[Podcast] Environomy: They Came, They Rapped, They Lobbied

In the Garhwal Himalayas, women hugged trees as part of the Chipko movement to protect them from being cut down. Environmentalist Sunderlal Bahuguna staged long fasts along the Bhagirathi river to oppose the construction of the Tehri dam. Activists from the Narmada Bachao Andolan and indigenous inhabitants of the Narmada Valley protested by sitting amidst the rising waters of the Sardar Sarovar dam. Historically, Indian environmental movements pitted the moral right of the individual or community to the might of the state and the industry.

After the introduction of the economic reforms however, there was a difference in India’s approach of environmentalism. What led to this change?

In the second episode of ‘Environomy,’ Mongabay-India Managing Editor and podcast host S. Gopikrishna Warrier discusses how the economic reforms influenced the way the middle class looked at environmental issues.

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Full transcript

Gopikrishna Warrier: You’re listening to Everything Environment by Mongabay-India.

The 6.8 magnitude Uttarkashi earthquake shook the western Himalayas and the plains of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi in the early hours of 20^th October 1991. Within a week, even as the aftershocks continued, I was on a bus to the old Tehri town. This is the town that has now gone below the waters of the Tehri Dam reservoir. A Gandhian and the Chipko movement leader, Sunderlal Bahuguna, was protesting against the dam project from his makeshift hut on the banks of the Bhagirathi River, overlooking the dam site.

Just a few months earlier, I had taken a train to Vadodara, then rode on the back of a truck to Kevadia colony and walked along the banks of the Narmada river to Bamni village. The Narmada Bachao Andolan had organised a meeting at Bamni.

In the early 1990s, the anti-Tehri dam and anti-Narmada dam movements were the most well-known environmental protests in the country. It was not as if only environmental activists were involved with these movements. The developments in Tehri and Narmada were watched keenly by people across the country. In the coming decade, something changed.

Welcome to our show, Environomy. I am S. Gopikrishna Warrier, Managing Editor, Mongabay-India. Through the series of podcasts, I will take you through the journey of how the environment and economics got interlocked after the economic reforms of 1991. This is a journey for which I had a ringside ticket as a journalist reporting and writing on the environment for the past three decades.

In the first episode of this series, we looked at how the Indian middle class got a distinct economic and political identity after the economic reforms of 1991. In this second episode, we will examine how this distinct economic and political identity for the Indian middle class, changed the way in which they dealt with environmental issues. We will try to define this new environmentalism.

Historically, Indian environmental movements drew their inspiration from the methods that the freedom movements used. Like the Satyagraha of the independence movements, the Indian environmental movements pitted the moral right of the individual or community to the might of the state and the industry.

Thus, village women in Garhwal Himalayas hugged their trees to prevent them from being chopped as part of the Chipko movement. Sunderlal Bahuguna fasted for weeks on the banks of the Bhagirathi river, to protest against the construction of the Tehri dam. The activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan and the tribal denizens of the Narmada Valley sat in protest, braving the rising waters of the Sardar Sarovar dam, chanting, “Dubenge par hatenge nahi” which means we ‘will we will drown, but we will not move.’

In December 1990, just a few months before the economic reforms were launched, a long march by the activists and tribals was blocked at Fuqua as they entered Gujarat from Madhya Pradesh. They were headed to the Sardar Sarovar dam site on the Narmada in Gujarat.

The national media covered the event extensively, and the nation watched the developments with attention and concern. However, just a few years into the 1990s, the national media and the reading, viewing public had lost interest in the anti-Narmada and anti-Tehri movements. Both dams were built and villages submerged.

Both the anti-Narmada Dam and the anti-Tehri dam protests took their bearings from the people’s protests to protect their trees from being felled in the Himalayas in the present-day Uttarakhand – the Chipko movement.

Literally meaning ‘to hug’, the Chipko movement became famous internationally, through the iconic images of Garhwali peasant women hugging the trees to prevent them from being axed in the early 1970s. Writing about the Chipko movement in his book, The Unquiet Woods, historian Ramachandra Guha notes that the Chipko movement marks a continuity between the people’s protests of the past and links it with modern political and economic structures.

Social scientist and environmental historian Amita Baviskar writes, “In its idioms of protest and ideology, Chipko drew explicitly on a Gandhian social vision and political vocabulary, bringing a distinctively Indian tenor in its critique of development.”

Unlike how in the US, protesting on environmental issues after the Vietnam War had brought young people to the streets, the villages of Garhwal or the tribals of the Narmada Valley were protesting to have access to natural resources. Theirs was not an ideological conflict alone, but resistance anchored in reality. Unlike the environmentalists of Western Europe, these poor men and women had no aspirations of joining politics or launching a Green Party.

Indian environmentalism was unique up to that point in the mid to late 1990s. They had not taken to the ‘legal technical campaign’ or the ‘lobbying route’ that Western environmental movements had already taken by then.

The middle class-isation after the economic reforms changed all this. With urban middle class interests driving the national narrative, issues such as those from the Narmada or the Tehri Valley dropped out of the national consciousness. And like the urban middle class contemporaries of the Western countries, Indian environmentalists started using Western methods of environmental protests.

Indian environmental groups took to technical arguments against what they protested. For instance, they had detailed technical arguments against genetically modified crops. They had similar arguments against the neutrino project or against the nuclear power plants. They fought campaigns through the internet, media and social media.

Thus, when activists protested against Coca-Cola overdrawing groundwater in Plachimada village, near Palakkad town in Kerala, support came to them from different parts of the world through the internet.

When rap singer Sofia Ashraf sang ‘Kodaikanal Won’t’ against the thermometer plant of Hindustan Unilever, she became a social media sensation across the globe.

Environmental activists took to legal actions, filing writ petitions in the High Courts, Supreme Court and later the National Green Tribunal.

In fact, the 1990s is known as the decade of judicial activism, and many of the cases where the judiciary had a far-reaching impact dealt with the environment. In early 1997, Indian environmental groups even effectively lobbied with parliamentarians to stall the legislation in its tracks. Lobbying till then, had never been tried in India. It was and still remains a tool that is effectively used by environmental groups in the US.

In India, the first incident of lobbying was to prevent the parliament passing a legislation that would have annulled an environmentally favorable court judgment on December 11, 1996. In his last month before retirement, Justice Kuldeep Singh of the Supreme Court had ordered that all industrial shrimp aquaculture units operating within the coastal regulation zone had to be closed. The coastal regulation zone then, was defined as the coastal patch within 500 meters of the high tide line. The aquaculture industry was not happy with the decision. So was the national government of the day looking forward to shrimp aquaculture, bringing in foreign exchange. An aquaculture authority bill was developed and introduced in the Upper House, Rajya Sabha. The bill declared aquaculture as a permissible activity within the coastal regulation zone, thereby nullifying the Supreme Court judgment.

The bill was passed by the Rajya Sabha on the day it was introduced. Environmental groups lobbied with parliamentarians sympathetic to the environmental costs, resulting in the Lok Sabha keeping the draft legislation in abeyance. It later lapsed with time.

There were also structural reasons for the shift of environmentalism, from its truly Indian roots to Western modes of activism. If before the economic reforms, the people, the government, and the industry formed the three build points of a triangle, in the years after 1991, these three elements blended into an amorphous entity.

With the national government, and the state governments vying with each other to attract investments, the government and industry were espousing each other’s costs.

As a young journalist working with The Hindu BusinessLine newspaper, I reported multiple stories of the Confederation of Indian Industry, encouraging its members to green their processes, financial incentives and a huge market for environmental goods and services opened in the later years of the 1990s and the first decade of the century.

After the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which brought in a mechanism for the developed countries to trade greenhouse gas emissions with developing countries, many developed countries were making a beeline for India.

Following this trail, I got a major news break in March 2000. Bill Clinton, the President of the United States, was visiting India. It was the first visit after economic sanctions were imposed on India following the 1998 Pokhran nuclear testing. Indian media was speculating on what could be the focus for Clinton during his visit. I thought that the focus could be on environmental goods and services. My editor permitted me to write an op-ed on my hunch. Green Sell it was with the Clinton visit. After the photo opportunity of the Clintons holding hands and posing in front of the Taj Mahal, the President of the United States opened his gift hamper. It included 45 million USD to promote energy-efficient production, 25 million USD for assistance for energy conservation, and 200 million USD funding through the Import Export bank.

The direct impact of all this was that environment-related professions grew in the country and provided employment opportunities for educated youngsters. These included environmental audits such as the ISO 14000 certification, energy audits, design of effluent treatment plants, etc. Environment got deeply embedded in the middle class glossary.

It is not as if environmental issues went out of the public discourse in the past three decades. On the contrary, more people spoke about the environment, but the concerns articulated were those of the middle class communities. The issues that got currency included urban waste disposal, urban transportation, water supply, green economics, smart cities, green buildings, circular economy, etc. Discussions about the Narmada and Tehri disappeared. There are almost no discussions on the Polavaram dam, another big dam, this time across the Godavari river. Kudankulam, Jaitapur, agrarian distress and farmer suicides, etc. moved to the periphery of the national consciousness.

In the next episode, we will look at how the relationship between the legislature, executive and the judiciary changes in the past three decades and what impact it had on the environment.

This episode was written and produced by me, S. Gopikrishna Warrier. Production Editor: Kartik Chandramouli. Audio Editor: Tejas Dayanand Sagar. We received additional music and archival material from the documentary film Words on Water, written and directed by Sanjay Kak; Kodaikanal Won’t, written and performed by Sofia Ashraf, produced by Justice Rocks Initiative, Vettiver Collective; archival recording of the US President Bill Clinton is from the William J. Clinton Presidential Library.

CITATION:

1. Baviskar, Amita. The Unquiet Woods and Indian Environmental History. In The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalayas. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Permanent Black and Ashoka University. 2010.
2. Guha, Ramachandra. The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalayas. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Permanent Black and Ashoka University. 2010.
3. Warrier, S. Gopikrishna. Clinton Visit and the US Green Agenda. The Hindu Business Line. 20 March 2000.

Read more: [Podcast] Environomy: The Middle Class Unbottled

Banner image: Protest against the Maheshwar Dam in the Narmada Valley, 2006. Photo by International Rivers/Flickr.