Tropic of Chaos (20 page)

The Naxalite war is a strange affair that mixes open political advocacy by students and urban intellectuals with nonviolent direct action by peasant organizations (such as road blockades), and the terrorist methods of the guerrilla cadre (such as assassinations and mining of roads). The Naxals hardly seem capable of taking state power, but neither did their fight wind down with the end of the Cold War. In recent years the state has pushed back with a classic, increasingly violent counterinsurgency, hunting down and killing both insurgents and their civilian supporters. The war is creating centrifugal forms of violence that leave the social fabric weakened and infected with corruption, crime, and pathology.

In this district, the little war against the Naxalites has mostly been won, at least for the moment. Yet, civilian Naxal supporters still close roads with blockades, and the people here still observe the anniversary of an infamous April 20, 1981, massacre in which police shot dead as many as one hundred tribals at the village of Indervelli.
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The Naxals also pass through, sometimes killing informants (real or imagined). A local student, a Gond tribal who was showing me around, said that the previous
year guerrillas had accused a cousin of his of informing and killed him. Other Adilabad locals have died at the hands of the Greyhounds—the state police special forces.

In 2008 Naxals even attacked a police boat on the Balimeda-Sileru reservoir near the Andhra-Orissa border. In that fight, fifty-nine Greyhounds on “combing operations” decided for some reason to cross the reservoir in a single boat, only to be attacked by Maoists firing from nearby hills. The police boat capsized, and thirty-eight of the commandos were killed.
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In Telangana, water is political; to manage water is to manage society. The region is bound by the Godavari River to the north and the Krishna River to the south. Both began as rain-fed rivers, not glacier-fed ones, like the Ganga and Indus. As such, Telangana's rivers are extremely vulnerable to climate variability and local deforestation. The Godavari and Krishna both rise in the Western Ghats—the mountains and escarpments that catch the greater part of the summer monsoons—and drain east across the Deccan Plateau, through Telangana, eventually discharging into the Bay of Bengal. When the monsoons fail, the rivers are reduced to mere memories. Even in the epic monsoon of 2010, Adilabad still had a 25 percent deficit below the regional norm.
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Climate scientists predict
cataclysmic
physical changes for the subcontinent in the very near future. The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made an infamous and very serious error in predicting the speed of future glacial melt.
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But after all the science had been subject to hostile vetting, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report's core findings remained true: “The entire Hindu Kush–Himalaya ice mass has decreased in the last two decades.” And it continues to do so at an alarming rate.
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Now consider this: two-thirds of Indians are farmers, most of whom depend on Himalayan glacial runoff or the monsoon rains. And the region's hydrological system is sliding into crisis: monsoon variability is increasing;
the rains are late or too light, or they come heavily all at once. In the winter, some areas get no rain.

When I interviewed one of India's top climatologists, Dr. Murari Lal, he was distraught: “The political class are in total denial. They are not dealing with the issue of climate change. They think it is a rich man's problem. Nothing can get in the way of ‘India Shining.'You understand? They are thinking, ‘Development first, then address the environment.'It has only been due to pressure from the international community, and only in the last three years, that they have even begun to realize that there is a problem.” A few months later, India's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, shocked the world when he accused rich nations of needlessly raising alarm. “Science has its limitation,” said the minister.
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Lal's specialty is the monsoon system, and he is a crucial player in the IPCC. He says the monsoons are “exhibiting increased variability” with a slight increase in overall precipitation, but in such an erratic fashion that, in combination with bad land management and inadequate attention to water harvesting, the general direction is toward increased desertification and drought despite more rainfall. “Ten years ago I predicted the decline of the winter rains in the north, and already that's happened,” said Lal in sad exasperation.
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The US intelligence community has also noticed. In February 2010, National Intelligence Director Adm. Dennis C. Blair told Congress, “For India, our research indicates the practical effects of climate change will be manageable by New Delhi through 2030. Beyond 2030, India's ability to cope will be reduced by declining agricultural productivity, decreasing water supplies, and increasing pressures from cross-border migration into the country.”
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The core issue is water, both its quantity and quality.
When
the rain comes and
how
it falls is almost as important as
if
it falls. In other words, monsoon variability is bad news for Indian farmers. It has a negative effect on crop yields beyond what aggregate and average precipitation data can reveal. In social terms, monsoon variability manifests as increased debt, immiseration, migration, and social conflict.

India's other source of water is the Himalayan ice pack—the so-called third pole—and it is melting fast. The Himalaya's 46,298 glaciers hold water in frozen reserve for hundreds of millions of people in Asia.
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If greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase unabated, and world temperatures continue to rise, and these masses of ice completely disappear, the Ganges, Indus, Yamuna, Brahmaputra, and other rivers that traverse the northern Indian plain will become mere seasonal waterways flowing only when the monsoons unleash.
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For example, the Ganges—or
Ganga Ma
, Hinduism's most sacred river, the water source for some 500 million people—has a dry-season flow that is 70 percent meltwater from the Gangotri Glacier, a vast channel of ice 5 miles wide and 15 miles long. The Gangotri is shrinking at a rate of 40 yards per year, nearly twice as fast as it was two decades ago.
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This is typical of the “super-rapid decline in the glaciers of the region.”
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The Ganges is now in such serious decline that it is considered among the 10 most endangered rivers of the world.
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In the short term, this Himalayan melting will lead to increased runoff, but in the long term, Asia's glacier-fed rivers will largely vanish.
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Meanwhile, population and water demand increase: by 2050, India will likely have a population bigger than China's, and some 900 million of these people will still be working the land.
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Back in the village of Jaamni, in Adilabad District, the talk still turns on the issue of water. Some farmers here irrigate from small wells, some from a local river, but most depend primarily on rain, nothing more. They live by the mercy of the monsoon, much of which is kept off the Deccan by the Western and Eastern Ghats. Not far from the village is the almost completely dry river, which the locals simply call the Big Stream. It flows into the Sathnala reservoir, which is the product of a dam built in decades past.

In such a climate, rainwater harvesting and irrigation are essential parts of the landscape. In Andhra Pradesh and Tamul Nadu, most agriculture has traditionally been dependent on water impoundment and
storage; “rainfall is diverted, captured, stored, and controlled in a large number of reservoirs,” known locally as tanks, formed by blocking the drainage of natural depressions with crescent-shaped earthen dams.
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Canals feed out from the tanks, and elaborate rules govern how and when water is allocated.

The irrigation systems of southern India were famously, and somewhat incorrectly, theorized in both Marx and Weber as the products of wellorganized, stable, autarkic states. A long line of scholars following these foundational thinkers has assumed that large-scale irrigation is normally accompanied by despotism and stable state bureaucracies that absorb the surplus created by the society. This link between irrigation and state power is essential in Marx's theory of the “Asiatic mode of production.”

In his classic
Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power
, Karl Wittfogel described water's political imperatives thus: “No operational necessity compels [a farmer] to manipulate either soil or plants in cooperation with many others. But the bulkiness of all except the smallest sources of water supply creates a technical task which is solved either by mass labor or not at all.”
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Another scholar explained, “The need to control corvee labor and competition between societies requires ever larger works; larger works require heavier corvees of labor, heavier corvees require higher levels of integration and co-ordination and therefore large permanent systems ultimately require permanent specialized bureaucracies who will decide how many people are needed for what, and where. These must be ‘vertically' organized.”
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In other words, the argument behind the idea of hydraulic despotism or the Asiatic mode of production: large-scale canal irrigation systems seem to require mass organization, and that seems to require a centralized powerful state.

In reality, India's old irrigation systems seem to have evolved slowly, piecemeal, haphazardly, through a succession of political arrangements that were often unstable and punctuated by violence. Viewed over the long term, plenty of social change and instability existed, especially at the political and geographic margins of states .
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As the anthropologist David Mosse argued contra the old consensus, in southern India war and the rule of warriors was always bound up with irrigation and water rights—but
that did not always mean stability. Political conflict was ongoing, and irrigation systems most likely have always existed in a state of relative crisis and ill repair.

British representatives of the East India Company latched on to this fact and used it as an ideological prop in their larger mission. They took great pains to note the dilapidation of water works in their reports; as Mosse explains, “These officers were the first to put into place a representation of tanks as part of the noble tradition of the ancient community eroded by contemporary exploitative rulers. And from this damaged landscape, they read justification for the extension of a British rule of order and property.”
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Thus, water, irrigation, and extreme weather have been central to Indian politics, power structures, property arrangements, and traditions of repression and resistance for centuries. Climate change—and the catastrophic convergence by which it is expressed within the social world—is only enhancing water's significance.

The farmers in Telangana all grow genetically modified
Bacillus thuringiensis
(Bt) cotton, a product of the agricultural giant Monsanto. The new cotton became available a few years back. Although advertised as not needing pesticides, it does. At first it boosted output and incomes, but after a few years, incomes fell and the new cotton became a curse. Its roots penetrate deep into the soil, sucking up all the nutrients. Before long the farmers need large amounts of artificial fertilizer—and that means taking loans. Scholars call this the “vicious cycle of chemical agriculture.”

“We know that after three or four years, the land will be dead,” said Linga Reddy Sama, whose family are Hindu migrants rather than of the local tribal Gond people. The farmers in these villages know they are mining the soil, extracting and exporting its nutrition in the form of cheap cotton. While their crops decline, their debts increase. And in the worst of cases, farmers are killing themselves. This is the catastrophic convergence at the local scale, at the scale of specific crops and actual families.

Had anyone committed suicide in Jaamni? Yes, a man named Anjanna, who was about forty-five years old and had killed himself the previous year by drinking pesticide. “He killed himself to escape his debts,” said one of the farmers. “Now his wife and grown son are in Maharashtra State working as farm laborers.”

The problem, again, comes back to water. In recent years, irrigation has suffered under a wave of neoliberal disinvestment. The state has removed important subsidies from small farmers; as result, thousands of them have killed themselves.

The process went like this: Starting in 1991 the Indian government began a process of economic liberalization. Efficiency became the watchword ; the state cut power subsidies to farmers. With that, running pumps for wells and irrigation became more expensive. To cope, farmers started taking loans from local banks or usurious moneylenders.
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The neoliberal withdrawal of developmentalist policies meant that local irrigation systems fell into dilapidation. With bad irrigation works soon the norm, farmers turned to drilling privately-funded wells and taking groundwater. This was typically done on an ad hoc and individual or village-by-village basis, with little planning or proper water management. As a result, the aquifers soon fell into decline. These private coping strategies require private capital. To drill wells, farmers had to borrow from local moneylenders—often at exorbitant rates. Now, when crops fail or wells run dry, which is becoming more common due to climate change, farmers cannot repay their debts.