Displacement Syndrome

Even as I write this piece, the specially constituted Group of Ministers (GoM) is meeting in New Delhi, to decide, among other things, a higher compensation package for the Bhopal gas victims. The words 'displacement', 'compensation', and 'rehabilitation' ('DICORE' would be a convenient acronym) in the contexts of, ironically, both tragedy and development, are increasingly entering our everyday parlance.

Make an inventory of events in just Karnataka during the last month alone, and you'll be astonished how starkly real this assessment of lexical infusion is. We began by speaking about a compensation package for the Mangalore air crash victims; then almost immediately, we had to deal with a package for the Chitradurga bus tragedy victims. As the monsoon approached, the issue of rehabilitation of victims of last year's unprecedented floods in North Karnataka was re-ignited. It came with all its attendant controversy of siphoning off of funds by both the opposition Congress party and the BJP government. Heavy rains caused a wall to collapse in Bangalore and a school girl taking shelter near it died. Her family rejected compensation. Then with the holding of the Global Investors Meet, compensation packages for people who would surrender land for the government's ambitious 'land banks' scheme was vigorously defended. In the state capital, where many roads are being widened and the Metro Rail is coming up, the number of people having to give up portions of their private property went up during this last month. Many of them got together to protest the Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) scheme of the municipal corporation. There were many other development activities like power projects etc., across the state, that automatically allowed the domination of DICORE. 

Scale this up to the national level and you'll be flummoxed. There was the rail tragedy in West Bengal to deal with. Displacement of tribals and their rehabilitation has been a perennial refrain ever since the Naxal issue came to the centrestage and it has lingered on during the previous month too. Many state governments are unleashing several development projects and wooing investors thereby making DICORE the central element of our discourse. And now of course, the Bhopal case has reopened in the public space after 26 years.

Some months ago when I visited Karwar taluk, where there is the naval Seabird project, the Kaiga nuclear power plant and more than half-a-dozen dams over the river Kali, I was stupefied by the stories of people who had been displaced not once, but twice and thrice over by various development projects. Even before they had settled down in a place, they had been asked to move on. In some cases within a couple of years. Many had tagged the names of their villages that had been submerged to their own proper names. That was their innocent way of keeping themselves afloat and staying connected with their ancestors. It is a case study that deserves many doctoral dissertations. Karwar was a story that began many years before most parts of India understood the nuances of development and displacement. And strangely now, displacement is not just a far away rural phenomenon, but urban as well. TDR is its new language. 

I wonder if DICORE is the word-tripod on which we'll have to stand as a nation for a while. Especially, as our GDP swells and our growth rate accelerates, there is perhaps no escaping this new lexical order. A few days back, eminent octogenarian Kannada writer Ka. Vem. Rajagopal, who was discussing the draft of his new, reflective short story, 'Parihara' (Compensation), put this idea into my head that we may all be already 'displaced' in some sense or the other and that we may all be in need of some kind of 'compensation' - economic or emotional. It is slightly disorienting for an entire nation to think that way, but if you follow his story line then it is prognostic.

It begins with the running television images of the Bhopal gas victims after the recent judgment was pronounced. The protagonist, who is a writer, recalls his visit to Bhopal a couple of years after the tragedy and remembers the many conversations he has had with friends there. One explanation for the large death toll comes back to him in particular: "When they heard of the accident, people from far and away started running towards the Union Carbide factory out of sheer curiosity. Perhaps some even had the good intent of saving lives. They didn't realise that the killer-gas would consume them too. It was a new kind of killer that leapt across its boundaries to kill." As he narrated, the gas struck me as a metaphor for the economic order sans frontiers we have embraced and also the recent recession that slowly spread across boundaries.

Then, the protagonist's attention turns to Raghu Rai's iconic picture of the nearly-buried child looking like a discarded doll pleading with its eyes. He is moved by the image and, like many, is outraged by the pittance of a compensation offered. He worries about those who were displaced from the vicinity of the factory after the tragedy. He remembers some of them begging for a living at the Bhopal railway station. He wonders if he should pass on a part of his ever depleting pension-savings to some poor victims. When all these confabulations are taking place inside him, it suddenly dawns on him that he himself is a victim of displacement. His children have all grown independent and he has been dispossessed of his home. Another guilt begins to haunt him: he may be weaving this story so that he may get a pittance of a 'compensation' from a newspaper that would publish it.

I am sure that the story would acquire layers and nuances when written up. What I have presented here is Rajgopal's oral recounting of its contours, but even without the story taking a permanent structure, it drives home the displacement syndrome afflicting all of us. Is it really?