How to Break a People

To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them of volition. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers, who doesn't. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it. How easily you can press a button and annihilate the earth. How you can start a war, or sue for peace. How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another. How you can green a desert, or fell a forest and plant one somewhere else. You can use caprice to fracture a people's faith in ancient things-earth, forest, water, air.
   Once that is done, what do they have left? Only you. They will turn to you, because you're all they have. They will love you even when they despise you. They will trust you even they know you well. They will vote for you even as you squeeze the breath from their bodies. They will drink what you give them to drink. They will breathe what you give them to breathe. They will live where you dump their belongings. They will have to. What else can they do? There's no higher court to redress. You are their mother and their father. You are the judge and the jury. You are the world. You are God.
    Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained.
    This cold, contemporary cast of power is couched between the lines of noble-sounding clauses in democratic sounding constitution. It's wielded by the elected representatives of an ostensibly free people. Yet no monarch, or despot, no dictator in any other century in the history of human civilization has had access to weapons like these.
   Day by day, river by river, forest by forest, mountain by mountain, missile by missile, bomb by bomb-almost without knowing it-we are being broken.
    Big Dams are to a nation's "development" what nuclear bomb are to its military arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They're both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link-the understanding-between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.
   Can we unscramble it?
   Maybe. Inch by inch. Bomb by bomb. Dam by dam. Maybe by fighting specific wars in specific ways...
                                                                               -The Cost of living, Arundhati Roy