{"id":5171,"date":"2015-01-09T07:22:37","date_gmt":"2015-01-09T01:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/indialegalonline.com\/?p=5171"},"modified":"2020-12-03T17:33:41","modified_gmt":"2020-12-03T12:03:41","slug":"maa-ganga-will-test-modis-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.indialegallive.com\/people\/inderjit-badhwar\/maa-ganga-will-test-modis-leadership\/","title":{"rendered":"Maa Ganga will test Modi’s leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"
But like Lady Macbeth we will have the smell of blood on our hands and \u201call the perfumes of Arabia\u201d would not make our hands smell better. It is not my purpose here to go into the wondrous mythology of the Ganges, the endless verses composed by our rishis, the ecological havoc which hangs over our heads as Maa Ganga dies and dies, choked and poisoned by the effluents of man\u2019s greed and the instinct to plunder. If you are unaware of this, go study it. Ponder it. If you don\u2019t care, maybe you need to read this cover story. Or maybe you don\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n Awareness of the poisoning of the artery that flows through India\u2019s heart and provides succor to the inhabitants of the Indo-Gangetic plain, as she journeys tortuously to the Bay of Bengal to merge into the Indian Ocean, is nothing new. She shares her bounty with 40 percent of India\u2019s population\u2014about 500 million souls living in 11 states. Her decline was first noticed in 1854 when the British first built the Haridwar Dam and hastened as we poisoned, despoiled and raped her with the kind of banality that is the ultimate root of all evil. <\/span><\/p>\n\u201cI thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It\u2019s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers\u2014the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and the Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees\u2014must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers. Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there\u2019s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to the wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for their own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?\u201d<\/strong><\/span> <\/q]\n\n \n\nnly a writer of children\u2019s books like Chambers can so appealingly conjure up the mystery, the majesty, the living force of a river and bring home with such dynamic brutality the reality of how each one of us dies a thousand deaths when we take part in the killing of a river. We do not even know it, but every Indian alive today, and those who lived a generation before us, is guilty of strangling and torturing the river Ganges to death. She is writhing in agony before our very eyes. We are spending money on keeping her lungs gurgling on life support systems, like ICU doctors who put a patient on whom they\u2019ve given up, on a respirator and then wash their hands clean with a detergent.<\/span><\/p>\n