Orientalizing Environmentalism: Green Movements in India
Millenial-led environmental movements in India fall prey to imitating their Western counterparts. If environmentalism is to have any success in the country, we need a more vernacular environmentalism.
On June 5, 2015, activists in Siliguri, West Bengal organized a campaign on World Environment Day to raise awareness of the environment, importance of fresh drinking water and healthcare. Image: Diptendu Dutta via The Baltimore Sun
During its budget session this year, the Indian parliament passed the Mineral Laws (Amendment) Act, 2020 after discussing it for merely 9 minutes. The Act establishes a deregulated regime for mining in India, going as far as waiving any restrictions placed on conglomerates over the end-use of coal.
Early last year, the Ministry for Environment, Forests and Climate Change came up with a draft Coastal Regulation Zone Notification which diluted the stringent measures in the 2011 Notification, thus allowing — amongst many other provisions — mining, salt harvesting, and waste treatment in ecologically-sensitive areas.
Both these examples expose the limits of the state’s existing environmental governance apparatus. In the context of these limits, not to mention the vested interests of corporations, the role played by civic activism becomes very important. But the trends among millennial activists in India, barring a few groups, are utterly distressing.
Environmental Activism in India
The most recent form of citizen-driven environmental activism that comes to mind is the Save Aarey Movement. This movement was launched against the construction of a metro car shed at the Aarey Forest in Mumbai. Despite many petitions pleading it to reconsider, the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation Ltd. (MMRCL) began cutting trees in Aarey to clear space for this shed. Concerned about losing 2,702 trees and displacing over 290 species of wildlife, many citizens started protesting against MMRCL.
Image from the protests against the deforestation at the Aarey Forest in Mumbai to clear space for the construction of a metro shed. Image: Free Press Journal
The activists claimed that cutting trees in the forest, considered the “green lungs” of Mumbai, contravened many environmental acts passed by the government. The protesters were met with a hard blow from the police, who arrested 29 people for violating Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code. Section 144, a colonial era law which debars unlawful assembly of people, had been imposed by the police at the protest site in order to keep the disrupting protesters at bay. Aided by social media and widespread coverage by mainstream media, the movement got a lot of attention and was widely discussed in the public sphere.
Discourse in the public sphere revolved around the dichotomies of development versus the environment. Where one side, consisting of urbanists and bureaucrats, criticized the willful rejection of development and advocated a realist approach of sustainable development; the other side, led by environmentalist Stalin Dayanand, exhorted like-minded activists to expose the real face of the shibboleth that is “sustainable development”.
As this movement indicates, we are witnessing a rise of environmental activism in India. Recent movements have often been led by millennials. Across the country, millennials are forming collectives and opening local chapters of Western environmental groups. One such Western-led group is Extinction Rebellion (XR), which has 20 odd chapters across India.
While this emergent form of millennial-led environmental activism may appear to be a welcome development for anyone concerned about the climate crisis, there are some serious shortcomings. These stem, in large part, from the fact that these groups often imitate their Western counterparts.
Often, demands emerging out of Western movements — like XR’s tripartite demands that exhort governments to “tell the truth” about the climate crisis, to “act now” against it and, lastly, to create a “citizens’ assembly” that leads climate governance — are copied by millennial-led Indian environmental groups. The imitation leaves no room for Indian or indigenous voices and problems. While Western green movements have played an important role in establishing the seriousness of the climate crisis in the Indian millennial psyche, Indian activists working under the banner of such movements conspicuously bypass the ground realities of the climate crisis.
Extinction Rebellion has multiple chapters across India, attracting many young people to become environment activists. Image: Extinction Rebellion India
Western movements like XR have expended a lot of their resources to spread their movement outside of Europe. Indeed, XR’s explicit ambition is to transform into a global climate movement. Many of XR’s European activists have arrived in major cities in India and across the global South to help locals set up chapters. The objective is to build a chapter and movement on the same lines as XR UK. After initiating a chapter, a predefined process, detailed in the organizational charter, is followed: hold a protest to declare a national climate emergency and then move on to holding weekly public discussions involving an array of extravagant props, with the aim of enticing people to join local chapters. All of this is done in order to fall in line with the demands set by the parent organization in Europe.
But these efforts fail to mobilize significant numbers of people or recruit them into their organization. People joining the movement fail to stick to it throughout and often drop out. Having been a part of one such XR chapter, I have seen these failures first hand. There are several reasons for this, all of which stem from the fact that the local chapters are most interested in following trends in Europe than in India.
One of the biggest failures is that local XR chapters are largely unaware of national environmental laws. This is further amplified by their negligence of local environmental issues.
While managing the Instagram handle of a local chapter, I came across someone who wanted to work with XR to find alternatives to stubble burning, mobilize around these alternatives and put them forward to the relevant government departments. Stubble burning, where the remaining straw stubble at the end of a harvest is burnt, is a common practice by farmers across India and has been touted as a major cause for rising pollution across cities, especially in Delhi. When I shared the idea of extending help from our side with my peers in XR, I was dissuaded from doing so because that would have deterred us from the movement’s charter. This emphasis on sticking to the charter arises out of the fact that local chapters need to keep up with developments in the West. European chapters devise a bunch of activities as part of a long-term plan which remains the same for chapters across the world. This uniformity leads to activists ignoring the concerns of the people they intend to work with and the environment in which they work.
A farmer clearing his field of old rice crop stubble by burning it. This is a common practice across northern India and has been blamed for the smog and deteriorating air quality in the region. Many farmers blame the state for failing to provide affordable alternatives which forces them to continue the practice. Image: Raminder Pal Singh/EPA via Guardian
Another problem with Western imitation is that the intersection of climate change with the local contexts of class, caste and gender are ignored. The downtrodden in any society, especially in a densely populated region such as India, are the most vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis.
Green movements should ideally make people aware of this intersection and develop strategies accordingly. Because movement leaders do not attend to these local intersections and context, these groups end up being restricted to upper-class, upper-caste, and gentrified spaces.
I saw this in my experience with XR as well. The organization frequently holds public meetings, or assemblies, which are meant to be an important way to listen to ordinary people’s concerns around the climate crisis. But in my experience, these assemblies were simply spaces for allaying the concerns of urban, upper-class, and upper-caste citizens. Never was a discussion held over the displacement of people in coastal areas from rising sea-levels. Or never did we strategize how to advocate for better agricultural laws that protect farmers — 60,000 of whom, according to a recent study, have committed suicide in the last 30 years due to global warming.
A Way Forward
The climate crisis demands action, both from our governments and our fellow citizens. Millennial environmentalists in India are doing what they believe is necessary, and I don’t fault their intentions. But the movements to tackle the climate crisis cannot be insensitive to local problems, laws and environmental governance regimes.
“Now more than ever, we need a vernacular millennial-led environmentalism”
The Indian government recently took down the provision for holding mandatory public consultations as part of the environmental clearance process for any new project. Awareness of such matters could pave the way for millennial-led environmental movements to devise public awareness campaigns based on local traditions, like street-plays or protest music. Instead of blindly imitating Western environmentalism, the emergent millennial-led environmental groups need to follow and strategize around local developments like these.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the entire nation is under lockdown, the government continues to grant permission for building rails, highways, coal mines and hydroelectric projects in ecologically sensitive areas — effectively putting wildlife and the life of over 300,000 trees in danger. Now more than ever, we need a vernacular millennial-led environmentalism.
Vismay Kamate is a student at the Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia.