Medha Patkar detained

NEW DELHI: After having forcibly taken Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) leader Medha Patkar to hospital during her hunger strike in protest against the decision to raise the height of the Narmada dam, Ms Patkar and NBA activists were detained outside Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s 10 Janpath residence on Monday as they staged a sit-in there.

The activists were demanding a meeting with Ms Gandhi in connection with the rehabilitation of those displaced by the Sardar Sarovar Project. The police resorted to preventive detention after the activists refused to move away from the high-security environs and took them to Parliament Road police station.

“We asked them to move away from the place as they were holding the protest without permission in the high-security area,” a police official said.

The Congress has been in a quandary over the dam question as the issue has struck an emotive cord with the people of Gujarat, where it has morphed into a development vs anti-dam activists debate.

With the Gujarat unit of the party echoing the BJP’s demands for raising the dam height, the government has been forced to virtually disown a report of a team headed by Central water resources minister Saifudin Soz, which has hinted that rehabilitation work undertaken this far in states like Madhya Pradesh was below par.

Subsequently, the Congress has come out with an umbrella statement on the issue which took a pro-dam stance but talked of the need for rehabilitation to go hand-in-hand with the construction at the dam site.

Talking about the arrest, party spokesman Rajiv Shukla said there was no need for Ms Patkar and NBA activists to stage a protest outside Ms Gandhi’s residence. “There is a way of demanding a meeting,” he said, adding that the NBA activists should have staged their protests outside the BJP headquarter as the rehabilitation of the Narmada Dam oustees was “not taking place properly” in the BJP ruled states.

“They (BJP) are trying to take political credit but are neither working on the dam nor doing proper rehabilitation. It would have been better if the NBA activist had staged the protest outside the BJP headquarters,” he said.