Painting the Greens black

Who are these people, who were once called stooges of the capitalist West and are now dismissed as old-fashioned socialists? Are they only interested in saving pretty trees and tigers, or do they also have more humanist concerns? What was, and is, their true agenda? How can one penetrate beyond polemics to a proper understanding of what environmentalism means in India?

It would help here to recall how the environmental movement began. The movement has its origins in the Chipko Andolan, which opposed the destruction of forests by wood-based industry. The romantic portrayal of women hugging trees has led to Chipko being viewed in some quarters as a cuddly teddy-bear of a movement, wishing to protect virgin forest where deer roam and rishis pray. But in fact the movement did not wish to keep forests in pristine purity. It hoped rather to reassert the rights over fuel, fodder, and small timber of the hill peasants whose claims had been set aside in favour of commerce and industry.

Inspired by its leader, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Chipko then set about planting up barren hillsides and promoting energy-saving technologies. From the beginning Chipko was as much a social justice as an environmental movement. Such is also the case with the Narmada Bachao Andolan, which is to the Greens in the nineties what Chipko was in the seventies. Narmada too has been colossally misrepresented in the popular and not-so-popular press. It is fundamentally a struggle for elementary human rights, for the rights of a hundred thousand Indians who are asked, nay forced, to make way for a dam that shall further impoverish them. True, the dam will also enrich thousands of others but, ask the villagers of the submergence area in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, why should we be removed from our homes so that someone else gets fat?

Anti-green columnists speak sarcastically of Medha Patkar as "high-profile" and "media-savvy". She may be those things, but she is also a public-spirited and patriotic Indian. Since 1947, some 18 million people, a large proportion of Dalit or tribal origin, have been displaced by development projects. They have been made to move, against their will, in the name of the "national interest", and paid minute sums as compensation.

Anthropological studies have shown that for the dispossessed displacement means economic loss, social dislocation, and psychological trauma. That the phenomenon has not been much discussed in the past is because it was always someone out there who paid the price, not the urban intelligentsia. One wonders how Tavleen Singh or Dilip Thakore would react if they were issued a notice telling them that their property was being commandeered by the government, and that they would be paid compensation at a rate much below market price. Would they accept it gracefully as being in the national interest? Of course not. They would talk to their friends in government to get the order reversed, or go to court. But neither alternative is easily available to the Adivasis of the Narmada valley, which is why they have taken (non-violently) to the streets.

Movements like Chipko and Narmada, or the fisherfolk’s struggle in Kerala, are the visible face of Indian environmentalism. But there are also hundreds of "invisible" environmentalists, who shun protest in favour of constructive work in the countryside. They are invisible to the press but not to the communities they live with. Some groups work on reviving traditional technologies, such as tank irrigation, that have fallen into disuse. Others implement newer technologies that are low-cost and resource-conserving, such as biogas plants. Yet others mobilise local communities in programmes of ecological restoration, planting trees or protecting fragile soils.

Liberalisers promise the sun and the moon to everyone, but in fact market-oriented liberalisation, like the state-led development of yore, will make many people rich and many more people poor. It is only the Greens who have had the courage to speak up for the victims, to ask uncomfortable questions about winners and losers in the great game of economic growth. It is also not true that they have just said "no" to everything. The constructive workers alluded to have made life a little less harsh for the villages they work in. Scientists like A.K.N. Reddy and Madhav Gadgil have shown how the latest technologies can be moulded to the claims of sustainability and social justice. In their fields of expertise, energy and forests, they have shown how we might meet the needs of the future without committing the mistakes of the present.

Understanding comes from exposure and the willingness to learn. The recent attacks on environmentalism stem from an inability to look beyond one’s drawing room. I am reasonably confident that a week is all it would take to convert the knee-jerk critic of Greens into a qualified admirer. A week, to be spent walking with Chandi Prasad Bhatt in the Alakananda valley, or perhaps with Medha Patkar in the Narmada ghati.

Guha’s most recent book is Ecology and Equity’, written in collaboration with Madhav Gadgil