The Ferengi’s Column

But, one is a little surprised to hear India’s commerce minister protesting against the West’s insistence to link trade with environmental safeguards and norms. It would be all right for the honourable minister to ride on the high horse of offended honour if India’s ecology was in a good state. But the simple truth is that it is near the point of no return — and no government, be it the Congress or the BJP, has ever given a hoot about India’s environment, except to pay somelip service.

We have recently seen for instance how the BJP made a political appointment out of the ministry of environment, showing how low India’s ecology is on its agenda. But if they could think for a moment, they would know that the environment portfolio may be as important as the defence ministry, because two nuclear bombs dropped by Pakistan on India will do less harm to the country’s environment than fifty years of ignorant and corrupt politicians.

Does the commerce minister know that by the middle of the next century there will be no more forest cover left in India? That its population will have long crossed the billion mark and will overflow everywhere, stifling any progress, annihilating all efforts? That India’s cities will be so polluted by their millions of cars that it will be impossible to breathe any more? That India’s rivers will be so poisoned by industries, that all living life will long have disappeared from it (and that there will be no drinking water left, except imported mineralwater)? And that India will be littered with so many plastic bags, that it will be materially impossible to ever get rid of them? This is 21st century India for you.

Many experts have already pointed out that hardly 11 percent of India’s classified forests have adequate density. In 1950, one third of India’s area was still forested; each year India loses through deforesting a territory bigger than France, that is nearly two million hectares. And of these, only three percent is protected, but is actually in deep distress, because of population pressure, big dams (like the Narmada), and industries. And without doubt, the greatest culprits of the massive deforestation, the dwindling of animal life, the thinning of underwater tables and the increasing desertification of India, are the politicians (except for Maneka Gandhi, who was the only serious environment minister India ever had), who are in connivance with the contractors, who in turn bribe the forest officers. Witness how Veerappan was able to plunder theforests of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka for ten years.

But ultimately, is it fair to blame only the politicians, or even the British, who started the massive deforestation for their railways and killed hundreds of thousands of tigers ? Is there not something else in the Indian psyche that is to blame? Where is the root of this massive unconcern for one’s environment; this total disregard for beauty, whether it is the terrible ugliness of the cities in Punjab, or the appalling filthiness in Tamil Nadu?

And, maybe, for once, the Hindus are to blame. The Ganges seems to be the perfect illustration of a religion which enjoins a thousand purification rites and yet has allowed her own mother earth to be defiled. Here is a river that Hindus have held most sacred for centuries, nay millennia; to bathe in it is to purify oneself of all bad karma; to die here is to be reborn in Light. Yet what do all Hindus do with their sacred Ganges? They defecate in it; they throw in all their industrial waste; they let their deadfloat down the mighty river, as if they thought that the spiritual purity of the water can never be obliterated by material dirtiness. But ask any scientist what is the degree of pollution in the Ganges today and he will tell you that it is near the point of no-return. What will happen to India if it loses the Ganges, which is its very soul?

So, Mr. Minister, for once, use the West, let them have their own way, however hypocritical and moralistic they may be. Use them for the good of India, so that a little bit of ecological concern is drilled in this country, which allows its very body to go wasted. Because we have already seen how India has been forced to adopt certain environmental measures just out of greed, when European countries refused for instance to accept any textile export which was not azo free, or leather which was chemically poisoned. The West has grown an ecological consciousness and knowledge which India totally lacks and we should learn from them.