ABSTRACT
At first glance, the success of the campaign in effecting the withdrawal of several TNCs from the project, and in lodging spanners in the wheels of the early attempts to fund the project via liberalized financial institutions, points towards an interesting comparative analysis of the different challenges and opportunities that confront activists when they campaign against a public project (the SSP) and a private project (the MHP) respectively. Indeed, an immediate, and perhaps somewhat counterintuitive, inference would be that the outcome of the campaign against the MHP indicates that contending with TNCs, which albeit unaccountable to democratic norms are conscious of the opportunity costs of going ahead with investments in a highly controversial project, is actually more likely to succeed than contention aimed at state authorities whose democratic accountability is curtailed by the ways in which state power is congealed from regional and national class structures. However, the recent undermining of the NBA’s initial victory by the interventions of the Government of Madhya Pradesh to facilitate funding for the MHP (see Chapter 2), and the concurrent re-ignition of struggle in the dam-affected communities in eastern Nimad prevents such easy comparisons; indeed, as a parallel to my argument about the relative insignificance of the World Bank’s withdrawal from the SSP, the current scenario suggests that the workings of the domestic state-system, both in facilitating the operations of regional capital and in terms of mediating transnational financial flows, may be more crucial factors in some cases than the direct presence of the corporate juggernauts of transnational capitalism. In any case, it is still too early to pass judgement on these questions, and I choose instead
to focus on the making of the campaign against the MHP and the ways in which it has been criss-crossed by factors of enablement and constraint.
