So what is wrong if Arundhati Roy saves the Narmada Valley? Wasn't one of freedom's most beautiful chapters in this century scripted by writers and painters and singers and actors? Remember Civic Forum, the Magic Lantern, and slogans like `living in truth'? The second Prague Spring, the VelvetRevolution, was liberation's most romantic passion play enacted by amateur revolutionaries -- playwrights and rock singers, actors and novelists. Their headquarters was the Magic Lantern, a theatre. Flowers on the barrel of a gun, the poetry of candle lights on the street -- the velvet adjective to the Czech revolution in 1989 was a lyrical rejoinder to the falsehood of the party. It was more than poetic justice, it was literally Platonic justice when the philosopher finally became king.

Even if they are not kings, philosophers continue to protest and argue. Gunter Grass is today a professional dissenter, tracing all German woes to the Kohlossal blender of re-unification. He resigned from the Social Democratic Party, wrote a novel called The Call of the Toad, both politically and artistically inferior to The Tin Drum, as a rejoinder to the pretence of a re-unified Germany. Grass is still beating the drum, not so enchantingly as Oskar did years ago, but rather boringly. Still, Grass in hisdissent represents the tradition of writer as conscience keeper. Like the Croation writer Slavenka Drakulic, who ``survived communism and even laughed''. For her an independent Croatian state does not mean the end of the intellectual's counterpoint: ``We are all covering up our past and we don't have the courage to protest our memory.''

The protection of memory is a writer's struggle in every society where questions or reminders are not tolerated. As so famously said by a novelist who inherited such a society, the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Amos Oz is doing it in the Land of Israel, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes and many others are doing it in Latin America, former Velvet revolutionaries like Ivan Klima are doing it in post-communist Eastern Europe. Arguing with the powerful is an intellectual tradition perfected by those writers and artists who defied every form of tyranny, notably communism. As Klima writes, ``the strength of the powerful isgenerally based on the number of souls dominated on the power of their weapons and on their ability to organise.''

Or, as Arundhati Roy would say, on their ability to build big dams and make nuclear bombs. In her world, the powerful is the state without love. In a world where watery displacement and nuclear extinction are subordinated to national machismo and developmental statistic, she, Citizen Roy who has also written a beautiful novel, is an outsider, or, as she said so metaphorically, a mobile republic, though it is a matter of record that in the republic of imagination this mobile thing's real parent is another novelist, Jose Saramago, a very `socially' conscious and dissenting novelist. When she writes an essay for the valley, when she `rallies' for the valley, or when she asks why writers should only write, she thinks she is representing a tradition. Didn't Bernard Henri-Levi rally for Bosnia, doubling as both Sartre and Malraux on the protest street of history? Didn't Ken Saro Wiwa pay with hislife for his protest? So what is wrong with Roy's photogenic struggle for the abandoned lives of the Narmada valley?

Nothing wrong, if you see it as a voluntary service in social activism. Nothing wrong if you see it as a safe, risk-free cause. But the gulf between the cause and her verbal position is so wide that it doesn't fail to make a pastiche of the tradition of the word against the received wisdom of the state. End of the Imagination, she said, she the author of The God of Small Things, certainly a magnificent page in the history of imagination. But the End of Imagination rhymed with Adorno's `no poetry after Auschwitz'. Perhaps for Roy, India's nuclear testing marked a moment as momentous as the Fuhrer's Final Solution. Anti-nuclear tears have only limited sentimental value in this world where CND barely exists in the glossary of current events. Enriched nationalism is more dangerous than enriched uranium.

And the Narmada Valley is safer than the other valley of which there has never been aword different from the words of journalists and politicians. Really, look at the limited-edition value of our causes, the intellectual smallness of our dissent. When the writer argues with the state, when dissent challenges wisdom, it is a moral position, a rejoinder that defies easy answers. As Vaclav Havel, velvet revolutionary-turned-velvet president, has argued in many of his essays, the power of dissent is the power of ``living within the truth'', it is a ``tension between the aims of life and the aims of the system''. The professional dissidents of Indraprastha, seen usually in the Mandi House area under banners like Sahmat, are still happy with the remains of a historically repudiated social causes. Human rights and environmentalism have become the new text of the post-communist utopia. In India too, the protesting, socially sensitive writer seems to have no `causes' except the obvious causes of the socially redundant. So Arundhati Roy has to join a page-three andolan of the professional causejunkies to state her status as a dissident. The cause doesn't match her passion.

``Unhappy the land that has need of heroes,'' cried out Brecht's Galileo. We are certainly not in a happy land, but heroes are marching out of the dam site or the seminar rooms, waving the flag, any flag except the national flag, of salvation. The writer among the heroes is good in poetry, maybe because only imagination can make sense of the many lives of India. In the prose of protest, it looks so banal. No poet around to write justice. Unhappy land.