On February 2, a mass of more than 1 lakh people gathered in the city of Bikaner to protest the cutting of the Khejri tree (Prosopis cineraria) across western Rajasthan. The protesters were (and are) adamant to have legal assurances from the state government and written guarantees to conserve Khejri trees until a legal framework comes into being. Primarily, these protests are against the solar energy giants that have proliferated in the state during the last few years and their indiscriminate acquisition of land (mostly on lease basis) in the border regions and significant ignorance of ecological concerns, mainly cutting of trees in the vicinity of project plants. This is the obvious, out-in-the-public, interpretation of the cause of the protests. However, if one looks closely, there seems to be a host of grave structural concerns looming around the fragile desert ecology and socio-cultural fabric.
One way to make sense of this struggle is to view it as one of key classes. Madhav Gadgil and Ramchandra Guha interpreted this as ‘modes of resource use’, where three social classes are central to the struggle over natural resources. The key classes that have emerged in India are ‘ecosystem people’ whose subsistence depends on natural resources in their immediate vicinity, and the ‘omnivores’ who have economic and political sway over these resources. Omnivores successfully monopolised the fruits of development by utilising state incentives, subsidies and technological interventions (iron triangle) to further their interests. In the process, developmental biases have allowed the omnivores to pass off the prices of resource depletion to the ecosystem people. This has created a third class termed as ‘ecological refugee’.
Central commitment towards clean energy, and especially solar energy, has incentivised the allocation of projects in states like Rajasthan and Gujarat in the last decade. On ground, these projects championed by key renewable energy players such as Adani, Reliance, Tata, Rays Power Infra, Hero Future groups etc., enabled to create a class of local influential groups formed along caste and community lines. These groups enabled such corporate giants to acquire land, labour and administrative support for rapid expansion.
This intermediary class is crucial to understanding the negotiation between growing public unrest and corporate interests. The Bhadla plant, one of the biggest solar projects in Asia located near the Pakistan border in Bikaner district, is a case in point. The lower management of the plant consists of the dominant castes, and the initial land was acquired from people of ‘lower’ castes and migrant Muslims who received these lands some years back from the government itself. This group was instrumental in pacifying the local protests during the initial phase through bribes, police interventions and rarely, through the use of force. Economically distressed locals, influenced by immediate monetary incentives, have sold their farmlands and are on the verge of becoming ecological refugees.
At the heart of this phenomenon is the processes of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation, where heavy investments and capital distort the existing socio-ecological relations and replace them with new patterns of social relations, suiting corporate interests. Communities in Bikaner, Phalodi, Jodhpur, and Jaisalmer are concerned about their cultural and ecological beliefs, which are in direct confrontation with the growing solar energy plants. Communities like the Bishnoi hold the Khejri and other desert plants dear and consider their spiritual norms to be at stake. The religious reform movements of the 14th and 15th century in the Thar Desert consolidated the local religious and spiritual norms around ecology and environmental conservation. The Chipko movement in 1730 in Jodhpur where 363 people sacrificed their lives to save Khejri trees should be interpreted along this legacy. Recent protests were organised invoking these historic legacies.
Another theme central to this struggle is the identification of desert space. ‘Plain gaze’ is a framework where policymakers and thinkers view desert space as ‘peripheral’ in the Lefebvrian sense. A peripheral space often abandoned for stagnation is available for control, appropriation and exploitation. Philosophically, the modern world is characterised as a ‘desert’ that continuously grows, thus highlighting the barrenness and undesirability of a desert space. The government desires the desert precisely due to its undesirability. In essence, deserts are always seen as spaces for experimentation. The Thar as a choice for nuclear testing is marked by the same logic in India as elsewhere in the US and China (New Mexico and Gobi Deserts). The argument is not against the developmental regimes but against the biased gaze of these regimes.
The appropriation of desert space has various modes other than blind and rapid expansion of solar plants and the decline of fragile desert flora. One stark pattern is marked by the proliferation of invasive plant species. Today, in every village in the Thar, a common tree can be found - Prosopis juliflora (Vilayati Babool). The tragedy is that this plant was initially introduced to green the barren land and was part of the nursery planting along the Indira Gandhi Canal. The origin of Prosopis juliflora is believed to be in Mexico. It has overgrown to such an extent that it has encroached into community protected sacred groves - the Oran lands. Another such non-desert species is water-intensive eucalyptus which are found today, in abundance, along canal-irrigated regions. The penetration of such species deep into the desert is disturbing the ecological balance to such an extent that native species are being replaced, intensifying desertification.
Therefore, movements such as Khejri Bachao and Orans Bachao cannot be isolated and viewed as a local struggle regarding distribution of economic resource; rather, they are symptomatic of structural shifts and emerging ecological crises impacting the socio-ecological fabric of desert communities.
Subhash Bhambhu is a PhD scholar at Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth