"Work on India's biggest dam has been stalled for six years while opponents and supporters slugged it out in the Supreme Court. On Wednesday, by a majority verdict, judges gave the dam a green light.

The concrete mixers will start churning again on 31 October. But tomorrow, Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize winner and prominent anti-dam campaigner, and thousands of the small farmers and landless peasants threatened by the Sardar Sarovar, will meet at the town of Badwani, on the edge of the area the dam will ultimately submerge, to protest and plan their next move.

"I don't want any longer to say the movement should be violent or non-violent," Roy told the Independent on Sunday. "The people affected by the project should make that decision. We live in our little islands of privilege amid terrible dispossession - we always live with the fear of what is just outside our door. We know all resources are scarce, so we have an almost religious respect for institutions like the Supreme Court to protect our interests.

"I don't respect the court as an institution: I know it is as much a part of the system as anything else. It offers shelter to the privileged. The other India stands outside the pale."

The life-worlds of traditional Hindus and traditional Muslims will be equally washed away under a dam for supplying power to corporate headquarters in faraway cities, but that isn't a story that sells stock in multi-national corporations, or allows the BJP to arouse its fanatics into a politically useful rage against Pakistan.