The satyagrah for a free-flowing Ganga

Shiv Visvanathan
Academic with Compost Heap

Looking at a picture of GD Agrawal, former professor of civil and environmental engineering at IIT, Kanpur, a child remarked that he looks like Moses and Gandhi. It is an apt description because Agrawal has the style of an Old Testament prophet in combination with with the strategy of a satyagrahi. Agrawal is one of our great environmentalists. But unlike most scientists, he is both an exemplar and a paradigm of his ideas. He is a scientist full of ideas about the Ganga and he embodies a lifestyle in consonance with his ideas. He is now famously known as environmentalist Swami Swaroop Sanand. 

Agrawal is today in hospital under protective custody because he has been on a hunger strike for over a month, protesting about the way his beloved river, the Ganga, is being treated. He has objections against the way the Ganga is being conceptualised and administered. 

For him, the Ganga is special and a special kind of river. One has to think of the river as more than a physical entity. The Ganga embodies a sense of sacrament and displays special properties. It has bactericidal properties which fight contamination. Ganga jal, unlike ordinary water, does not deteriorate.

Yet, the government treats it shoddily. True, the National Ganga River Basin Authority has been created. But, as Agrawal remarks, ironically the attribute “national” belongs to the bureaucratic structure and not the river. He says the Ganga should be seen in civilisational terms, as a site where myth and scientific rationality coexist.

Agrawal claims that his sadness stems from the ‘governmentalisation’ of the river. The Ganga, despite its sacredness, is treated like a PWD department. There is no sense of the myths, the sacredness or the ecological logic of the river. What the Ganga needs, to minimise pollution, is an unimpeded flow. But what the bureaucracy has done is impose 600 dams on it. The river is being choked by pollution and encroachments. Agrawal claims that the Modi government is both illiterate and indifferent to the situation. He argues in the languages of both myth and science. He says that he is fasting to death because the Ganga is his grandmother, even while summoning arguments from science.

The BJP government does not know what to do with a man who claims that the emperor has no clothes. Agrawal is an oxymoron — a sanyasi who speaks science, an ecologist who understands the mythology of the river, a Gandhian who has little respect for the ecological claims of the regime. His authenticity, unlike the regime’s pretensions, is potent. With quite a tenacity, Agrawal claims that saving the Ganga is the sole purpose of his life. 

Helpless before his arguments, the regime has resorted to brutality. When he was in the third week of his fast in a Haridwar ashram, a posse of policemen dragged him out, forced him into an ambulance and rushed him to a hospital, where he has since been in protective custody. 

Yet, the moral voice of Swami Swaroop Sanand is difficult to suppress. His students and supporters have rallied around him. Rajender Singh has requested universities to go on a one-day fast as a token of support and respect for him.

The battle has the overtones of a scientific David fighting a governmental Goliath. Agrawal exposes the hypocrisy and illiteracy of a regime which stands confused before a satyagrahi and sanyasi who contends that the BJP has no sense of science or the sacred. Agrawal is objecting to the hydroelectric projects choking the life of the Ganga. In fact, Agrawal resigned from the National Ganga Basin Authority, dubbing it a sham. 

For Agrawal, rivers and the Ganga, in particular, are both a vocation and a career. A trained engineer from Roorkee, he was the dean of civil engineering at IIT, Kanpur, and a member-secretary of the Central Pollution Control Board. Agrawal's fascination for ecology has rubbed on to many of his student disciples, including the late Anil Agarwal of the CEE and Rajender Singh, who are pioneers and exemplars of ecology in their own right. But he does not need these testimonials or certificates. His very presence and the moral impact of his struggle capture many an imagination.

Agrawal has been a persistent dissenter when dissent, especially environmental dissent, is at a discount. His protests over the Ganga have earned him insults and labels such as ‘CIA puppet’. But the government's hostility has not impacted the 80-year-old professor’s integrity. He is brutally frank, claiming that the Ganga Action Plan is the chip of the old clerical blockhead, the Mission Clean Ganga. Neither institution, according to him, has a sense of accounting, accountability, responsibility or trusteeship. The bureaucratisation of the Ganga has led to a failure of ethics and scientific competence, he laments. 

GD Agrawal is as impatient with the citizen as he is dismissive about the epidemic of tourism, which, he says transforms the sacred centres of pilgrimage into picnic spots of ecological destruction. An old-style prophet, he has no respect for a populism which banalises the sacredness of the Ganga. His demands are specific and immediate. He suggests that the environmental flow of the river be maintained as an antidote to pollution, that encroachments along the river be dismantled and that special legislations be enacted to sustain these requirements. 

Agrawal's struggle has moved beyond an individual protest to an epic struggle, which is quietly stirring the moral imagination of many activists. His critique, like that of Madhav Gadgil's critique of development, needs to be acknowledged and acclaimed. Both bring the much-needed moral imagination to the Indian science. 

Agrawal is no prophet crying in the wilderness. His earlier protests made Jairam Ramesh cancel the dam on the Bhagirathi. 

Narendra Modi, however, seems to have forgotten that restoring the Ganga to its pristine self was one of his much-advertised electoral planks. When a concerned citizen protests, the Modi regime has no answer. The onus now is on the people reading about his struggle. Agrawal’s is a moving story. The challenge is whether people will rise to the occasion and back the great satyagrahi by joining him in his battle.