Now people outside Gujarat were noticing him too. Thus, as Ratan Tata put it at the inauguration of the Nano project, ‘there is a good M and a bad M’, the first being Narendra Modi, who had welcomed him in Gujarat after the second M, Mamata Banerjee, had him effectively exiled from West Bengal. For his part, Modi praised the ‘nationalistic spirit’ of the Tatas, while hoping that ‘the coming of the Nano to Gujarat will begin a new chapter of partnership which will propel the state in a new direction of growth.’18
V
The software industry was, so to say, the benign face of liberalization in India, in that it used skilled labour and modern technologies to generate wealth. The brutal face was constituted by the mining sector, where politicians allocated contracts to entrepreneurs close to them, who gave back a share of the proceeds in return. Meanwhile, in their haste to make as much money as soon as possible, mining lessees ravaged the land, leaving a trail of social and environmental devastation in their wake.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, international metal prices rose by more than 400 per cent. This sparked a mining boom across India, with massive amounts of forest land diverted to the extraction of iron, bauxite, coal and limestone. Thus in a single day, the government of Jharkhand cleared forty-seven mining leases, these among the thousand or more leases granted by state governments in these years.
Success in the mining sector owed little to technical or managerial innovation and creativity. What mattered far more was proximity to a particular politician or political party. In this classic form of crony capitalism, corruption took three principal forms. First, ministers or governments in charge of granting leases took a certain sum – usually in the range of Rs10 to Rs12 crores – upfront as a bribe. Second, by fixing royalty payable to the state at an implausibly low level, politicians allowed mining lords to make super-normal profits, a share of which was passed on to them. (For example, in 2008, when iron ore prices were between Rs5,000 to 10,000 a tonne, the royalty payable to the state was less than Rs30 per tonne). Third, under-invoicing was rampant, with far fewer trucks reported than those actually carrying ore from the mine to port or train station. So, for example, if thirty loaded trucks left the mine one day, only two would be recorded by the government’s mining inspectors.19
The web of corruption extended far and wide. It included officials of the forest, mining, and transport departments, of the railways, and of the ports. However, the principal beneficiaries were the politicians on the one hand and the mining lords on the other. The nexus between these two classes was particularly intimate. Politicians came to own mines (sometimes under the names of their relatives); mining lords came to fight elections and become ministers. Politicians of the Congress, the BJP and various regional parties were all involved.
The mining boom corroded the political system through corruption and cronyism. And it also had devastating social and environmental impacts. Since the mining companies had political patronage, they did not care to observe environmental or labour regulations. The owners brought in labourers from outside the state, who, displaced from their families, were too weak to organize themselves for better working or housing conditions. The forest, water, wildlife and pollution controls in place were likewise ignored, these violations largely overlooked by the local administration, intimidated by the connections that mining lords had with ministers and even chief ministers.
Since mining was effectively unregulated, when the price of ore was high there was an incentive to extract as much as possible, as quickly as possible. This impulse towards over-extraction was shared both by mine-owners and by politicians, since the latter did not know how long they would be in power, and wanted a share of these galloping profits quickly too.
Moreover, since it was conducted with other than state-of-the-art technology, and since the law was rarely respected, mining in India led to massive environmental degradation. Forests were cut down, rivers and springs polluted, cultivable lands rendered infertile. This damage ran into hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees. Often, it was irreversible. It impacted wildlife and biodiversity, but, far more seriously, the local village economy, based on fertile soil, clean water and healthy forests which provided wood for fuel and house-building, as well as fruit, artisanal raw material (such as bamboo for basket-makers), and medicinal plants. With the forests gone, the lands damaged and the water scarce or polluted, villagers in mining areas suffered enormously.20
Finally, since those who lived in and around mining areas did not benefit, and were indeed often impoverished by its side-effects, this industry generated a great amount of discontent. It was no accident that Maoists were particularly active in states like Orissa and Chhattisgarh, where tribal communities had been displaced by the rush of mining leases granted to prospectors from outside. On the other side, the state had set up vigilante groups – such as the notorious ‘Salwa Judum’ militia in Chhattisgarh – that attacked and killed villagers who opposed mining and hounded journalists and human rights activists out of the districts where mining was taking place.
The criminality and lawlessness that ran through the mining districts of the Indian heartland sat poorly with the country’s self-image as the ‘world’s largest democracy’. These districts were so far from being a modern, twenty-first century, rule-bound society that the closest comparison must be to the California of the nineteenth century or the Congo of the twentieth century, when a rush to loot precious metals likewise fuelled an escalating cycle of violence and brutality.21
VI
In the first decade of the twenty-first century India was, by any objective standard, an environmental basket case. Of the twenty cities in the world with the worst air pollution, as many as thirteen were in India. Six hundred and fifty million people – over half the country’s population – lived in regions considered excessively polluted by India’s own national standards. If air quality was improved to meet these standards, these 650 million Indians would, on an average, each live 3.2 years longer.22
The air was foul and the water filthy. The country’s most loved river, the Ganga, was biologically dead for most of its course, killed by untreated sewage and toxic chemicals from factories and towns on its banks. (Some 144 towns, small and large, on the Ganga’s banks collectively deposited an estimated 3,500 million litres of sewage every day into the river.) Half-burnt human corpses (it was considered auspicious to be cremated along the Ganga) polluted the river further. Hundreds of thousands of Indians died each year from diarrhoea and other diseases, contracted after drinking this contaminated water. Meanwhile, the decline of fish stocks put fisherfolk out of work.23
Other rivers were scarcely less polluted. In many states (including the country’s grain bowl, the Punjab), groundwater aquifers were depleting at an alarming rate, threatening agricultural sustainability. Natural forests were being steadily destroyed or degraded, hurting village communities who depended on them for fuel, fodder and agricultural inputs.
The conventional wisdom among conventional economists was that India was ‘too poor to be green’. Once it got rich it would clean up. But this wisdom – such as it was – was based on a mechanical, or perhaps unhistorical, extension of the development experience of Western Europe and North America to Asia and Africa. For industrialization and economic growth in Europe and North America was enabled in part – perhaps large part – by the access to the land and resources of the colonies that those countries controlled. Developing countries like India had no such colonies; and they had far higher population densities. Therefore, there was a case to be made that India had to be even more environmentally conscious than were England or the United States at a comparable stage of their development experience.
This case was strengthened by the evidence on the ground. For, all across India, it was the poor who most directly bore the burden of environmental degradation. Depleting forests deprived peasants of fuel and fodder. Polluted rivers deprived them of irrigation water (and sometimes of drinking water too). O
pen-cast mining brought debris to agricultural fields and dried up springs. In the cities, air pollution made the urban poor – already badly housed, over-worked and under-nourished – more vulnerable to respiratory and other diseases than their richer (and better-fed, better-protected) counterparts.
Arguments such as these, upending the conventional wisdom of development economics, had an honourable lineage in India. They were first made in the 1970s, by popular movements such as the Chipko Andolan, a struggle of poor peasants in the Himalaya against monocultural commercial forestry. Chipko was followed by movements around forest rights in other parts of India, and by movements against destructive mining and dam projects as well. Meanwhile, social workers, often of a Gandhian persuasion, had organized rural communities in reforestation drives and water conservation schemes across India.
Movements like Chipko challenged the reigning economic belief – or superstition – that India was too poor to be green. In fact, as these movements showed, sustainable management of water, soil, pasture and forests was absolutely critical to the livelihoods of the majority of Indians. These struggles led to the creation in 1980 of a Department of Environment at the centre (and in time in the states), and to new laws and regulations to forestall environmental abuse by industries whether in the public or private sector.24
The Environment Ministry was meant to be a regulatory as well as a prescriptive body. On the one hand, it had to frame laws to check environmental damage, monitor air and water pollution and assess the environmental impact of proposed new mines, highways, dams and factories. On the other hand, it was meant to fund scientific research to forge sustainable policies for forestry, wildlife, agriculture, energy management, etc.
Sadly, for much – if not most – of its existence, the Environment Ministry fulfilled neither objective. The ministers who headed it generally ignored or disregarded the advice of India’s top scientists. Every major project was supposed by law to prepare an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). In other countries this was prepared by a group of independent experts. In India, in a naked display of crony capitalism, it was the project promoter who himself chose the consultant to write the EIA. Naturally, the ensuing report minimized or downplayed the negative impacts of the project.
The ideological climate of economic liberalization was deeply inhospitable to environmental concerns. With India (for the first time) experiencing high rates of economic growth, environmental activists were dismissed as party-poopers, as throwbacks to a discredited era of socialist economics, or as agents of foreign powers determined to keep India backward. Bowing to the mood, the press ran fewer (and fewer) stories on the degradation of the environment and the marginalization of the rural communities that it caused. A greater abdication was by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, which dismantled the existing safeguards and made the clearance of even the most destructive projects a mere formality.
In the India of the early twenty-first century, attacks on environmental activists were frequent and abrasive. A prominent politician claimed that ‘in a developing country, environment standards laid down by developed countries can’t be taken as the thumb rule.’25 A free-market columnist attacked what he saw as ‘the fundamentalist and irrationalist nature of the ecology movement’, claiming that it had ‘turned investors against India.’26 One environmental journalist ruefully wrote that ‘the editor of a leading media house, everytime I pitched a green story, would invariably complain: “Environmentalism is stalling growth; all I am interested in is double-digit growth for this country”’.27
In truth, environmental responsibility was absolutely necessary for sustaining economic growth in the long term. A group of ecological economists working at the World Bank computed the costs to Indian society – in the form of ill health, lost income and increased economic vulnerability – of specific forms of environmental abuse: among them air pollution, forest and pasture loss, degradation of crop lands, and poor sanitation and water supply. The study estimated that in the year 2009, the cost of environmental degradation in India was about Rs3.75 trillion, equivalent to 5.7 per cent of GDP. In other words, if the air had not been so polluted, if forests had not been so rapidly felled, if the soil had not become so toxic or saline due to over-use of chemicals, if water sources had remained uncontaminated – in that case, India would have added more than 5 percentage points to its annual growth rate.28
VII
Even where there were no new industrial or mining projects coming up, there could be violent clashes in the countryside. For the rising self-consciousness of the Dalits had brought them into conflict with castes ranked higher than them in the social hierarchy of rural India.29
One theatre of this conflict was the southern-most districts of the southern state of Tamil Nadu. The clashes here were between the Thevars, a rising middle caste of landowners, and the landless Dalits. They were sparked by disputes over wages, or pique that a community once condemned to scavenging was now sending members to the Indian Administrative Service. The Dalits, emboldened, were refusing to be served tea in a separate glass at village cafés (a long-standing custom). And for each statue build by the Thevars of their revered leader Muthuramalinga Thevar (1908–65), the Dalits would build a statue of Ambedkar in reply. (Indeed, some of the bloodiest clashes were provoked by the demolition by one side of a statue erected by the other.) The rows were material as well as ideological, they were frequent, and they were costly. In a single decade, caste conflicts in Tamil Nadu resulted in more than a hundred deaths.30
Nowhere were the Dalits as oppressed as in the state of Bihar; nowhere were they better organized to resist; nowhere were caste conflicts so frequent, so bitter, and so bloody. The agrarian system of eastern India had historically exhibited the grossest forms of feudalism. In neighbouring West Bengal these inequalities had been attenuated by land reforms, but in Bihar they persisted down into the present. The middle and upper castes owned the land, and the Dalits tilled it. From the 1970s, however, Maoist radicals had taken up their case. Although they had more or less disappeared from West Bengal, where their movement had begun, these ‘Naxalites’ had steadily gathered strength in the districts of central Bihar. They formed agricultural labour fronts, which demanded higher wages, shorter hours and an end to social coercion (which, in some areas, included the right of the landlord to a low-caste bride on her wedding night). They also demanded a share of village common land and access to natural resources such as freshwater fish, theoretically owned by the ‘community’ as a whole, but usually the preserve of the upper castes alone.31
Their mobilization by left-wing radicals had instilled a great deal of self-respect among the lowliest in central Bihar. Travelling through the state in 1999, the journalist Mukul noticed a new-found confidence among the Dalits. Visitors were treated as social equals, and met with the salutation ‘Namaskar, bhaijee’ (Greetings, brother). Unlike in the past, the Dalits ‘do not fold their hands. They do not bend their body. They do not call anybody “huzur”, “sahib”, “sir”, or anything like this. This new found word [Bhaijee], is heard repeated all over the region in village after village and haunts the heart’.32
The anthropologist Bela Bhatia writes that ‘this sense of dignity is one of the principal achievements of the Naxalite movement’. Other achievements included an end to forced labour and a significant enhancement of the wage rate. Normally paid in kind, this had doubled; besides, the quality of the grain was much better than before. Once made to work twelve hours non-stop, labourers were now allowed regular breaks. And, for the first time in recorded history, women were paid (and treated) the same as men.
The long-term aim of these radicals, however, was the overthrow of the Indian state. Open and hidden, legal and illegal, activities were carried on side by side: processions and strikes on the one hand, the collection of weapons and attacks on their enemies on the other. The Naxalites had their own Lal Sena (Red Army), whose members were trained in the use of rifles, grenades and land mines. They also ha
d their safaya (clean-up) squads, whose marksmen were trained to assassinate particularly oppressive landlords.33
In response, the ruling élites had formed senas of their own. Each of the landowning castes maintained its own private army. The Bhumihars had their Ranbir Sena, the Kurmis their Bhoomi Sena, the Rajputs their Kunwar Sena, the Yadavs their Lorik Sena. The modern history of Bihar was punctuated with gruesome massacres perpetuated by one caste/class group upon another. Sometimes, a Bhumihar or Yadav sena would round up and burn alive a group of Dalits. At other times, the Naxalites would raid an upper-caste hamlet and shoot its inhabitants.34
Behind this violence lay a savage hatred. ‘Mera itihaas mazdooron ki chita par likhi hogi’, claimed one Bhumihar landlord – my biography will be written around the funeral pyres of [Dalit] labourers. ‘Aath ka badla assi se lenge!’, shouted the Naxalites – if you kill eight of ours we will kill eighty in revenge.35
The growing power of the Naxalites in Bihar was spectacularly underlined by an attack on the town of Jehanabad in November 2005. Hundreds of armed gunmen stormed the town, rained down bombs on government offices and attacked the jail. They freed two hundred inmates, mostly of their own party, among them their area commander. The operation was made easier by the fact that a large chunk of the district police force was away on election duty. Still, the act underlined the fragility of the legally constituted state in Bihar. For Jehanabad is a mere sixty kilometres from the provincial capital, Patna.36
Atrocities against Dalits were by no means the preserve of caste Hindus alone. In the Punjab, the land-owning Jat Sikhs resented the growing self-confidence of the labouring and artisanal castes. From the early twentieth century, Dalit Sikhs had struggled for a share of the land and access to shrines (both controlled by Jats). Some Dalits sought escape in a religion of their own, named Adi-Dharm. More recently, the prosperity fuelled by the Green Revolution had opened up new possibilities for low castes: work in towns and factories, and opportunities to start their own businesses. There was also a growing Dalit Sikh diaspora, which sent money back to their kinsmen in the village.37
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 88
