freshwater prawns. 40,000 fisherfolk who live downstream depend on the river for a living.

In 1961, the Gujarat Government acquired 1,600 acres of land from 950 Adivasi families for the infrastructure it would need for starting work on the dam. Guest houses, office blocks, housing for engineers and their staff, roads leading to the dam site an d warehouses for construction material.

Overnight, the villagers became landless labourers. Their houses were dismantled and moved to the periphery of the colony, where they remain today, squatters on their own land. Some of them work as servants in the officers' bungalows and waiters in the g uest house built on land where their own houses once stood

Incredibly, they do not qualify as project affected!

In its publicity drive, the other sleight of hand by the proponents of the Sardar Sarovar is to portray costs as benefits. For instance, there's the repeated assertion that Displacement is actually a positive intervention, a way of relieving acute depriv ation. That the state is doing people a favour by submerging their lands and homes, taking them away from their forests and river, drowning their sacred sites, destroying their community links and forcibly displacing them against their wishes. Anybody wh o argues against this is accused of being an 'ecoromantic', of wanting to deny poor and marginalised people the "fruits of modern development". Of glorifying the notion of the Noble Savage.

If the well-being of Adivasi people is what is uppermost in the Planners' minds, why is it that for fifty years there have been no roads, no schools, no clinics, no wells, no hospitals in the areas they live in? Why is it for all these years they didn't take any steps to equip the people they care so deeply about, for the world they were going to be dumped in? Why is it that the first sign of 'development' - a road - brought only terror, police, beatings, rape, murder? Why must the offer of Development be conditional, that is: You give up your homes, your lands, your field, your language, your gods, and we'll give you 'development'?

As part of 'the best rehabilitation package in the world', the Gujarat Government has offered to rehabilitate all the officially 'project affected', even those from Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. The Madhya Pradesh Government has filed an affidavit in c ourt declaring that it has no land to rehabilitate people displaced by the Sardar Sarovar Reservoir. This means that all the displaced people from Madhya Pradesh have no choice but to move to Gujarat - not a State known for its hospitality towards 'outsi ders'. It's like displacing people in England and forcing them to live in France. Notwithstanding its feigned generosity, in point of fact the Government of Gujarat hasn't even managed to rehabilitate people from the 19 Adivasi villages in Gujarat that a re being submerged by the reservoir, let alone those from the rest of the 226 villages in the other two States. The inhabitants of Gujarat's 19 villages have been scattered to 175 separate rehabilitation sites. Social links have been smashed, communities broken up. Not a single village has been resettled, according to the directives of the Tribunal.

Some families have been given land, others haven't. Some have land that is stony and uncultivable. Some have land that is irredeemably water-logged or infested with pernicious daab grass. Some have been driven out by landowners that sold land to t he Government but hadn't been paid yet.

Some who were resettled on the peripheries of other villages have been robbed, beaten and chased away by their host villagers.

In several resettlement sites, people have been dumped in rows of corrugated tin sheds which are furnaces in summer and 'fridges in winter. Some of them are located in dry river beds which, during the monsoon, turn into fast-flowing drifts. I've been to some of these 'sites'. I've seen film footage of others: Shivering children, perched like birds on the edges of charpoys, while swirling waters enter their tin homes. Frightened, fevered eyes watch pots and pans carried through the doorway by the current, floating out into the flooded fields, thin fathers swimming after them to retrieve what they can.

When the waters recede, they leave ruin. Malaria, diarrhoea, sick cattle stranded in the slush.

Forty households were moved from Manibeli in Maharashtra to a resettlement site in Gujarat. In the first year, thirty-eight children died.

In April 1999 the papers reported nine deaths from chronic malnutrition in a single rehabilitation site in Gujarat. In the course of a week. That's 1.2875 people a day, if you're counting.

Many of those who have been resettled are people who have lived all their lives deep in the forest with virtually no contact with money and the modern world. Suddenly they find themselves left with the option of either starving to death or walking severa l kilometres to the nearest town, sitting in the marketplace, (both men and women) offering themselves as wage labour, like goods on sale.

Instead of a forest from which they gathered everything they needed - food, fuel, fodder, rope, gum, tobacco, tooth powder, medicinal herbs, housing material - they earn between ten and twenty rupees a day with which to feed and keep their families. Inst ead of a river, they have a hand pump. In their old villages, certainly they were poor, extremely poor, but they were insured against absolute disaster. If the rains failed, they had the forests to turn to. The river to fish in. Their livestock was their fixed deposit. Without all this, they're a heartbeat away from destitution.

For the people who've been resettled, everything has to be re-learned. Every little thing, every big thing: from shitting and pissing (where d'you do it when there's no jungle to hide you?) to buying a bus ticket, to learning a new language, to understan ding money. And worst of all, learning to be supplicants. Learning to take orders. Learning to have Masters. Learning to answer only when they're addressed.

From being self-sufficient and free, to being further impoverished and yoked to the whims of a world you know nothing, nothing about - what d'you suppose it must feel like?

In fifteen years, the government has not managed to resettle people displaced by half a dam. What are they going to do about the remaining 3,199 dams? There's something wrong with the scale of the operations here. This is Fascist Maths. It strangl es stories, bludgeons detail and manages to blind perfectly reasonable people with its spurious, shining vision.

So much for project costs. Now let's take a look at the benefits. The stated benefits.

The whole purpose of the Sardar Sarovar, the Government of Gujarat says, is to take water to the drought-prone regions of Kutch and Saurashtra which lie at the very end of the canal network. The Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam publicity campaign is full of pictures of parched earth and dying cattle. In the name of Kutch and Saurashtra, it justifies using about 80 per cent of Gujarat's irrigation budget for the Sardar Sarovar. It says, categorically, that there is no alternative to the Sardar Sarovar.

To understand what's really going on, the first thing you must do is to look at a map of Gujarat. Look for two other rivers - the Mahi and the Sabarmati. You'll see that both are miles closer to Kutch and Saurashtra than the Narmada is. Both have been dammed and the water diverted to Ahmedabad, Mehsana and Kheda, the Patel-rich, irrigation rich, politically powerful areas of Central Gujarat. The people of Kutch and Saurashtra haven't seen a drop of water from these rivers.

When the Sardar Sarovar Project was first planned, there was no mention of drinking water for the villages in Kutch and Saurashtra. It was supposed to be primarily an irrigation project. When the project ran into political trouble, the Governement discov ered the emotive power of thirst. Drinking water became the rallying cry of the Sardar Sarovar Project. Officially, the number of people whose thirst would be slaked fluctuated from 28 million (1983) to 32.5 million (1989) to 10 million (1992) to 25 mill ion (1993).

The number of villages that would get drinking water varied from zero in 1979 to 8,215 in 1991. When pressed, the Government admitted that the figures for 1991 included 236 uninhabited villages.

Nobody builds Big Dams to take drinking water to remote villages. Of the one billion people in the world who have no access to safe drinking water, 855 million live in rural areas. The cost of installing an energy-intensive network of thousands of kilome tres of pipelines, aqueducts, pumps and treatment plants to provide drinking water to scattered populations is prohibitive. When the members of the World Bank's Morse Committee arrived in Gujarat to do the Independent Review, they were impressed by the G ujarat Government's commitment to take drinking water to the State's remote regions. They asked to see the plans. There weren't any. They asked if the costs had been worked out.

'A few thousand crores,' was the breezy answer. A billion dollars, is an expert's calculated guess. But of course, that isn't a part of the cost-benefit analysis (the benefit-benefit analysis, shall we call it?)

As for the irrigation benefits, when the Government of Gujarat argued its case before the Water Disputes Tribunal it pleaded for more than its proportionately fair share of water because it said it desperately needed water to irrigate 11,00,000 hectares of land in the arid region of Kutch. The Tribunal accepted the argument and allotted Gujarat 9 MAF of water. It did not specify how that water should be used. The Gujarat Government then reduced the 11,00,000 hectares to less than a tenth of that. To 100 ,000 hectares. That's 1.8 per cent of the cultivable area in Kutch. And that's on paper. On paper it irrigates only 9 per cent of the cultivable land in Saurashtra. If you ask what they're going to do about the rest of the drought-prone regions, they tal k of 'alternatives'. Water-shed management. Rainwater harvesting. Well-recharging. The point is that if there are alternatives which are good enough for 98.2 per cent of Kutch and 91 per cent of Saurashtra, then why won't they work for the whole 100 per cent?

There are some other interesting caveats which make it unlikely that water from the Narmada will ever get to Kutch and Saurashtra, situated as they are at the tail end of the canal.

First, there's a lot less water in the Narmada than the government says there is.

Before the Tribunal announced its water-sharing formula, it had to assess how much water there actually was in the river. Since there was no actual flow data available at the time, it extrapolated it from what was even at the time thought to be faulty ra infall data.

In 1992, actual flow data indicates that there is only 22.69 MAF of water in the river - that's a whole 18 per cent less!

Second, the Sardar Sarovar Dam was planned in conjunction with the Narmada Sagar Dam. In the absence of the Narmada Sagar, on which construction has temporarily been stopped, the irrigation benefits of the Sardar Sarovar drop drastically.

Third, the irrigation efficiency of the canal has been arbitrarily fixed at 60 per cent when the highest irrigation efficiency ever achieved in India is 35 per cent.

Last, and perhaps most important of all, are the competing claims being made on the water. The Authorities of the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam declared that farmers would not be allowed to grow sugar-cane in the command area because sugar-cane is a water -guzzling cash crop and would use up the share of water meant for those at the tail end of the canal. But the Government of Gujarat has already given licences to dozens of large sugar mills at the head of the canal. The chief promoter of one of th em is Sanat Mehta, who was Chairman of the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam - the Dam Authority - for several years.

The chief promoter of another was Chiman Bhai Patel, former Chief Minister of Gujarat, probably the most ardent promoter of the Sardar Sarovar Project. When he died, his ashes were scattered over the dam site.

Other than the politically powerful sugar lobby, to get to Kutch and Saurashtra the canal has to negotiate its way past a series of golf-courses, luxury hotels and water parks which, the Government says, it has sanctioned in order to raise money to compl ete the project!

Apart from all this, and in complete contravention of its own directives, the government has allotted the city of Baroda a sizeable quantity of water. What Baroda gets, can Ahmedabad bear to lose? The political clout of powerful urban centres will make s ure they get their share.

So the chances of the farmers of Kutch and Saurashtra benefiting from the Narmada get remoter by the day.

Of late, the people of Kutch and Saurashtra, who have endured water-shortages for years, have begun to recognise Government propaganda for what it is. Civil unease is stirring as realisation dawns that the Sardar Sarovar is mopping up their money but is not going to solve their water problems. That the solution lies not with the Government but with themselves. The Gujarat Land Development Corporation estimates that there is at least 15 to 20 MAF of rainwater that can be harvested by local watershed harv esting schemes in Kutch and Saurashtra. (The Sardar Sarovar promises, on paper, 3 MAF to these areas.) In several villages, entirely through peoples' initiatives, successful water-harvesting schemes are already under way. Hundreds of thousands of wells are being recharged with rainwater that was flowing away unused. So much for the Government of Gujarat's claims that there are no alternatives to the Sardar Sarovar.

A people's organisation has filed a case against the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam, demanding an express canal to Kutch, with no designer stops on the way.

Another huge cost that does not figure in the benefit-benefit analysis of the Sardar Sarovar Project is the cost of installing drainage in the command area to prevent water-logging and salinisation. The cost of installing drainage is about five times hig her than the cost of installing the irrigation system. So, traditionally drainage costs are left out in order to make projects in developing countries appear viable. I'm told this is an old World Bank practice.

Over the last fourteen years, the NBA has pointed to these facts over and over again, and asked for the project to be reviewed. After the World Bank's Independent Review was published and the Bank stepped back from the project, the Gujarat Government has systematically blocked every attempt at a review. It prevented the Five Member Group Committee from entering Gujarat. It refused permission to the World Commission on Dams to visit the dam site. It prevented the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Sch eduled Tribes from visiting the dam site. It prevented the Union Welfare Ministry from assessing the Rehabilitation and Resettlement situation. It stood by and watched while the NBA office in Baroda was ransacked and its documents publicly burnt.

In May 1994, the NBA filed a petition in the Supreme Court in which it listed all the points I've talked about, and asked for a review of the project. In early 1995, on the grounds that the Resettlement of displaced people was not satisfactory, the court ordered a halt to the construction. Over the years the court has managed to limit the whole issue to resettlement. It has cast itself in the role of a sort of Welfare Inspector of Resettlement Colonies whose jurisdiction is more or less restricted to Gu jarat. It oversees the resettlement of only those who officially qualify as 'project affected'. Unfortunately, even here it hasn't distinguished itself.

In February 1999, despite the fact that nothing had changed radically in the resettlement scenario, despite the fact that families who were supposed to have been resettled had returned in despair to their original villages, the Supreme Court lifted the f our-year-long stay and allowed construction of the dam to continue.

The people in the valley responded by declaring that they would drown rather than move from their homes. The NBA defied the gag imposed on them by the court. In a statement to the press, its leader, Medha Patkar, announced that she would drown herself in the river if the court permitted any further construction.

As a response to this, the Gujarat Government filed a petition asking that the NBA be removed as petitioners for committing contempt of court and that criminal action be taken against me for writing "The Greater Common Good" which, they claimed, undermin ed the dignity of the court and attempted to influence the course of justice.

In July and August, while the waters rose in the Narmada, while villagers stood in their homes for days together in chest-deep water to protest the decision of the court, while their crops were submerged, and while the NBA pointed out (citing specific in stances) that government officials had committed perjury by signing false affidavits claiming that resettlement had been carried out when it hadn't, the three-judge bench in the Supreme Court met over three sessions. The only subject they discusse d was whether or not the dignity of the court had been undermined. On the 15th of October, 1999 they issued an elaborate order. Here are some extracts.

... Judicial process and institution cannot be permitted to be scandalised or subjected to contumacious violation in such a blatant manner in which it has been done by her (me)... vicious stultification and vulgar debunking cannot be permitted to poll ute the stream of justice... we are unhappy at the way in which the leaders of NBA and Ms Arundhati Roy have attempted to undermine the dignity of the Court. We expected better behaviour from them... After giving this matter thoughtful consideration and keeping in view the importance of the issue of Resettlement and Rehabilitation... we are not inclined to initiate contempt proceedings against the petitioners, its leaders or Arundhati Roy... after the 22nd of July 1999... nothing has come to our notice which may show that Ms Arundhati Roy has continued with the objectionable writings insofar as the judiciary is concerned. She may have by now realised her mistake.

So. Shall I heed the warning or persevere with the contumely?

To heed the warning might be prudent, but in my opinion it would undermine the dignity of Art. And, as we all know, there's no excuse for bad art. Just as much as the valley needs a writer, I believe that writers need the valley. Not just writers - poets , painters, dancers, actors, film-makers - every kind of artist. If we are to remain alive, if we are to continue to work, we need to reclaim the political arena which we seem to have so willingly abdicated. If we choose to look away now, at this point - somehow it doesn't say very much about our art. I'm not suggesting that everybody must turn out a hectoring, political manifesto. I'm all for Matisse and goldfish on a window sill. All I mean is that from time to time we could lift our eyes from the pag e and acknowledge the condition of the world around us. Acknowledge the price that someone, somewhere far away is paying, in order for us to switch our lights on, cool our rooms and run our baths.

Today the Sardar Sarovar Dam is 88 metres high. It has submerged only a fourth of the area that it will when (if) the dam reaches its full height of 138 metres. It's true that the Government has already spent a lot of money on the project. But continuing with it would mean spending about six times that amount - throwing good money after bad. There is a detailed engineering proposal in place for how the dam can be used at the current height in order to take water straight to Kutch and Saurashtra, if that is indeed what the Government wants to do. Restructuring the project with this lower dam height would mean saving hundreds of thousands of people from certain destitution. It would mean saving thousands of hectares of forest. It would mean saving some o f the most fertile agricultural land in Asia from submergence. It would mean having enough money to fund local water-harvesting schemes in every village in Gujarat.

It would mean a victory for non-violence and the principles of democracy. It would mean that we still have hope.

Since this is the Nehru Memorial Lecture, let me end with a quote from a speech he made in November 1958 at the Annual Meeting of the Central Board of Irrigation and Power:

For some time past, however, I have been beginning to think that we are suffering from what we may call the "disease of gigantism". We want to show we can build big dams and do big things. This is a dangerous outlook developing in India.... it is the small irrigation projects, the small industries and the small plants for electric power which will change the face of this country far more than half a dozen big projects in half a dozen places...

Needless to say, this speech never made it into the school books.

I've made myself very unpopular in India by saying the things I say.

Fortunately, I'm not standing for elections. As I writer, I would rather be loved by a river valley than by a nation-state.

This is the text of the Nehru Memorial Lecture delivered by the writer at Cambridge University on November 8, 1999. The lecture was delivered at the invitation of Professor Amartya Sen, Master of Trinity College.

The suicide terrorism syndrome which has become acute in South Asia and West Asia in the past two decades has, however, not driven states most affected by the menace to study and uproot it. The LTTE in Sri Lanka is among the deadliest exponents of the syndrome.

THE three suicide attacks by the LTTE in Colombo within a span of three weeks have revived the "suicide bomb syndrome" in Sri Lanka. Amidst preventive and reactive measures against suicide attacks - curfews, large-scale arrests, mobile checkpoints, tight er security for vulnerable targets - the threat of another attack looms.

Despite large-scale cordon-and-search operations, security forces have failed to net the suicide cadres or their weapon caches in Colombo. Only searches and arrests made on the basis of accurate and timely intelligence tip-offs have succeeded in eroding the LTTE's compartmentalised infrastructure to conduct suicide attacks. Sri Lankan intelligence operatives estimate that in addition to the LTTE cells engaged in reconnaissance on human and infrastructure targets, there are about 30 active and sleeper LT TE cells in Colombo, drawn from the LTTE group called the Black Tigers.

The LTTE leads the global list of groups that are capable of suicide attacks. Other groups with such capability are the Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the Hamas in Palestine, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) of Turkey, the Groupe Islamique Armee (GIA or the Armed Islamic Group) of Algeria and the Islamic Group of Egypt. A brief review of the suicide threat to targets in Sri Lanka and India from the LTTE and an analysis of global trends and patterns in suicide terrorism are therefore in order.

IN South Asia, the LTTE is the only suicide capable group. It is the only group to have assassinated two world leaders, both assassinations carried out using the suicide body-suit. Unlike former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and President Premadasa, incumb ent Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga was fortunate to survive, though with a serious injury. Both intelligence and interrogation of LTTE cadres reveal that the LTTE intended to assassinate Chandrika Kumaratunga in order to ensure the victory of leader of the Opposition Ranil Wickremasinghe. Wickremasinghe's United National Party (UNP) had initiated a dialogue with the LTTE with the intention of declaring a ceasefire, which would have enabled the LTTE, as it had done during three previous cease fires, to strengthen its organisation both politically and militarily. The political context of each suicide operation reveals how the LTTE manages to survive and advance its aims using this lethally accurate tactic.

The suicide bomb threat from the LTTE is not confined to Sri Lanka. In fact the LTTE's first suicide attack using a suicide body-suit took place in India. The LTTE had mounted surveillance on a number of Indian leaders, with the intention of assassinatin g them in order to control the threat to it from India. Recent arrests both in India and in Sri Lanka reveal that the LTTE was likely to have made a serious attempt to assassinate Congress(I) president Sonia Gandhi during the campaign for the Lok Sabha e lections in September-October 1999, had LTTE assessments indicated that the Congress(I) would win. The LTTE assessed that had Sonia Gandhi assumed power, she would assist the Sri Lankan Government militarily to crush the LTTE in order to avenge the death of her husband. On the eve of the Lok Sabha elections in 1991, the LTTE assassinated Rajiv Gandhi to pre-empt a reintroduction of the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) in the island. The LTTE had secured intelligence through a prominent Tamil Nadu polit ician that Rajiv Gandhi had vowed to "teach Prabakaran a lesson" for going back on the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement of July 1987.

Similarly, on the eve of the 1994 Sri Lankan elections, the LTTE assassinated UNP presidential candidate Gamini Dissanayake who enjoyed close ties with India. Interrogation of LTTE cadres revealed that V. Prabakaran, the LTTE's supreme leader, had decide d to target Dissanayake for fear that a government under Dissanayake would receive Indian assistance. The LTTE has not targeted an Indian VIP since Rajiv Gandhi's assassination because successive governments in India have not gone out of their way to har ass the LTTE. Furthermore, the LTTE had managed to neutralise the threat from New Delhi by befriending a handful of Indian political leaders such as George Fernandes. Except for extending the proscription of the LTTE, the assistance given by New Delhi to Colombo in the war against the LTTE has been minimal. As such, there is no immediate threat to India from the LTTE.

Among the contemporary terrorist groups engaged in suicide attacks, the LTTE has conducted the largest number of attacks. The Black Tigers are constituted exclusively of cadres who have volunteered to conduct suicide operations. On July 5, 1999, Black Ti ger day, the LTTE erected in Puthukuthirippu in the Wanni a monument for the Black Tigers who killed themselves in operations. A statement issued from its political headquarters in Mallavi in the Wanni said that the LTTE had conducted 147 suicide operati ons since 1987. However, this number did not include the suicide attacks carried out on non-military targets, such as politicians and economic infrastructure, in which civilians were killed or injured. The LTTE code prevents it from claiming responsibili ty for attacks on non-military persons such as Rajiv Gandhi, Premadasa, Dissanayake, and Ranjan Wijeratne, the Sri Lankan Minister of State for Defence. By adopting such a position, the LTTE seeks to project to the international community that it is a li beration movement that targets only military personnel, and not a terrorist group.

THE mindset of the LTTE suicide bomber is distinct from his or her West Asian counterpart. The LTTE suicide bomber is motivated by his or her politico-social environment as well as by the indoctrination carried out by the organisation. Prabakaran states: "With perseverance and sacrifice, Tamil Eelam can be achieved in 100 years. But if we conduct Black Tiger operations, we can shorten the suffering of the people and achieve Tamil Eelam in a shorter period of time."

The first LTTE suicide operation was conducted on July 5, 1987, to stall the advance of the Sri Lankan military to Jaffna town. It was not an LTTE cadre wearing a suicide body-suit, but a vehicle laden with explosives that was used. Wasanthan alias Capta in Millar volunteered to drive the vehicle bomb into the makeshift army camp in Nelliaddy. Although the suicide operation was not the reason to abort the mission to capture Jaffna, LTTE propaganda claimed that Captain Millar's success in killing 40 soldi ers in Nelliaddy frustrated the intentions of the Government to recapture the Tamil heartland. For some unknown reason, which perhaps security specialists will be able to analyse in the future, the LTTE did not conduct suicide operations during the IPKF period. But immediately after that it initiated a series of suicide attacks with the assassination of Wijeratne and Rajiv Gandhi in March and May 1991 respectively. These off-the-battlefield strikes were developed in Eelam War II, when the LTTE integrate d suicide bombers into its land and sea fighting forces.

The vulnerability of any group driven by ethnic nationalism to the use of the tactic of suicide terrorism is demonstrated in the Sri Lankan case. At a global level, suicide terrorism is driven not only by religious but also ethnic nationalism. In the lon g term, a higher number of ethnic communities are at risk of experiencing conflicts driven by ethnic nationalism. Only four per cent of the countries in the world have just one ethnic community. By understanding both the contexts of and the vulnerability of separatist groups to the use of suicide terrorism, the threat can be addressed proactively and comprehensively.

In this context, the Sri Lankan experience provides invaluable lessons because no other country has lost so many leaders in such a short time as Sri Lanka. Other than the loss of leaders, the country's national political, economic and cultural infrastruc ture has been damaged by suicide attacks. The LTTE deployed with deadly accuracy suicide bombers to destroy the Joint Operations Command, the nerve-centre of the Sri Lankan security forces; the Central Bank; the World Trade Centre; the Temple of the Toot h Relic, the most hallowed Buddhist shrine; and the oil storage installations in Kolonnawa. The LTTE used suicide bombers to kill a number of service personnel, apart from political leaders and outstanding intellectuals such as Neelan Thiruchelvam. Sri L ankan Navy chief Admiral Clancy Fernando was killed by a suicide bomber on a motor cycle soon after he returned from India after discussing Indo-Sri Lankan naval cooperation. Two officers engaged in the "hearts and minds" campaign, Brigade commander of t he Jaffna peninsula Brigadier Larry Wijeratne and Jaffna town commandant Brigadier Ananda Hamangoda, were killed in two independent suicide attacks. In order to paralyse the security apparatus, the LTTE singled out and targeted individuals who were at th e forefront of counter-insurgency operations. For instance, Chief Inspector Nilabdeen, the head of the anti-terrorism unit in a suburban police station, escaped with injuries but Razeek, a former Tamil militant who had been integrated into the Sri Lankan Army, was killed in May 1999.

IN most cases, the suicide bombers have succeeded in reaching their target through infiltration or following thorough reconnaissance. Security designed to deceive the LTTE rather than increase the protection of the target has helped save the lives of sev eral VIPs. Further, sound and timely intelligence has disrupted several LTTE cells in the south of the island. President Chandrika Kumaratunga survived at least four attempts to assassinate her when some of the operation leaders or cell members were arre sted or killed in premature explosions. For instance, a suicide bomber was arrested in Colombo, a reconnaissance team member was arrested in Vavuniya, and a lorry laden with explosives blew up prematurely in Galle on December 8, 1997. Similarly, three at tempts to kill General Aniruddha Ratwatte failed - a suicide bomber with a cart of coconuts prematurely blew up in Torrington on August 7, 1995; a bus laden with explosives meant for his vehicle blew up in Maradana on March 5, 1998; a female bomber in fr ont of the Prime Minister's office, who was aiming to target his vehicle, was interdicted on January 5, 2000.

THE number of groups engaged in suicide operations has increased between the 1980s and the 1990s. The 1990s witnessed suicide strikes by the Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad in Israel; the Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel, Panama and Argentina; the GIA in A lgeria; PKK in Turkey and Iraq; al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya, or Islamic Group of Egypt, in Pakistan and Croatia; and the LTTE in Sri Lanka and India. The 1980s witnessed suicide strikes by the Hezbollah, al-Da'aw (Islamic Action), al-Amal, the Syrian Sociali st Nationalist Party, the Ba'ath Party, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Lebanon and Kuwait, and by the LTTE in Sri Lanka.

The concept of suicide terrorism was acquired by emulation or by the transfer of technology through group-to-group contact. The groups currently engaged in suicide terrorism have political, military and financial links with several other groups. As more guerilla and terrorist groups have become capable of carrying out suicide attacks in the 1990s than they were in the 1980s, it is likely that the threat of suicide terrorism will continue into the new century. Most suicide attacks in the 1980s were in pr e-existing theatres of conflict but their range of operation increased into neighbouring countries in the 1990s. For instance, a female suicide bomber of the LTTE assassinated Rajiv Gandhi in Tamil Nadu in 1991.

The Hamas commenced its suicide bomb campaign in Israel in October 1993, after an abortive attack in June 1988. A Hezbollah suicide bomb destroyed the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish Community Centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in March 1992 and July 1994 respectively. A mid-air explosion on board an aircraft killed a suicide bomber and 20 others in Panama in July 1994. An affiliate of the IG of Egypt conducted suicide strikes at the police headquarters in Rijeka, Croatia, and the Egyptian Embassy in I slamabad in October and November 1995 respectively.

The LTTE, the Hezbollah, the Hamas and the PKK institutionalised indoctrination and physical training of volunteers in order to enhance the efficiency of the bomber. The threat of suicide bombings, previously confined to West Asia and South Asia, is like ly to spread to other areas with domestic governments increasingly denying these groups the use of their territories.

North American and Western European security and intelligence agencies assess suicide terrorism as a threat to Western security. Post-Cold War regional conflicts are witnessing both enhanced migration of displaced persons and their sustenance by fledglin g diaspora and ethnic communities. Under cover of such communities, the potential of a guerilla/terrorist group to employ a bomber to engage in long-range surveillance and strike a target in an "enemy" country is increasing. The increase in the potential of groups to penetrate and operate far away from the theatres of conflict can have implications for states hosting migrant refugee communities as well as those intervening in conflicts.

Suicide strikes have serious implications. Suicide attacks led to the withdrawal of the Multi-National Peacekeeping Force after the Hezbollah destroyed the headquarters of the United States Marines and the French paratroopers in Lebanon in October 1983; pre-empted the re-introduction of the IPKF into Sri Lanka after the LTTE assassinated the architect of the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord, Rajiv Gandhi, in India; and temporarily stalled the peace process in West Asia after the Hamas targeted civilians in I srael throughout the 1990s. One suicide bomber can have a profound effect on the political, military and economic contexts, especially in peace-building situations. After the conflict-ravaged Jaffna peninsula held by the LTTE was recovered by the militar y in 1995, the ambitious rehabilitation and reconstruction programme was disrupted by a lone suicide bomber who killed the Town Commandant Brigadier Ananda Hamangoda (posthumously promoted as Major-General). Even for states with sophisticated militar y and intelligence apparatuses, suicide terrorism is hard to combat.

DEFENCE research by Israel, Sri Lanka, India and Turkey, states affected by suicide terrorism, has led to the development of human intelligence capability and other technical counter-measures. But there is no security or technical cooperation between the most affected states - Israel and Sri Lanka. Although there is security and intelligence cooperation between India and Sri Lanka, Israel and India, and Israel and Turkey, there is a lack of technical cooperation. The technologies for non-commercial, ind igenously developed electronic warfare counter-measures against terrorism are rarely shared even among friendly states. Current research by governments is largely confined to technically protecting land or sea targets from suicide attacks or preventing s uch attacks.

After nearly two decades of suicide terrorism, systematic research examining this phenomenon evades both the scholar and the analyst owing to a lack of intensive research into group dynamics as well as the political, military and socio-economic contexts that spawn and sustain suicide terrorism. For instance, widespread poverty and underdevelopment exist in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, southeastern Turkey, and northeastern Sri Lanka, which form the recruiting ground for a bulk of the suicide bombers. Da n Setton (director), Suicide Bombers: Secrets of the Shaheed, Cinemax Reel Life film, April 1998, states: "...Hamas extremists continue to preach their version of patriotism among the desperate and the poor."

Instead of regulating the environmental factors and group dynamics, states respond to the threat in different ways. For instance, Israel responds reactively to the effects of suicide terrorism by destroying the homes of the suicide bombers and prosec uting potential suicide bombers. As a result, suicide attacks have become more ruthless (targeting civilian targets), deceptive (using deep penetration) and daring (attacking multiple targets). As suicide attacks are planned and executed by compartmental ised cells, even a pragmatic military response, such as infiltration or "hardening" likely targets by stepping up protection, fails to guarantee security and offers no long-term solution. The extant criminal justice and prisons systems offer neither dete rrence nor rehabilitation to a politically motivated potential bomber. In Sri Lanka and in other states, the effectiveness of the state response to suicide terrorism has not been assessed. Similarly, no analysis has been conducted on the differing trends in the use of suicide terrorism. By comparing the evolution in technology, training and operational doctrine against state response over nearly two decades, likely trends can be identified.

There is a paucity of research on suicide terrorism in open as well as classified literature. Research on suicide terrorism has been confined to West Asia. An exception has been the work of the Indian forensic specialist, P. Chandrasekharan, who scientif ically proved that it was the suicide bomber Thenmuli Rajaratnam alias Dhanu who assassinated Rajiv Gandhi. Except for the Chandrasekharan study, and another study tracing the roots of the phenomenon to the Indian Ocean region, suicide terrorism as a pol itical and social phenomenon has not been researched in Asia.

In suicide terrorism, the aim of the psychologically and physically war-trained terrorist is to die while destroying the "enemy" target. Suicide as used in the appellation "suicide terrorism" does not imply suicide as a psychological or pathological situ ation or condition. Suicide terrorism is different from high-risk military operations where death is not certain and the perpetrator may survive the operation. In the spectrum of political violence, from the perspective of the perpetrator, suicide terror ism is the most violent form of expression.

Today law enforcement reports analyse the threat from potential bombers and their suicide devices, logistics and support network and modus operandi, and also identify them and their ideologues and device designers. By acquiring and comparatively a nalysing a wide range of data, a deeper understanding of the distinction between suicide and non-suicide terrorism must be gained. This is essential to evolve solutions to suicide terrorism. The underlying factors and conditions that drive suicide terror ism can help formulate long-range policies to break the cycle of violence. As a political and social phenomenon as well as a security threat, suicide terrorism is a least studied problem.

Dr. Rohan Gunaratna is the author of Sri Lanka's Ethnic Crisis and National Security.

THE security threat posed to India by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is on a par with the threat to the country from the numerous other terrorist groups, according to a recent Indian intelligence warning. The intelligence agencies have alert ed the Government of India about the impending threat from the LTTE. It has now been revealed that the LTTE, an organisation with long-term strategic goals, has developed contingency plans to target nuclear facilities in South India. The LTTE has planned to deploy a number of suicide squads armed with custom-designed improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to sabotage these facilities in the event of India stepping up military assistance to the Government of Sri Lanka, especially by reintroducting its troop s on Sri Lankan soil.

The recent debriefing of a senior LTTE leader by a foreign intelligence agency revealed that the LTTE had mounted surveillance on, built scale models of and developed operational plans to sabotage strategic targets in India. The LTTE's civil intelligence under Pottu Amman and its military and strategic adviser Wedi Dinesh were both instrumental in running a number of agents into India to gather details of these facilities. The intelligence gathered includes photographs of some of the facilities and deta ils of senior, middle-level, and junior staff of the Fuel Reprocessing Plant at Kalpakkam. The scale models of the targets were built by the map- and the model-making units of the LTTE's military and civil intelligence wings. The intelligence gathering w as coordinated by Janan Master, a senior intelligence wing leader, who was assigned to cover India. Janan Master, who was responsible for planning the assassination of President Ranasinghe Premadasa, is widely respected in LTTE circles. His presence in I ndia was clandestine even when other LTTE leaders and cadres engaged in "political and military" activities in the country.

THE security threat posed to India by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is on a par with the threat to the country from the numerous other terrorist groups, according to a recent Indian intelligence warning. The intelligence agencies have alert ed the Government of India about the impending threat from the LTTE. It has now been revealed that the LTTE, an organisation with long-term strategic goals, has developed contingency plans to target nuclear facilities in South India. The LTTE has planned to deploy a number of suicide squads armed with custom-designed improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to sabotage these facilities in the event of India stepping up military assistance to the Government of Sri Lanka, especially by reintroducting its troop s on Sri Lankan soil.

The recent debriefing of a senior LTTE leader by a foreign intelligence agency revealed that the LTTE had mounted surveillance on, built scale models of and developed operational plans to sabotage strategic targets in India. The LTTE's civil intelligence under Pottu Amman and its military and strategic adviser Wedi Dinesh were both instrumental in running a number of agents into India to gather details of these facilities. The intelligence gathered includes photographs of some of the facilities and deta ils of senior, middle-level, and junior staff of the Fuel Reprocessing Plant at Kalpakkam. The scale models of the targets were built by the map- and the model-making units of the LTTE's military and civil intelligence wings. The intelligence gathering w as coordinated by Janan Master, a senior intelligence wing leader, who was assigned to cover India. Janan Master, who was responsible for planning the assassination of President Ranasinghe Premadasa, is widely respected in LTTE circles. His presence in I ndia was clandestine even when other LTTE leaders and cadres engaged in "political and military" activities in the country. n

SINCE we have lessons to learn from the past, let us briefly dwell on the history of television. Here, I wish to look back, around and ahead.

Broadcasting was a war-gadget during the First World War. After the War, the army stopped buying radio sets in very large numbers. In 1920, manufacturers of radio receivers in the United States wanted a market for these receivers among the civilian popul ation and they began establishing radio stations. In other words, broadcasting started in order to sell radio receivers. Initially, these radio stations were open for anybody to come and broadcast. It was more or less like standing on a bench at Hyde Par k to make a public speech. People walked into radio stations and sang songs or delivered speeches as they liked. They also gave birthday messages. Small stores found it was profitable to popularise their names through the medium. The radio stations began to charge them, and thus the radio commercial was born. By 1925, there were 400 radio stations in the U.S. and the number was growing. Eventually, the U.S. government thought it fit to control the airwaves and appointed the Federal Communications Commis sion (FCC) to allot airwaves in order that the same frequency was not used by competing radio stations.

When radio broadcasting was inaugurated in India by the British Government, the first Director of All India Radio (AIR), Lionel Fielden, wrote that his four years of strenuous efforts were "enough to make a cat laugh. It was the biggest flop of all time. "

Throughout the world as within India, the control of the broadcast waves has been disputed territory. AIR made outstanding contributions to the popularisation as well as archival preservation of Indian classical music. But in the realm of information and views, the strangulated voice of AIR during the first three decades after Independence was reflected in the insipid vision of Doordarshan which came into being as a nascent broadcasting organisation. Indeed, some outstanding programmes were produced by the staff of AIR and Doordarshan as well as by outsiders; but these were exceptions rather than the rule.

The international experience has shown that "great, good, bad and indifferent" programmes are produced by private profit-oriented organisations, autonomous non-profit bodies and public sector bodies. The secret of good production lies in the motivation a nd talent of the individuals involved, a general culture of creative freedom and an ethos of aesthetic and technical finesse. None of this, of course, can exist in an administrative and financial vacuum.

Television, the little giant, is tossed between three players - the producer, the sponsor and the audience. The American experience over the past five decades has shown that in a milieu that believes in free trade in all aspects of society, the sponsor d ominates the medium either directly or indirectly. This is true of a predominant percentage of American entertainment television programmes. The major advertisers, for example, would not like their products to be advertised on the screen when the main p rogramme is anything less than extravagantly glossy. It cannot even remotely portray poverty of any kind or the darker side of life in the U.S. It is believed that the audience for such a programme is subconsciously not in a mood to buy in a lavish mann er. Hence, the commercial interests in general exclusively support glossy, escapist entertainment with an atmosphere of unreal affluence, in order to influence subliminally the spectator often to buy what he or she does not need, at prices he or she cann ot afford. No wonder, even non-fiction is about the "rich and the famous".

In the words of Aldous Huxley, television in such a society is "concerned in the main with neither truth nor falsehood; neither beauty nor ugliness; neither phenomenon nor the reality behind them", but with "the ephemeral, the more or less totally irrele vant". Huxley further noted that as a consequence of this, Jeffersonian concepts of democracy are no longer valid since Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues could not have imagined the distortions, if not perversions, of the mass media of the future.

Two decades ago, even as some sections of society in India were trying to promote and press for allowing private ownership of broadcasting, ironically the intelligentsia in the U.S. were trying to bring some kind of state control over broadcasting - in o rder to ensure that the power of the media was not "wasted". Intellectual opinion was that a precious instrument of knowledge was being frittered away on frivolous commercial considerations. This resulted in the birth of the Public Broadcasting Service ( PBS) in the U.S. PBS is primarily funded by the state. If at all corporate bodies offer sponsorship in PBS, the intention was that they should merely get a credit line for sponsorship without any commercials promoting products and services.

"Papa, what is the moon supposed to advertise?"

Television is a challenge to the very philosophy on which the Indian Constitution is based. As Huxley pointed out, some aspects of the functioning of democracy have to be changed after making due adjustments and taking into account the impact of TV on hu man minds. India has been a crucible for studying the influence of cinema on society. In many pockets of India, cinema has performed the role of negating the benefits of democracy. As a non-literate medium, cinema has held a hypnotic spell on a mass of p eople which, by and large, has been detrimental to voters' awareness and maturity, distorting their perception of political processes and ideologies.

The reason for mentioning cinema here is that private TV channels in India are satellite channels in another sense of the term - most of them are satellites of the film industry. Given these circumstances, ideally Prasar Bharati should be geared to liber ate TV from mass cinema and build up an independent identity - an identity that can be more mature, leading people to better awareness in every sense of the term.

The problem with Doordarshan has been that it started with a public broadcasting philosophy, unceremoniously diluted this purpose with a commercial broadcast protocol (but adopting managerially inefficient procedures inconsistent with market objectives), and has since then been fluctuating between the goals of commercial self-sufficiency, oneupmanship against private tinsel channels in capturing a mass audience with populist programmes, competing with the best non-commercial public service broadcast cha nnels of the world, and so on. With the political establishment in a state of flux owing to too many changes in the last decade, Doordarshan has unfortunately become rudderless, but with enormous investments and a mammoth staff strength. The weakness has been compounded by financial improprieties and many complaints of graft. The constantly fluctuating priorities, the absence of a transparent policy, and the lack of commitment to any goal have cumulatively made Doordarshan a blindfolded elephant of trem endous strength, moving without a sense of direction. There are several good professionals within and outside Doordarshan. But they are riding the blindfolded elephant without a map, without a charter, without a compass, and indeed without a road. Even a s the rajahs and nawabs of India were at their weakest when colonisers entered this subcontinent, this TV giant was at its weakest when private satellite channels set up shop.

These private channels inspired by the American television model have become such a prominent component of Indian living rooms that we need to consider what their impact has been in the soil they belong to.

"I believe that television is going to be the test of the modern world. We shall stand or fall by television - of that I'm quite sure."

The content of media being a product of culture and several millennia of our civilisational values, some of which are unique to India and some of which are common to humankind as a whole, the medium cannot be treated on a par with other commodities of th e market, whether they are material commodities or services. Hence, not all the rules that are applied to economic liberalisation and market liberalisation can be applied to the media - particularly television.

Discussing which other areas are to be protected from the onslaught of such liberalisation would be a larger debate. The scope of this article being limited to television, I speak here only of the need to protect it as "cultural entity".

Humanity's search for the perfect model for political and social institutions continues. No system has found the ultimate answer, if there is any. Technological changes bring about big changes to the very contexts in which models are evolved, even before their implementation. The Prasar Bharati Act is a case in point: a model conceived in the context of a monopolistic government-controlled medium, proposing that it may better come under an autonomous body for governance. But even before its implementati on, the monopoly was lost. This has changed the very foundation of assumptions on which the original model was proposed. I still strongly advocate "autonomy" as a basis. But many details need to be looked into entirely afresh.

LET us try to find answers to three questions: 1. How do you finance the operation? 2. Who should govern the broadcasting organisation? 3. How are programme content and the producers to be chosen?

First, on financing an egalitarian public broadcasting system to serve the primary purpose of Prasar Bharati. The cultural and philosophical basis of government funding is akin to funding for HRD (Human Resource Development). You do not expect immediate financial returns on education. It is an investment in human development. It is the same with a public broadcasting system.

The problem of funds, often cited as a stumbling block, is not as overwhelming as it is made to appear. Various methods of financing have been suggested. The publicly owned airways are being used rent-free by commercial users to create vast fortunes; the re is no reason, as Walter Lippmann suggested long ago, why commercial users should not pay a rental or royalty for such use of public property, to be earmarked for the needs of public broadcasting. The device suggested by the Ford Foundation - a royalty from domestic communication-satellite revenue - holds equal merit. The Carnegie Commission's proposal of a special tax on the receiver is also logical, perhaps as a supplementary device. Let us look at these first as recommendations in the American con text. In the words of Erik Barnouw:

The Carnegie document, surveying American television, concluded that society has communication needs which could not be met by an advertising-based system. These needs were felt to call for a "public" television service channelling a different set of mot ives, a system through which Americans would "know themselves, their communities, and their world in richer ways". The commission termed it "a civilised voice in a civilised community". In its first decade this "public" system, linked by a Public Broadcasting Service and receiving Federal funds through a Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has made important strides in the hoped-for direction. A key element in the Carnegie manifesto was its financial recommendation. To assure the independence of the system, it was to have an automatic source of revenue such as a dedicated tax on electronic equipment. Several alternative tax bases were suggeste d. The dedicated tax was meant to parallel, to some extent, arrangements in effect in Britain and Japan, both of which have effective, well-financed non-commercial systems based on licence-fees - systems existing side by side with their commercial system s, and holding large audiences. The reasons for the Carnegie stipulation were clear. To fulfil its purpose, the system had to be independent not only of sponsor domination but also of pressures involved in constant confrontations with congressional committees over appropriations and po licies.

In the Indian context, the government should be able to underwrite and subsidise 90 per cent of the recurring expenses in running the various channels. Sponsorship may be accepted on a limited basis for getting sponsorship credit lines - but with no product advertising, in the main channels of Doordarshan. The required resources can be raised in the following manner.

A system of taxation should be evolved by which the privately owned satellite channels will pay a differential tax to a separate fund in order to finance Doordarshan's operations. A higher tax slab for foreign-owned media and a lower slab for Indian-owne d channels will be perfectly justified. This can be modelled after the Carnegie Commission recommendations with suitable modifications to suit our ethos. There should also be a differential tax slab, based on the broad content of the material broadcast b y these channels - with much lower slabs for news, current affairs, educational and such other channels, and a steeply higher slab for the entertainment channels. This should generate substantial revenues to take care of the entire cost of programme prod uction for Doordarshan. The government should consider it a societal obligation to pay for hardware, renewals, salaries and all such other overheads in order to run the autonomous broadcasting channels under Prasar Bharati efficiently.

Barnouw, whose three-volume history of broadcasting is considered the most authentic, while discussing the Carnegie Commission recommendations in the U.S. context expands on how and why politicians were unwilling to accept the entire proposal and how Con gress voted only part of the proposals. He writes:

Congress did not follow the recommendation. Congressmen ensured their hold over the system by making it dependent on periodic appropriations... This has virtually pushed the system into the arms of the corporate sponsor and also into endless subscription drives - which may meet increasing resistance as the sponsor's role expands. Whatever attitudes and fears were involved, the financial status inflicted on public television has done much to sabotage the original plan. At most stations major programme proposals are drawn up, then held in abeyance while fund raisers seek under-writ ing. The sponsor's nod is awaited.

Recognising that the problem in India is far more complex than in the U.S., the Indian Parliament should rise to the occasion beyond the party divide, and create a public broadcasting system that can stand out as a model for the world. With India's resil ience born out of several millennia of civilisational values, we need not wait for role models to appear elsewhere in the world. The challenge of neo-colonialism through control of television by multinational corporations is a real challenge; and India's public broadcasting system should be considered as important as security and defence. As much as we need to protect our geographic borders and territory, it is imperative to protect our psychic identity as a nation of thoughtful people with perennial hu man values enshrined in our consciousness. It is indeed worth allotting the regular financial resources required on a massive scale to protect this. Tinkering with the Prasar Bharati framework will not do. We need a comprehensive revision, a comprehensive cultural defence force in place, with adequate funding. WE now come to the question of how and who should govern the airwaves under Prasar Bharati. There are no satisfactory models to copy. Hence we have to evolve a model of our own. I propose that the Prasar Bharati Board be directly elected by the people of India - not by every citizen, but by a discretely chosen electoral college, which may consist of the following people, with provision for one-third of the board to retire every alternate year. I propose that the electoral college to elect the board members of Prasar Bharati consist of Indian citizens with the following minimum qualifications: 1. Doctoral degree holders of recognised (accredited) Indian and international universities, in any su bject. 2. Professionals with bachelor's degrees (from recognised universities) limited to engineering, medicine, law and education. 3. Musicians, dancers, stage/screen actors and actresses, with at least five years of public performance experience, and a minimum of bachelor's degree from a recognised university. 4. Painters, sculptors, visual artists, photographers, with a minimum of five years of work experience and a minimum of a bachelor's degree from a recognised university or an equivalent diploma from any school of arts or a film/television institute. 5. Working journalists employed in a registered newspaper for more than five years, with a minimum of a bachelor's degree. 6. Authors with published books in any Indian language or English (fiction or non-fiction), and directors of released feature films, documentary films and television serials, with a minimum of a bachelor's degree in any subject from a recognised university. 7. Authors, performing artists and visual artists who have received awa rds at the national level from the Sahitya Akademi, the Sangeet Natak Akademi and the Lalit Kala Akademi, and directors of feature films and non-fiction-films who have received national awards for their films, even if they have not received any formal un iversity education. The third question is, how will the programme content and programme producers be chosen by this hopefully eminent board. It is easy to get caught in a trap of evolving very strict rules and regulations. Suffice it to say that the board will be wise enoug h to avoid scrupulously tinsel names of commercial cinema and build up a healthy, meaningful alternative channel for people to enjoy. Suffice it to say also that producers will not be given serial numbers to line up in a queue (there were these incredibl e physically lined-up queues, standing day and night in front of Doordarshan to get a time-slot allotment during the days of its monopoly), but that the board will have the stature, wisdom and sensitivity to identify creative brains and invite them for w hat will be collaborative efforts between the channels and the producers. Objective criteria can be evolved for such selection. With all its promise, the information superhighway will be marked by the pot-holes and pitfalls of history. And, therefore, we are likely to need more of the resources of humanism, humility, constraint and virtue. These are not qualities to be found on o r along the information superhighway. No one may figure out a way of digitising them, for they depend on a different order of living and interaction. Dr. S. Krishnaswamy is a writer, producer and director of television serials and documentary films, who has won national and international awards. He is a media analyst and co-author of the book Indian Film with Erik Barnouw.

Post-Seattle, only a coming together of developing countries on the basis of an agenda that will help protect their interests can hold out against the developed world on issues of practising technological protectionism, environmental imperialism and social exclusion.

THE strategies that the United States and the European Commission (E.C.) would follow in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in order to shape the agenda of post-Seattle negotiations in Geneva are now clear. Their recent actions indicate that despite diff erences on some crucial issues, the U.S. and the E.C. will closely coordinate on issues of common concern to them.

The joint attempt of the E.C., Norway, the U.S., Japan and Switzerland to make the Committee on Subsidies take action on the extension of the period of waiver from the application of provisions that make many of their own subsidies for technology develop ment actionable, is a case in point. The U.S. and the E.C. continue to coordinate on the issue of getting the members to agree on the start of a new round that will have several non-trade issues (such as investment, competition policy, biotechnology safe ty, environment and labour) included in the agenda. They have even pressed Mike Moore, the Director-General of the WTO, into service to champion the cause of a new round. The Director-General was in India recently to attend an event organised by the Conf ederation of Indian Industry (CII). At this meeting, the Director-General was completely open about his mission. He went out of his way to impress upon industry and government officials the need to launch a new round of negotiations.

It is a matter of relief that the view of a large majority of countries is that the Seattle Ministerial Conference has ended and that the conference is not in a state of suspension and cannot be resumed. In the consultations after Seattle before the Dece mber 17 General Council meeting in Geneva, the U.S. sought to take the opposite position. It tried to adopt a view that had two sides. One, that the Ministerial Conference was in suspension and that all issues and papers before it remained "frozen". Two, that the Seattle Ministerial had ended, in the sense that the General Council could act and decide issues. This way the U.S. wanted to enable itself to continue consultations to find a consensus on dispute settlement and keeping alive the e-commerce mor atorium on custom duties or the labour issue.

The developing countries themselves have to share the blame for this partly. The inability of these countries to follow an agreed approach on relevant issues is a major reason for a new determination on the part of the developed world. The developing cou ntries are yet to realise the real meaning of the failure of WTO in Seattle. They are still unable to act in concert. Individual nations are trying to cut deals with the U.S., whose administration cannot for now deliver anything. India is itself a perfec t example of this mode of behaviour.

The result is that the WTO General Council meeting on December 17 got adjourned without a decision on the proposals seeking delays in end-of-the-year deadlines for applying obligations and other provisions of WTO agreements - for example, in the realm of intellectual property (TRIPS) and certain investment measures (TRIMS). These deadlines will now be among the subjects discussed.

A detailed reading of the decision taken in the General Council meeting indicates a sinister design on the part of the developed world to trap the developing countries into another major surrender. The real intentions of the developed world are clearly l inked to the so-called "implementation" issues on which the developing world can claim to have done at least some mobilisation. At one level, the December 17 decision is an attempt by the developed world to decide at least some of the so-called "implemen tation" issues through the means of not taking any action. The developed world has thereby succeeded in creating a situation where it would be in a position, post-December 31, to threaten some of the developing countries with cross-retaliation on the iss ue of non-implementation. The developed world is also interested in putting them on a new round because that would give the delegations of developed countries a clear chance to use the so-called issues of "implementation" or extension of deadlines to ext ract more concessions from the developing countries.

THEREFORE for the developing world, the moot issues to be considered today are two fundamental questions of counter-strategy. First, what kind of leverage does the developing world have today vis-a-vis the developed countries in the WTO? And second, is t he developing world at all in a position to take advantage of the available space?

There are at least two issues in which the developed world clearly has a major interest, and if the developing countries join forces to withhold consensus on these, they are likely to get leverage to influence the WTO on their own problems and demands.

One issue relates to the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing duties that sets for the developed countries the target of completely removing by December 31 all those subsidies that are said to cause serious prejudice to other members. The subsidies that are defined as prohibited and actionable by the WTO include research and development activities of enterprises that could be subsidised up to 75 per cent of the cost of research and up to 50 per cent of the costs of pre-competitive activity. Several countries of the developed world were supposed to undertake reductions in such industrial subsidies and they are as a whole guilty of violating these legal provisions of the WTO.

Similar violations have occurred in the case of environmental and regional subsidies, where too the developed world is a big culprit. There has been little close monitoring, and even less of a reporting requirement on countries, on the various subsidies that they provide to industrial and service enterprises.

The second issue relates to the Agreement on Electronic Commerce, where also the Seattle Conference has neither extended the moratorium on custom duties nor taken any decision. The interests of the developed world, particularly of the U.S., are largely a t stake here. To the developing world, both these issues offer some hopes of righting the wrongs done to it at Marrakesh.

COMING now to the second aspect, the moot question is whether the developing world has the right mindset to exploit the above-discussed issues for its own benefit. By all indications, the developing countries are still divided along the lines of large an d small countries. The E.C. and the U.S. are also consciously trying to divide them as the advanced and least developed countries. In Seattle they made a conscious attempt to divide the developing countries into three sets: advanced developing economies, developing economies and least developed economies. They have announced that the developed world would be willing to offer zero tariff benefit to the least developing economies if the advanced developing economies are also ready to do the same. In the U ruguay Round, the developing world was divided into only two sub-sets, but in Seattle the attempt was to divide the developing world into three sub-sets. This issue, if not tackled on time, has the potential to cause serious divisions in the developing w orld.

But if the developing world were in the right mindset, it would not allow itself to be divided on this issue. Large developing economies have to play a positive role here. India can take a lead in suggesting to the least developed economies that if they give full support on the concerns relating to non-trade issues, the proposal of zero tariffs would be acceptable to it.

To come to the hurdle of differentiated interests in respect of access to markets, technology and investment, India can take the lead by suggesting to the developing countries the adoption of an approach of having only multilateral agreements on non-trad e issues. The suggested approach would give the developing countries freedom to optimise their own respective strategies. They will be still free to decide whether to join the multilateral agreements being offered on non-trade issues. With these steps In dia can hope to bring all the developing economies into a united bloc. In Seattle, the developing countries showed maximum unity over the issue of undemocratic practices being followed in the decision-making processes. There was a clear assertion over th is by Africa, the countries of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) and the Latinos. They were forthright in stating that they will not tolerate the lack of respect being shown by the developed world to the issues of transparency and full participation of m embers. The scale of unity that was seen in Seattle over the issue of decision-making processes is yet to be converted into unity on substantive issues. In the absence of a common approach to substantive issues, it would not be possible for the developin g world to take advantage of the leverage the developed world appears to be generating on account of its own compulsions. The scale of unity was smaller when it came to taking a common stand on substantive issues. The like-minded group gathered by India on the "implementation" issues has just 12 members.

IN this connection, the question to be answered is why this unity was always limited. The answer may be that the larger economies among the developing countries have developed a mindset which is essentially inimical to the strengthening of unity in the d eveloping world. They have started to believe that they are "Big Boys", and that their interests are better served by being with the countries of the North. Apparently their thinking is that they have little in common with the rest of the developing worl d. Among them there is a perception that the smaller developing countries are merely herds that could will be easily bought for small gains, and also that they are too diverse to be united as the developing world. In their view, the developing world is a differentiated world, whose interests in respect of market access are so varied that in the WTO a united approach by the developing countries is not possible.

In fact, Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran is one of those few leaders who went on record on this issue in Seattle. Asked why groups like G-15 and G-77 were not able to issue any declarations, he clearly said that their interests were too diverse. In Indi a this belief has emerged as a part of the process of ongoing liberalisation. In this the Minister is not alone; it is a complete mindset. It is a mindset that big business holds today in India. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Member, Planning Commission, was la ter echoing the words. In fact, he went one step further and argued that it was wrong on the part of the Commerce Ministry to try changes in the agreements based on a perspective that runs contrary to liberalisation. He wondered why the Ministry of Comme rce should be at all interested in reviving the instrument of quantitative restrictions (QRs) for the sake of food security when the country is committed to moving in the direction of speeding up the process of liberalisation. He was quite open in arguin g that India should not bother about how to unite the developing countries. His advice was to bother only about how you can get more foreign direct investment (FDI) or enhanced market access. The only issue that bothered him relates to the demand for the linkage of trade with the enforcement of labour standards. Significantly, on the eve of the start of the Seattle negotiations, in Parliament Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee advocated the same stand of do-and-die on the labour linkage issue.

WHAT is really striking about this stand is that in this framework there is no firm opposition to the introduction of agreements on the rest of the non-trade issues. The stand of no compromise on labour linkage but surrender on every other non-trade issu e is an integral part of the framework that Indian big business seems to be content with today. It appears that since this framework ensures for big business a place of junior partner of multinational corporations, the liberalisers have no qualms in driv ing the government in the direction of making such a bargain. It is also seemingly true that to Indian big business it is immaterial that such a framework is essentially inimical to the interests of employment-oriented growth and technological self-relia nce.

This time Indian big business was well represented in the official WTO delegation in Seattle. Its influence was quite visible on the strategy. Indian big business was busy having a tete-a-tete with U.S. business and was directing India to go close r to the U.S. positions. India was being moved to accept an extremely dangerous position that the U.S. was taking in Seattle on the issue of market access in respect of agricultural goods. This time the U.S. was trying to push its biotechnology products into the negotiations on agriculture in the WTO. The U.S. position was therefore that the WTO should end the distinction it today makes between industry and agriculture when it comes to deciding on issues of market access. India was being pushed by big b usiness into accepting this position. This time the Indian delegation was totally for a policy of market access at any cost. It was willing to sacrifice the crucial interest of food security for a few dollars more for the sake of Indian big business, whi ch may get some crumbs in respect of agribusiness. In the Agreement on Agriculture, the mention of food security amounts merely to a best endeavour clause. India may not be able to convert it now into a binding commitment without making a compromise on t he issue of subsidies for agriculture in the developed world.

Needless to say, if India wants to avert these kinds of disasters it would have to pursue a consistent stand in the interests of the Indian people as a whole. The government would have to be pushed into adopting an approach that unites the developing cou ntries in the direction of fighting the developed world on the issue of practising technological protectionism, environmental imperialism and social exclusion.

The government must oppose with greater determination the implementation of a framework that grants multinational corporations easy access to Indian markets without the developing world and the Indian people getting anything substantially in return in th e areas of access to technology and markets.

Dinesh Abrol is a researcher working on science and technology policy. He is joint convener of the National Working Group on Patent Laws.