"His position reminds me very much of Hayek's "
Which is a bit daft, because Hayek's position is that the rights of private property take precedence over government action, which would favour the subsistence farmers over the relocation programme.
All in all I think Sean uses words differently from me. He calls me reactionary, when he sides with the World Bank and some US-based missionaries against an Indian government-backed development programme, for irrigation and hydro-electric power.
He cites many unnamed "independent" sources who question the dam's structure and finances, but all of these were available to the Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat governments as they were to the Indian Supreme Court before they made their decision to go ahead. Now of course, Sean, the World Bank, Patrick and the NBA might be right, but if they are they have failed to make their case where they should, in the state assemblies and legal system of India.
Sean is sarcastic about my "innate ability to smell a rat which the rest of us simply don't possess". Well, it is true that the left used to be a lot more alert to the pitfalls of romantic anti-capitalism (see Lenin's Economic Romanticism, or the passages on Feudal Socialism in the Communist Manifesto). But I don't think it takes a genius to work out that a Washington-based charity and the World Bank are not the most obvious champions of India's people.