Implosion (20 page)
Authors: John Elliott
In December 2013, Natarajan was moved out of the ministry to the Congress party office and her job was taken over by Veerappa Moily, the petroleum minister and a leading critic of her ministry’s decisions. On the same day, Rahul Gandhi told a business meeting that he understood their frustration over environmental clearances.
Ramesh continued to work in the same sort of areas when he moved to be minister for rural development, notably implementing long-delayed legislation on the use of land for industrial purposes and trying to develop areas previously held by Naxalite rebels. He used to say that the nature of the environment minister’s job was ‘to upset politicians, industry and environmentalists’ and that he wanted to ‘bring the environment into politics and public discourse’.
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He certainly did all that but, sadly, he did not manage to change attitudes in the environment-versus-growth debate.
The bottom line is that the profits made by spoiling the environment are just too big and risky for a reasoned debate in India’s present stage of development. In its rush for growth, there is little fundamental public interest in protecting the environment, scant respect for the rule of law, and widespread acceptance of corruption as a way of getting things done. This does not, of course, apply only to India. Growth versus the environment is a global conundrum, but it is more urgent in this country because of the need and pressure for growth, and because of the extent of the greed and corruption that has led to the environment being plundered.
Notes
1
. ‘Uttarakhand is paying the high price of anti-environmentalism’,
First Post India
, 24 June 2013,
http://www.firstpost.com/india/uttarakhand-is-paying-the-high-price-of-anti-environmentalism-900677.html
2
.
World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples – India: Adivasis 2008
, UNHCR,
http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/49749d14c.html
3
. Current Status of Tiger in India, WPSI website,
http://www.wpsi-india.org/tiger/tiger_status.php
4
.
https://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/demand-from-china-kills-indias-vanishing-tigers
5
. ‘Wild India’s Grim Reapers: Interview with Belinda Wright’, WPSI,
Conservation India
, 8 February 2011,
http://www.conservationindia.org/articles/trends-in-wildlife-crime-interview-with-belinda-wright-wpsi
6
. Database on Tiger Poaching, Trade & Wildlife Crimes, WPSI,
http://www.wpsi-india.org/projects/poaching_database.php
7
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/india-to-protect-the-environment-from-damaging-development-projects/
8
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/jairam-ramesh-sets-the-pace-on-india%E2%80%99s-climate-change-and-environment-policies
9
. ‘Lavasa: slow motion city – Construction has picked up in the last year-and-a-half and tourist numbers are rising; still, Lavasa has not yet become the promised bustling city’,
Business Standard
, 8 June 2013,
http://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/lavasa-slow-motion-city-113060700981_1.html
10
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/india-to-protect-the-environment-from-damaging-development-projects/
11
. ‘Cong, NCP split over Adani mines’,
The Times of India
, 3 August 2009,
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2009-08-03/nagpur/28179621_1_adani-mines-coal-tiger-habitat
12
. ‘“I have been forced to regularise illegality”: Jairam Ramesh’,
The Economic Times
, 6 May 2011,
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-05-06/news/29516925_1_regularise-constructions-environmental-violations
13
. ‘“All go-aheads not green”: Ramesh’,
Hindustan Times
, 6 May 2011,
http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/newdelhi/I-am-forced-to-regularise-compromise-on-green-norms-Jairam-Ramesh/Article1-694188.aspx
14
.
https://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/greenpeace-targets-tata-over-rare-sea-turtles/
15
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/jairam-ramesh-ousted-from-environment-in-india-reshuf?e
16
. Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers & People, ‘What Jairam did and didn’t do as green minister’, Rediff.com, 20 July 2011,
http://www.rediff.com/news/column/what-jairam-ramesh-did-and-did-not-do-as-green-minister/20110720.htm
17
. In conversation with JE, September 2013
18
. ‘Jayanthi Natarajan raises green objections to National Investment Board’, PTI, 9 October 2012,
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/jayanthi-natarajan-manmohan-singh-national-investment-board/1/224078.html
19
. ‘Green Terror: Outdated environmental laws and infl exible ministers strangle Indian economy’,
India Today
, 8 October 2012,
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/green-terror-jairam-jayanthi-regime-green-projects-vs-pmo/1/223589.html
20
. ‘Since 2004, 6 lakh hectares of forest cleared for mining’,
The Times of India
, 20 April 2013,
http://articles.timesofi
ndia.indiatimes. com/2013-04-20/developmental-issues/38692616_1_niyamgiri-hills-forest-rights-act-forest-clearance
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. Jairam Ramesh speaking at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, New Delhi, 14 February 2011
Just before Christmas Day 2012, I was standing on a Sunday evening with a thousand or more peaceful demonstrators near the ceremonial arch of India Gate – Delhi’s equivalent of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris – when we were swept from the area by the force of a massive water cannon and by a horde of police and paramilitary wielding the lathis that they often use to beat the weak and vulnerable.
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Till a few minutes earlier, the demonstrators, many of them young women, had been clustered in groups, some singing and some listening to speeches on the theme of ‘Give us justice’. Others stood around television cameras, watching interviews. Sellers of chai, sweet potato and other snacks were doing a brisk business. No one expected that the security forces, who were attempting to clear serious troublemakers a few hundred yards to the west, would come round the monumental arch. ‘Stay by our installation and you’ll be okay,’ joked Jehangir Pocha of the NewsX TV station who was broadcasting on the event.
When it became clear that NewsX’s trestle table and equipment were not a safe haven, I turned and ran with the crowds till the police, lashing at anyone they could reach, caught up with me. It was then safer to turn and walk towards the charge, rather than to appear to be running away – which I did, with my hands half-raised, saying ‘press, press’. The police dodged round me, swiping their sticks against those in their way. They continued irrationally to beat individuals, including women, who were leaving the surrounding area – a verbal instruction to go would have been enough. Tear gas shells could be heard going off nearby to deal with other demonstrators.
Brutal policing is commonplace in India, but that evening was significant because it was such an outrageously crude and vicious way to try to end the focal point of six days of countrywide mass protests that had been sparked by the gang rape and battering of a 23-year-old paramedical student. Driven around Delhi in a curtained bus, the student had been dumped with a male friend, virtually naked, on a dirt track beside a busy highway to the city’s airport. This provoked a national outcry and intense international and local media attention that generated continuing coverage of atrocities against women for months. The student – called Nirbhaya (fearless) and Braveheart by the media before her name, Jyoti Singh Pandey, was revealed
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– died on 29 December of multiple organ failure in a Singapore hospital. Three days earlier, she had been controversially flown there – a journey of 2,500 miles – after intelligence agencies apparently advised the government that there could be a massive public backlash if her seemingly inevitable death happened in India under the questionable care of Delhi doctors.
The day before I was caught in the police charge, thousands of demonstrators had staged unprecedented mass protests and had reached the gates of Rashtrapati Bhavan, the presidential palace on Raisina Hill that marks the other end of the grand processional Raj Path from India Gate. Tear gas shells werefired in the afternoon on the Sunday, and troublemakers in the crowd managed to advance a few yards along Rajpath, smashing police barricades, pelting stones and pushing back a paramilitary force several lines deep. Later the rioters lit bonfires with wooden media observation towers and fencing and smashed metal barricades. This enlarged the area engulfed with violence, but the incidents were isolated, and involved just a few dozen of the several thousand people there who were basically peaceful protestors and sympathetic spectators.
A Frightened Government
The unnecessary water cannon and lathi-charging – and sending Jyoti Pandey to die in Singapore – were the actions of a frightened government after three years of growing street protests and unrest. This came around the time that the Arab Spring uprisings were evicting regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and other Middle East (West Asia) countries. There was, of course, no risk of India’s government being unseated, but ministers and officials were becoming aware that the complaints had a wider base than the immediate cases of rape and widespread, endemic male cruelty towards women.
The middle class was beginning to demand a voice that had not been heard before. There had been mass middle-class demonstrations against corruption in the previous 18 months, led by the veteran and publicity-savvy social activist, 74-year-old Kisan Baburao ‘Anna’ Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, the politically ambitious anticorruption campaigner who became the chief minister of Delhi in December 2013. These protests also carried a wider message that the tide was turning, particularly among young people in their 20s and 30s, against both rampant graft and poor governance. For decades, people had tolerated petty corruption in their daily lives, paying for minor government services. But in 2011, the protests erupted over delays in the creation of a Lok Pal, an anti-corruption ombudsman, at a time when the government was blatantly corrupt to an extent not seen before, condoned by an apparently ‘clean’ prime minister and Sonia Gandhi.
The motivation of the crowds was to target an indifferent and inactive government, a desperately slow legal system that failed to administer justice, and inhumanly violent police and security forces that mostly saw it as their job to beat, hurt and exploit the weak and defenceless, including women, instead of protecting them. The social media played a key role in the protests, providing unorganized angry middle-class people with the opportunity to air views that previously would not have been heard. Television channels escalated the protests with round-the-clock and overhyped coverage of seemingly endless discussion groups and on-the-spot interviews. I saw TV interviewers from leading channels virtually screaming into their cameras at India Gate as if they were in the middle of a war zone, whereas they were mostly surrounded by quiet, curious crowds. As with the Hazare anti-corruption movement, the women’s rape protests would never have been so large were it not for television, plus the social media and, of course, mobile phone text messaging – a potent weapon in a country with nearly 900m mobile subscribers.
The government had certainly got the message from the women’s demonstrations that some display of change was required. No doubt spurred by the imminence of a general election, due in just over a year (April–May 2014), it showed media-oriented and overhyped concern.
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In a public relations splurge of insensitive symbolism, Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh went to Delhi airport around 3.30 a.m. on a Sunday morning to meet Pandey’s body with her family when she was flown back from Singapore. Two other political leaders went to the heavily guarded private cremation – one was Sheila Dikshit, the Delhi chief minister who, with assembly elections approaching, was trying to improve her image after playing politics over poor police handling of the issue. She had even been booed when she visited the protestors. Sonia Gandhi unusually led from the front, reflecting the nation’s horror and grief, despite her own poor health.
Five weeks after the rape, Pranab Mukherjee, the country’s president, said in his eve of Republic Day address: ‘The brutal rape and murder of a young woman, a woman who was a symbol of all that new India strives to be, has left our hearts empty and our minds in turmoil. We lost more than a valuable life; we lost a dream. If today young Indians feel outraged, can we blame our youth?’
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A week later, in early February, continuing what had become a rather crude media blitzkrieg, Sonia Gandhi again went to visit the family of the gang-rape victim and took Rahul Gandhi, who characteristically had been virtually invisible during the mass protests but was by then slightly more active because he had become the Congress vice-president.
Wave of Protests
These were the latest – and socially and politically the most significant – of a wave of protests that had swept India in recent years. They were historically important because they brought middle class and professional people out onto the streets, whereas earlier protests had mostly involved the rural poor opposing the conversion of agricultural and tribal land for industrial, mining and real estate development.
