Framing the state: Social movement in the Narmada Valley

This study is a historical investigation of the conflict between the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement, best known as the NBA) and the Indian state over the construction of the mammoth Sardar Sarovar Dam in the Narmada Valley. This study investigates the NBA within a broader span of India's political history from 1950 to 2007, and asks the following questions: why did isolated protests in the Narmada Valley for better enforcement of relief and rehabilitation for the displaced families transform into a global movement against development? What explains the unprecedented success of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) during its early years? Thereafter, how might we explain and understand the declining impact of the movement?;The conflicts over the project have been analyzed by some scholars as the outcome of the marginalization of tribal and peasant communities by uneven and rapacious economic development (Fisher 1995; Sangvai 2000; D'Souza 2002; Routledge 2003); as an extension of pervasive tribal movements that have historically resisted an expansionary and exploitative colonial and postcolonial state (Baviskar 1995; Gandhi 2003); mobilization of global activists' resources and networks (Khagram 2004; Udall 1995, and Caufield 1996); as interest group politics against the crisis of development (Dwivedi 2006); and as a struggle to resist the "accumulation by dispossession" of a neo-liberalizing capitalist state (Nilsen 2010; Whitehead 2010). Yet while scholarship in recent years has attributed significant importance to social movement frames, no scholarly exposition to date has focused on framing as a conceptual tool to understand the course of the NBA. This study argues that the economic and social programs of the Indian (Nehruvian) state were informed by a distinct institutional ideology of development – one that promised economic transformation accompanied by social justice – and that this development ideology furnished key frames that enabled the NBA to mobilize against the dam.;To pursue and support this argument, my study is designed as a historical account of a single case, the empirical investigation of which is based on theoretical insights borrowed from scholars across the fields of social movement and development studies. The study centers on a close interrogation of the language of state and movement actors as revealed in a range of state and movement documents, including government five-year plans, policy documents, court verdicts, congressional hearings and media reports. By unpacking certain components of state (Nehruvian) and movement discourses, my historical analysis of the Narmada movement traces the often profound interconnections between state action, movement mobilization and strategic framing across the course of a multi-decade struggle to shape one of the most important development projects of the late 20th century. In doing so, this study shows how movement frames can successfully challenge, at least for a time, what are often seen as hegemonic state ideologies of development. By the same token, however, the study also suggests that state discourses are hardly monolithic or static. State actors rework the basis of political legitimacy, and new state interpretations and articulations of development undermine the power of movement frames (and collective action) to influence the terms and outcomes of the political conflict.