Prime Minister Narendra Modi may or may not have succeeded on many fronts in the one year that his party has led a coalition government at the Centre. Many issues are debatable, but one that cannot be denied is the unabashed and relentless assault on those who speak for the environment.
But examining the issue only through a saffron-hued prism, or one that selectively blocks out saffron light would not be correct – both are equally fallacious and self-defeating. It is important to understand that the Modi government’s targeting of environmental organisations is seen as what it actually is –a continuation of the previous regime’s growth-crazy policies, albeit more stridently and remorselessly. Those who argue that the Modi government is UPA-III in disguise are not wrong.
There were essentially two segments of society who had voted him in – the traditional voters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and those who wanted, er, ‘development’. Modi, playing by the rulebook detailed out for him by his PR managers, had emphasised more on the latter, leaving the saffron agenda to be driven by the loonier fringe of the Hindutva brigade. The development frenzy that Modi had whipped up in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election in 2014 has still not died down. And it’s unlikely to.
Modi needs to keep this development hysteria alive for his own good. He cannot keep propelling the Hindutva agenda for ever and sully the statesman-like image that he is assiduously trying to conjure up at the international level; he can well let the hardened kinds like Sakshi Maharaj and Yogi Adityanand do the dirty job. On the other hand, the more he plays on the development strings, the more pragmatic he will sound to the world leaders whose adulation he desperately craves for.
Yet, Modi did not have to do much on this count to start with. The seeds of the development-mania had long been sown by Manmohan Singh, and the terms of the development vs environment debate had been framed by the Congress-led coalition. All Modi had to do was to fan the fire, and add a nationalistic twist. Aided by a subservient and gullible media, and spurred by trolls on social media, the lie that environmentalists are anti-development and, therefore, anti-national has been told a hundred times. The unfortunate and scary part is that too many people have been conned by this Goebbelsian ploy.
How the NDA government would take the UPA agenda forward was made amply clear within two weeks of Modi being sworn in as Prime Minister. It came in the form of a daftly-drafted report from the Intelligence Bureau (IB) that was leaked out to the press in early June 2014. It squarely blamed “a significant number of Indian NGOs”, funded by donors based in the US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands, for creating “an environment which lends itself to stalling development projects.”
The essence was summarised in these words: “Identified foreign donors cleverly disguise their donations as funding for protection of human rights, just deal for project-affected displaced persons, protection of livelihood of indigenous people, protecting religious freedom, etc. These foreign donors lead local NGOs to provide field reports, which are used to build a record against India and serve as tools for the strategic foreign policy interests of Western governments.”
From Greenpeace International and National Alliance of Anti-Nuclear Movements to Action Aid and Amnesty International, all featured in the inventory that, in hindsight, seemed to resemble a hit list. The targeting of NGOs, especially Greenpeace, was being planned from Day One. That’s why the IB report incident happened within the first fortnight of the NDA government.
This writer, at that time, had written:
But in this din over NGOs, their sources of funding and schemas, the core issues are going unheard. Irrespective of whether it suits your political/economic narrative or not, the fact remains that the issues behind all the movements revolved around people, and have still not died down. The issues, ignore them at your own peril, will you, are genuine and have been written about widely. Those include environmental concerns, flagrant violations of the laws of this country, and utter disregard of communities and their rights. If raising issues that affect rights and livelihoods of people is anti-national, medieval times are certainly down upon us.
It was obvious that organisations that challenge the status quo or criticise the government’s policies would be its biggest enemies. Greenpeace had done a lot of the latter, and also pointed out rampant and incessant violations of environmental laws that were taking place across the country. No establishment likes to be told that it is flagrantly flouting the laws of the land, certainly not a dispensation that has been thrusting a development agenda showing scant regard for the environment.
Simply gunning for NGOs like Greenpeace would not work – this the government knew. Court rulings would go against its actions (as happened a number of times in the case of Greenpeace), and hounding of civil society would reflect adversely on Modi’s image. Not that it has mattered much. So, the BJP/NDA decided to work on it from the law point of view too. While Prakash Javadekar has his task cut out as the Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change – to serve as a clearing house for industry out to plunder the nation’s natural resources, the government formed a committee to look into the existing environmental laws that were keeping ravaging industries in check.
When the answers trouble you, you can always change the question itself. That’s what the TSR Subramaniam committee sought to do. Many of the laws that protect the country’s natural resources will soon either be done away with, or diluted considerably. All the good work done in the last 40-odd years, starting with the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972, is on the verge of being undone by the Narendra Modi government in just one year. Some achievement, that.
