India would be an environmental disaster zone even if climate change did not exist: Ramachandra Guha
Ramachandra GuhaPhotograph: K A Shreya / CSE

India would be an environmental disaster zone even if climate change did not exist: Ramachandra Guha

Down To Earth speaks to prominent historian and environmentalist on his new book about the environmental movement in India
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Ramachandra Guha is among India’s foremost historians and environmentalists. He has recently come out with Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism published by Harper Collins.

In the book, Ramachandra Guha highlights 10 pioneering thinkers who wrote with deep insight about the dangers of environmental abuse from within an Indian context, challenging the narrative that countries like India are “too poor to be green”.

Down To Earth caught up with Guha during his recent visit to Delhi and spoke to him regarding the book. Guha spoke about myriad topics ranging from the development vs environment paradigm, the trajectory of environmentalism in British and post-Independent India, the state of the environmental emergency today, Mahatma Gandhi as an environmentalist and others.

Guha was biting in his critique of governments’ lack of concern for environmental issues in India. He also spoke about the recent disasters at the opposite ends of the country — in the Himalayas and the Western Ghats and whether India can ever have a mainstream Green Party.

Excerpts from the conversation:

Q. The book comes at a time when there seems to be a lull — or, near defeat — of environmental movements or expressions of resistance. At least that seems to be the case when one compares the current scenario to the 1980s. Do you think the debate between development vs environment is somewhat reconciled to the fact that the former is the priority?

A. I would say that it is a misconception to posit development against environment. It is a juxtaposition very common in the literature, one that is favoured by industrialists and politicians. This is partly out of ignorance because they do not have an understanding of the deep environmental problems that we face and partly because they feel that environmentalists are against development.

But the argument of my book is that India has to adopt a much more environmentally sensitive form of development unlike Europe and North America.

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This is because it is a country with much higher population densities than Europe and North America. Moreover, tropical ecologies are much more fragile because of the monsoon than temperate ecologies. And finally, because unlike Europe and North America, India did not have access to colonies whose resources it could exploit.

India having to adopt a much more environmentally sensitive form of development takes into account community rights — a combination of social justice and environmental sustainability. And those were the arguments articulated in the 1970s and 1980s by movements such as Chipko, Narmada and others.

If you look at popular non-violent civil disobedience movements, the 1970s and 1980s were the high watermark. But at the same time, there is a great awareness of the environmental crisis among young people today. This includes issues like depletion of groundwater, resources, air pollution and biodiversity, issues that are connected as well as unconnected with climate change.

So, among young Indians today, there is a greater awareness about the existential crisis that India and humanity face today with regards to sustainability. This awareness among young people, which has grown a great deal in the last few decades, does not translate to attention in the mainstream media. It does not translate into politicians having an ear to it and responding to it.

But I think the fact of the younger generation having a much greater awareness about the environmental crisis than say, 5 generations back is heartening. It will lead to action, activism and will translate into putting proper pressure on the government and the industrial classes who are the main polluters.

Again, in the 1980s, the environmental movement was led by grassroots movements and by journalists. We did not have too many scientists working in this field. In the last 40 years, India has developed a great amount of scientific expertise in this field — in ecology, hydrology, soil science, biodiversity, pollution abatement, urban planning, energy management. If this scientific expertise is harnessed, it can lead us to a sustainable path. It is tragic that these Indian scientists are never consulted. Or if they are consulted, their recommendations are ignored, which is what happened with the Gadgil Committee. And we know what the consequences of the neglect of the Gadgil Committee recommendations were.

So, the situation is not very promising. But it is not as bleak as one might expect because of the growing consciousness among the young. And because we have what we never had before: Fairly good, high quality scientific expertise to forge sustainable policies.

Q. You write: “In India, environmentalism as I define it was made possible only after the subcontinent came under the control of British imperialists. Colonial rule constituted an ecological watershed, in that it brought with it new technologies of controlling, manipulating, reshaping and destroying nature.”

Post-independent India looks similar to its predecessor. The exploitation of resources to fuel growth continues and most of our grassroots resistance is around land, water and forests. In your view, is the process that started in British India continuing, with just a change in characters?

A. It has actually intensified. The British brought modern forms of industrialisation — energy use, centralised and polluting technologies — to India. Some of the early figures in my book like Rabindranath Tagore, Radhakamal Mukherjee and some of the Gandhians, writing in the 1920s and 1930s when we still a colony, said when India got its political independence, it had to chart its own path to economic development that is mindful of its resources, population and ecological constraints. India cannot blindly follow the energy-, capital- and resource-intensive centralised model of industrial development. The pioneers whom I profile in my book argue for an alternative path very persuasively and in great detail.

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Unfortunately, they were ignored. In the 1950s and 1960s, the first two-and-a-half decades after its independence, India continued an extractive model of industrialisation with greater intensity. And it was not done purely out of greed but rather out of a mistaken belief that we were colonised because we were economically and industrially inferior and to hold our own in the world, we have to catch up with the west and maybe equal them.

But this was a deep misunderstanding of our peculiar nature, our peculiar ecological configuration, the fact that so many millions of Indians depend on sustainable natural resources for their livelihood.

Movements like Chipko reignited the debate and there is a third wave of the debate that is now coming up to which my book hopes to contribute.

Q. How do you foresee the “third wave of environmentalism” as you have defined in the book? Is climate change an existential threat? There is also the Anthropocene, an epoch defined by human activities. In this context, will the “third wave” be a kind of redemption?

A. Historians are not in the business of prediction. What I have tried to do is study the past to illuminate the present. But I can’t project into the future. What I am saying through this book is that in our political history, intellectual traditions and national movement, we have intellectual exemplars who can inspire and guide us and deepen our thinking of what India needs. How these ideas are taken forward, I can’t say.

But I will say one thing. One of the implicit arguments of the book is that even if climate change did not exist, India would be an environmental disaster zone. I am speaking to you in Delhi in the last week of October. I came today from my hometown, Bengaluru, where the air quality index is 60. It is 360 in Delhi. And it is going to get worse. This has got nothing to do with climate change. Air pollution and its impact on health, particularly of the working poor, is independent of climate change. The depletion of groundwater aquifers in Punjab and elsewhere is independent of climate change. So is the death of our rivers. Deforestation and decline in biodiversity are happening through misguided policies, independent of climate change. So even if climate change did not exist, we would be facing an existential crisis. Climate change makes it worse because the unanticipated consequences of a flood, a fire and a drought make our economic, environmental and social situation worse.

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But young people should recognise that climate change is an add-on, that problems are more deep-rooted and independent of climate change. Which is where these thinkers (mentioned in my book) come in as they were writing, arguing and reflecting even before climate change. They were saying we have to forge a much more caring, sustainable and equitable path towards economic progress than what the west is doing right now.

Q. Gandhi never used the concept “environmentalism” clinically. But his ideas and principles are widely used to define contemporary Indian environmentalism. Can Gandhi be then projected as a contemporary environmentalist?

A. There are three aspects to Gandhi that lend themselves to his being used as an environmental icon. One is technique of satyagraha. We will protest against unjust, destructive policies but we will do it non-violently. We will not pick up the gun unlike extremists of all hues.

That is why you find that from Chipko onwards, many grassroots and livelihood environmental struggles start their protest on October 2. Take for instance Alok Shukla, one of our most admirable grassroots activists who was recently awarded the prestigious Goldman Prize for his work in Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo Forest. His organisation started its campaign against destructive mining on October 2 as Gandhi says we will resist injustice but do it non-violently. That is one part of Gandhi’s legacy.

The second part is lifestyles. Try and simplify your own lifestyle. As an individual don’t make excessive demands on the earth.

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The third aspect is his intuitive understanding. The epigraph to the book quotes Gandhi as saying that, “If India takes to industrialisation after the manner of the west, it will strip the world bare like locusts”. He did not develop it further as he was involved in so many other things — freedom struggle, bringing women into public life, campaign against untouchability, fostering Hindu-Muslim harmony.

Gandhi thus was not an environmentalist per se. But his instinctive understanding that India needed to adopt a different path towards economic security was taken up by some of his followers.

So, my book does not have a chapter on Gandhi. But it has a chapter on two of his most remarkable disciples: The economist J C Kumarappa and the grassroots activist Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade), who worked in the Himalayas. They took Gandhi’s philosophical ideas and fleshed them out at a practical level.

I thought about whether I should include a chapter on Gandhi and finally I did not. He is a presence throughout the book. But there are two Gandhians in this book whose ideas, younger readers might find quite appealing.

Q. This year marks 40 years of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy and 50 years of the Chipko Movement. The Stockholm Convention is now over 50 years old. Each of them is a landmark in the environmental world. If I were to ask you to indicate one such recent event that can qualify as a landmark, what would it be?

A. It is not one event. But a landmark event which the government has done nothing about and which I regard as the failure of successive regimes is pollution in Delhi. Here, you are talking about India’s capital city. We want to punch above our weight and be recognised as a player in global affairs. India wants a seat in the UN Security Council. And yet we can’t clean up the air of our capital.

And it is not just Delhi. Most of the year, the Delhi media will not write about this. In October and November, they will have a few review reports. Alarm will be expressed and then nothing will happen for the rest of the year.

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But as you well know, it is a problem present across all of northern India. The cities of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, even across the border in Lahore, Pakistan. I was in Dehradun last year, where I grew up. The air there is as smoky as is here in Delhi.

I would put it very bluntly: How could the current prime minister spend three terms and do nothing about it? We know there are technical and economic solutions. There are alternatives to stubble burning. Subsidies can be given to farmers to transition away from stubble burning. There are technologies for pollution abatement.

This is scandalous because it is like Bhopal multiplied many times over. Bhopal was a terrible tragedy that occurred on the night of December 2-3, 1984. This is a smaller tragedy, but its cumulative effect is greater as it has been occurring every day for three months for the last 20 years. It is striking that no central government pays proper attention to it. And they just pass the buck to state governments. 

Q. Kerala and Uttarakhand are states at the opposite ends of the country. Both are blessed with natural beauty. And yet, both have witnessed some of the worst environmental disasters in post-Independent India. Both have also given some of the biggest luminaries to India’s environmental hall of fame. Do you see a curious correlation there?

A. A very good point. It is Kerala and Uttarakhand. But it is also the Western Ghats and the Himalayas which run through these two states respectively.

Our two great mountain chains that are reservoirs of biological diversity and water and home to very rich, cultural aesthetic traditions and forests. But since they are mountain chains, they are also ecologically fragile.

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Commercial forestry led to soil erosion and floods. Then you have unregulated road building and mining.

The environmental and social devastation that the policies of post-Independent India have caused have been quite extreme. The Central Indian Forest Belt in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand would have faced similar levels of brutalisation. But these two areas have relatively high levels of education. Kerala has cent percent literacy. But many scientists, poets and writers have also come from Uttarakhand.

It is true that these two regions have been witness to horrific levels of environmental degradation which has extracted a massive human cost. Both areas are also particularly vulnerable to climate change: in the Himalayas because of the drying of the glaciers and in the Western Ghats as they run adjacent to the sea.

These states have also seen some truly remarkable visionaries who tried to draw the attention of the wider public to the terrible things going on.

Q. Can India ever have environmentalism on the mainstream agenda? Can there ever be a mainstream Greens Party in this country like in Europe, Australia or New Zealand?

A. No. Because we have a first-past-the post electoral system, the Westminster Model followed by the UK. So, we have 543 constituencies in Parliament. If each constituency has 6 candidates and one wins 30 per cent of the vote, s/he is elected.

Germany and other European countries have proportional representation, where you get representation in Parliament depending on the proportion of your overall vote, not in every constituency.

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For instance, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress historically have got big majorities in Parliament of over 300 seats by winning just 35-36 per of the popular vote.

In a proportional representation system, they would win only 35 per cent of the seats. A Green Party can never become a majority party. But they can get enough support from committed people with a deeper understanding of what is going on to attract 7-8 per cent of the vote. And then they get represented in government. One of the reasons Germany has very progressive environmental policies is that their Green Party, started in the early 1980s, started getting 6-10 per cent of the vote. They joined the government sometimes in coalitions. Even if they did not, they were an effective opposition force in the legislature, raising these issues. This is also true of other Western countries.

A system of proportional representation is better generally, whatever the reason our founding fathers did not choose it when they framed the Constitution. It is unlikely that we will move away from it given the inertia. But that is the reason why it is hard to imagine a Green Party in India. But that does not mean we cannot have more green activism and mobilisation.

And it is a combination of green and red. The argument of my book is that in a country like India, the search for environmental sustainability is inseparable from the search for social justice because it is the poor and dispossessed who suffer the most from environmental problems.

Down To Earth
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