I thought to offer a few observations about this post by Felix Stalder,
about an interview by the Green European Journal with Amitav Ghosh.
My qualification for doing so is working experience with two central
ministries, government of India, the ministries being environment and
agriculture. For both, I was a consultant based on my work on
traditional knowledge. While the work with the agriculture ministry had
to do with traditional crop knowledge (in which responding to climate
change was a part), the work with the ministry of environment had
considerably more to do with climate change (and climate variability, as
we formally called it).
This experience, from 2005 until 2018, allowed me to witness at first
hand what development is, and what it is not. Usually, career
administrators stick to an official line that is loaded with political
positions. Even when professionally and scientifically competent to
formally correct unsound political reasoning (which I know is a
tautology, surely there can't be sound political reasoning?) they prefer
to stay backstage and issue sensible orders quietly. At times, but
rarely, retired administrators have lifted the veil in their published
memoirs.
Anyway, the point really is what are considered 'climate crises' and
what I have seen them as in India and several other places in Asia. It's
all very well to use terms like anthropogenic, extraction, disruption,
technocratic and so on, but I see these as being both meaningless and
irrelevant out there in the rural districts. There, ordinary households,
whether they depend mainly on selling some agricultural produce to a
small town market or in joining a wage labour industry, are focused on
survival from season to season. In so doing, they have perforce to cope
with what the state, and 'development', throws their way.
All too often in India, 'development' has been a term given a crippled
meaning. And that meaning has everything to do with infrastructure in
one form or another: a new road, a new or enlarged highway, a new
township, a new airport, a new power plant, a new bridge over a river, a
bigger railway station, more mobile phone towers, etc. If the
'development' is large enough and politically impressive enough, there
will be consequences.
The consequences may result in the ordinary rural household having to
migrate in order to 'cope' economically, or to suffer in place, and hope
for the state to assign them hand-outs. If, because of such
'development', such as being downwind of a new coal burning power plant
whose contaminating ash is lifted by the wind and deposited on fields,
making them useless for cultivation, the household has to pack its
belongings and move out, it will nowadays be called climate refugees. If
they stay and through some NGO are represented in a legal pleading, they
will be called climate victims.
As I see it, what they experience, and what has caused their experience,
has nothing whatsoever to do with climate change or climate variability.
It has rather everything to do with the willingness of experts,
appointed and paid by the state, to justify politically and industrially
advantageous investment decisions; the complicity of administrators to
frame rules and issue orders that sanction the material manifestation of
such investments (in the form of new factories, new special economic
zones, new industrial parks, new tech hubs, etc); the distraction by
media reporters, whose companies are influenced by the advertising
budgets of infrastructure corporations or whose publishers are part of
the political status quo, that the consequences can be blamed on climate
change rather than abusing nature and environmental flows; and so on.
I would say therefore that Ghosh, when replying "In the past, Indian
kings and emperors would prepare for and respond to famines with massive
state interventions: distributing food, storing supplies, and so on", is
not abreast with the actual history because it was and is, not at all so
much the kingly state, or the state of (apparently) independent India,
that has done the preparing and responding, but social institutions at
the village and town level. And also, "The British, literally while
famines were unfolding, would refuse to do anything that would interfere
with the laws of free trade", while being correct about free trade,
Ghosh failed to say (and the interviewer failed to pursue the point)
that the British colonial regime engineered those very famines (the most
recent and perhaps best documented of them being the 1943 Bengal famine)
but that the free and independent Indian state has engineered a much
larger number of malnutrition epidemics than the British ever could
have, also in the service of free trade.
When, some thirty years ago, I supported very actively with
participation and my writing, the protest in western India against big
dams, and in particular the damming of the river Narmada, with the
protest becoming familiar worldwide as the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the
crisis then was a crisis of development and state over-reach, not of
climate change. If the same consequences had unfolded today -
deforestation over great swathes, massive displacement of people and
communities and habitats, the inundation of large tracts of arable land
- it would very likely be classified in some way as being related to
climate change. It was not and cannot be, just as the 2013 June disaster
in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand (flood and landslide) had very
much to do with 'development' overtaking completely the precautionary
principle especially in the hill districts, and not with climate change
being the perpetrator.
Regards, Rahul Goswami
--
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rahul.gosw...@pobox.com
+91 8600043381/9833471884
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