Introduction

In September 2019, more than 300 representatives of farmers’ organizations, trade union federations, indigenous people's organizations, fisher groups, women's organizations, environmental groups, and a few progressive political parties from Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and various parts of India met in Hyderabad. This four-day-long convention concluded with the founding of the South Asian People's Action on Climate Crisis (SAPACC). The delegates voiced their concerns about the anticipated effects of the impending climate crisis and ‘critiqued the inadequacy of governments’ policies’ (Adve 2019). In the past, India's climate activists focused almost exclusively on multinational corporations and the governments of industrialized countries, who are responsible for causing the climate crisis. They argued that questioning the Indian government would ‘dilute’ the demand for holding industrialized countries accountable. Therefore, the SAPACC's public critiques of India and other countries in South Asia marks an important shift in the evolution of climate movements in the region.

Social movements and civil society organizations work within the complex politico-economic and institutional context of India. On the one hand, the Constitution of India is regarded as highly progressive, affording citizens a variety of civil and political rights and freedoms and a scaffolding of democratic institutions that are functional to some extent. This context is particularly conducive for the functioning of civil society institutions that focus on relatively less controversial and apolitical questions, for example, Gandhian organizations dedicated to the ‘welfare’ of the poor, or those promoting tree-planting programmes. On the other hand, organizations advocating for the rights and entitlement of the poor, and those demanding effective enforcement of constitutional provisions and a welfare state, often confront a state that is extremely opaque and highly vindictive (Banerjee 2008). This ‘Janus-faced nature of the postcolonial state’ explains why some types of environmental movements thrive in Indian society while others face violent threats (Kashwan 2017, 10). Yet these contradictory workings of the Indian state must be understood in the context of global capitalism and its domestic beneficiaries. Instead of weakening state control in the wake of economic liberalization in the early 1990s and beyond, the Indian state has transformed into a highly centralized and extractive state that abuses its authority blatantly to selectively reallocate land and other natural resources (Rajan 2011).

Edward Said (1978) introduced the notion of imaginative geography: Groups with a hunger for land essentially reimagine the landscapes they desire, elevating the notion of themselves as the owners of the land they seek, a process of reinventing the meaning of territorial landscapes as ‘imagined geography’. This would help them frame arguments justifying why they are entitled to take possession of the landscapes they desire. Before the actors themselves see and conquer the land, they entertain themselves under a discursive understanding that they are the owners of the landscapes that they covet. Hence, this imaginative geography is a theory of human action deriving from the interplay of material impulses and human consciousness (Gregory 1999); it is ‘performative’. Reimagining landscapes is the first step to acting upon them and creating the very outcomes on the land being imagined (Gregory 2004: 17–20). In this process, hegemonic forces with territorial ambitions refashion themselves as owners of the territory they desire by asserting themselves as masters and sovereign of the land.

Here, one wonders, what is the landscape that has emerged as part of the subaltern project of the imagined geographies? This entails the counterimagination and a contra-discourse of the imaginative geographies by the oppressed, intertwined with the notion of egalitarianism and justice, which could be realized through ecospatial struggles. If this imagined landscape and the struggle for the same is for livelihood and basic human and ‘post-human’ survival, the struggling poor would be forced to follow the logic of their own ‘moral economy’ that historically protected their rights to subsistence (Thompson 1991). The large number of ‘land-wars’ (Levien 2013) that have been taking place in Latin America and Asia, particularly in India, offers how the subalterns imagine their struggles as part of their livelihood and citizenship rights. If it was Muthanga in Kerala in 2003, it was Chengara in 2007. If Muthanga was occupied by the Adivasis, it was the Dalits – formerly the agrestic slaves and the most marginalized of all the outcastes of the Hindus – that occupied the Chengara part of the colonially evolved Harrisons Malayalam plantations. Even after three and a half decades of land reform experimentation how does one explain the Dalit land struggles in Kerala? Can Chengara replace Occupy Muthanga in terms of strategies, struggles, and outcomes? How far did the state succeed or fail in addressing the Dalit land question, their resource endowments, and livelihood?

Introduction

It is now accepted that the future of coal will be decided in the developing world. Even as Western countries transition away from coal, increased production and consumption of coal in India and China have meant that the share of coal in global energy production has remained constant for the past 40 years, despite attempts at decarbonization (Edwards 2019). Nevertheless, the West continues to produce high per capita emissions compared to developing nations (Lazarus and van Asselt 2018). In response, India has asserted its rights to equitable energy access in the international arena (Jaitly 2021). At the same time, questions of intra-country equity complicate India's position, with many arguing that India must pursue low-carbon pathways to protect its poor and vulnerable groups (Bidwai 2012).

After Independence, coal became an enduring symbol of national development in India (Lahiri-Dutt 2014). The coal industry has deep political roots, engaging powerful stakeholders at different levels (Bhattacharjee 2017). In recent years, coal investments have lost their appeal due to unrest over their environmental impacts as well as a dynamic downward trend in the demand for thermal power (Rajshekhar 2021). Even so, production targets for the state-owned Coal India Limited (CIL) – responsible for over 80 per cent of India's coal production – were increased to 1 billion metric tonnes by 2024. The central government is actively looking to sell more coal blocks to raise money, despite the lukewarm response to recent coal block auctions. Coal imports have simultaneously increased, engendering a new coastal coal geography controlled by private actors (Oskarsson et al. 2021). That renewables cannot substitute for coal, despite policy support from the state, is accepted. Analysts expect coal-fired generation to continue to grow to meet electricity demand growth even if 350 gigawatt (GW) of renewable energy (RE) capacity is installed by 2030 (Tongia and Gross 2019). New energy forms, including renewables, are, historically speaking, energy ‘additions’ rather than ‘transitions’ (Oskarsson et al. 2021). Importantly, this perception is not typical of India alone, as the global energy system remains locked into high coal energy use in the midst of an RE boom (Oskarsson et al. 2021).

This chapter addresses how politics, epistemology, and modernity are co-produced, and, in this process, how the pre-defined notions of politics, epistemology, and modernity themselves are transformed and reconstructed. The emergent theoretical framing is empirically informed by the place-specific campaign against the aerial spraying of endosulfan pesticide wherein ‘life is cheaper than cashew’. The chapter highlights the structural connections between global capitalism and state-driven developmentalism but also how the very state was conscientized by the transverse solidarity of the ‘constituent power’, including the victims and the larger civil society as agents of modernity, the latter understood as resistance for egalitarianism. However, it does not stop there. We shall also touch upon the ‘epistemological break’ (Bachelard 1938; Althusser 1969) that has occurred in the larger context of knowledge controversies and conflicts (see Whatmore 2009).

In May 2010, the left-front government in the Indian state of Kerala took the historic decision to ban more than a dozen toxic pesticides in the state. This was the culmination of over a decade and a half of struggle and movements in protest against the aerial spraying of endosulfan on the state-owned cashew plantation in the northernmost district of Kasaragod. This chapter follows the prolonged struggle led by the victims of the deadly pesticide, the awakening of a general consciousness among the public, the building up of transverse politics and solidarity, and, finally, the persuasion of the state to ban the pesticide, along with other toxic wastes. The chapter is situated in the larger context of what Beck (1986), Habermas (1987), and Gaonkar (2001) would call risk society, a society in which modernity has become ‘a theme and a problem for itself’, and thus the crisis inherent in it is to be managed through a reinvention of politics. The chapter suggests that the concept of risk society and reflexive modernity as the outcome of a series of struggles and movements demanding the ban on endosulfan in the state offers fresh insights into the power of the people and the civil society in joining the victims.

Alain Badiou points out that subjects become political when they create events – events as trans beings (see Hallward 2003; Badiou 2005, 2009) – even without the mediation of an agency. Badiou (see Hallward 2004) would also constantly remind us that what is important is post-eventual declaration: to quote Lisy Sunny, one of the Dalit woman leaders of Pombilai Orumai in Munnar, ‘[A]t least now we have a union of our own.’

The protests that rocked the Kanan Devan tea plantations, formerly Scottish James Finlay, in Kerala in 2015, led by the historic Pombilai Orumai – the women's unity – and later a parallel state-wide struggle spearheaded by the mainstream trade unions had been called off following what could best be described as mixed outcomes. While the plantation management has had to shift its position with regard to its decision not to increase the bonus or wages, the workers had to content themselves with a 30 per cent hike in wages as against their original demand for a 100 per cent increase. Yet the struggle has been path-breaking as it helped bring to light the harsh living and working conditions on the colonially evolved plantations. The company's claim that it ‘ranked No. 1 in the category [of] best company for employees’ involvement and participation in India’ and ‘featured among the 100 best companies to work [as per] its employees in India’ was exposed as an untruth. In fact, the observations made at the second All Kerala Thozhilali Sammelanam (All Kerala Workers’ Meet) held at Trichur in 1937 under the leadership of veteran communists including P. Krishna Pillai, N.C. Sekhar, R. Sugathan, and A.K. Gopalan, that of all the workers it was the plantation workers who suffered the most (see Raman 2010), remains true to this day – after nearly seven decades of Indian independence – with hardly a change in the historically evolved plantation-based patriarchal forms of exploitation/oppression.

Introduction

India's water crisis has been widely covered in the international and national press. In the summer of 2019, the New York Times published a series of reports and features on the prospects of Chennai and other large Indian cities running out of water (Subramanian 2019). Data on the absolute scarcity of water, sometimes illustrated using dramatic satellite imageries of water bodies, often dominate discussions on India's water crisis (Sengupta 2019). Recall, for example, the 2019 report about 21 Indian cities running out of groundwater by 2020 (ANI 2019a). We are now well past the dreaded summer of 2020 but there has been no follow-up reportage. The argument that India's water crisis lingers because its effects are experienced unequally along multiple dimensions – caste, class, and gender – is hardly a controversial one for scholars. However, there has been very little discussion in both the international and domestic press of the gross inequalities in access to water. The New York Times report mentions the poor, while another describes how women sacrificed daily showers so that office-going male members of the family could afford the luxury instead (Denton and Sengupta 2019). An overwhelming focus on water scarcity instead of water inequalities, we argue, is one of the major causes for the perpetuation of India's water crisis. In this chapter, we seek to examine how the intersection of social inequalities and climate change contributes to water injustice.

In India, access to water is determined by a complex entwining of caste, class, and gender identities that work to perpetuate structural inequalities. While geography and the quality of physical infrastructure greatly influence the extent of water insecurity, they are not entirely responsible for it. In some parts of the country, safe drinking water is inaccessible, causing widespread suffering, illness, and disease. In other regions, cheap and state-subsidized access to water is taken for granted and easily abused (Fatah 2013). The army cantonment and government districts in Delhi receive 375 litres of water per capita per day. On the other hand, South Delhi's Sangam Vihar, an area with a large number of ‘unauthorized colonies’ and home to many lower-income religious minorities, receives a meagre 40 litres of municipal water per person.

Introduction

The carbon emissions of the world's richest 1 per cent are more than double the emissions of the poorest 50 per cent, despite the fact that climate change is expected to disproportionately affect the poor, especially in the warmer parts of the world (Oxfam 2020; Goswami 2020). This suggests that climate and socio-economic justice are intertwined, and understanding the nature of the relationship between carbon emissions and economic inequality can help us arrive at potential pathways to address both.

Climate and socio-economic justice are crucial in the case of India. India is a significant player in the global economy, as its gross domestic product (GDP) is the fifth largest in the world (World Bank 2021). However, the country also experiences staggering levels of economic inequality. It has the third highest number of billionaires, but it also has the largest poor population in the world (Ankel 2020; Roser and Ortiz-Ospina 2019). The wealth of the richest 1 per cent of the Indian population is more than four times the total wealth of the bottom 70 per cent (Economic Times 2020). These indicators of economic inequality demonstrate a dire need to enhance socio-economic justice in India.

Three different indicators of carbon emissions are widely used for analytical purposes. The present climate crisis resulted from historically accumulated greenhouse gas emissions, measured in carbon dioxide equivalents. The United States (US) is the largest contributor, accounting for about 25 per cent of the global cumulative carbon emissions between 1751 and 2019, while India contributed about 3 per cent (Ritchie 2019). Hence, India's historical cumulative carbon emission is rather low. The second indicator measures annual carbon emissions, or a country's current emission levels. Based on this indicator, India has the third highest carbon emission levels globally; it trails China and the US by a huge margin. The third indicator is per capita annual emissions, which accounts for differences in the population size of countries. When countries are ranked in descending order of their per capita carbon emissions, India ranked 128 out of 210 countries in 2019 (Crippa et al. 2020). Even though India's per capita carbon emissions and its share in cumulative global emissions is low, its current scale of emissions is a matter of concern (Matthews 2016).

Arundhati Roy famously described the COVID-19 pandemic as a

As inspiring and insightful as these words are, such juxtaposition of utopia and dystopia barely scratches the surface of what and who we are as a nation. The soulcrushing images of burning pyres in parking lots turned into makeshift graveyards, which international and national media have immortalized, offer a clue, as does the sombre poetry of Parul Khakhar (Tripathi 2021). India is a land pockmarked with a million fires.

The COVID-19 crisis has come as a shock to many middle-class Indians. Yet, to India's Dalits, Adivasis, women, and other marginalized groups, haunted by centuries of oppression, this crisis is yet another in a long list of historical and ongoing crises. For example, the coalfields of Jharia in Jharkhand have been burning for over a century now. As a result, at least 130,000 families have, quite literally, lived through a century-long trial by fire (Rahi 2019). Since 1995, the state-owned Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL) has claimed to have a ‘master plan’, which is possibly gathering dust in some almirah of the coal ministry (S. Kumar 2021). One would imagine that a pandemic like COVID-19 might scare the minister whose job includes ensuring the welfare of the 3.6 million people who work in mines with a less than adequate supply of fresh air. Yet, in 2020, India's coal minister valorized coal workers as ‘our coal warriors who are toiling day and night to keep the lights on even during the corona pandemic’ (Press Information Bureau 2020). They toiled very hard indeed.

A year later, as India struggled to confront the monstrous second wave of the pandemic, Central Coalfields Limited (CCL), a subsidiary of Coal India Limited (CIL), recorded the highest-ever single-day coal dispatch of 80 railway rakes (PNS 2021).

The contribution of colonialism and imperial expropriation to the unfolding climate crisis has been well documented on a global scale. This chapter seeks to interrogate the role of caste as a structural element in shaping environmental inequities within India and beyond. Scientists across disciplines agree that the current system of production is unsustainable at the planetary level, even if a consensus on how to address this issue remains elusive. I argue that in the case of India, accounting for historical and contemporary caste-based extraction is crucial for any meaningful realization of climate justice.

Globally, academic scholarship and policy have come to acknowledge the uneven and unjust ways in which the burden and responsibility for the current crisis are distributed across nations, ethnicities, races, and genders. There is an emerging consensus that the historical pathways of colonialism and capitalist development are directly responsible for this uneven distribution. This pattern is seen across the histories of energy production, plantation economies, and commercial agriculture, as demonstrated in the detailed work of political ecologists (for example, Li 2017). Consequently, the idea that mitigation, adaptation, and resilience-building strategies must account for this historical unevenness is no longer controversial.

We see this acknowledgement in the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ formally adopted by the United Nations in 1992. Under this principle, world governments recognize the lesser contribution of formerly colonized countries such as India towards planetary environmental degradation. This can be read as an acknowledgement of the unequal distribution of political power and economic prosperity across world nations because of colonialism. Acknowledging this historicity of the climate crisis is important, but our understanding of it would remain incomplete without a serious stock-taking of those dimensions of inequality and unevenness that significantly pre-date the rise of colonial capitalism and are yet implicated in its development trajectory. These dimensions of inequality often operate at the national or sub-national levels and therefore escape scrutiny on the global stage. In the case of India, one such important and all-pervasive dimension of inequality is caste.

For decades, anthropological and historical scholarship on caste focused only on ritual, scriptural, and mythical dimensions, thus constructing the issue as a matter of religion alone. Anti-caste scholars and activists such as Ambedkar, Phule, and Periyar have resisted such ‘orientalist’ representations of caste.

Introduction

‘Climate change seems to be the last of the priorities of the state and central government. Despite various climate plans, we continue to privatize coal and divert forest land. How does one reconcile these decisions with the objectives of the climate action plan?’ asked a senior administrative officer in the Odisha Revenue and Disaster Management Department when questioned about the auctioning of new coal blocks and the state's climate action plan. His grim observation points to the political and economic barriers against implementing an effective climate policy that addresses climate justice in India.

In this chapter, we argue that India's climate policy fails to adequately address difficult political questions related to climate justice and rising inequality. As our analysis of state and national climate action plans show, India's engagement with questions of climate justice remains merely symbolic. This directly follows from the country's stance in international climate negotiations, during which it has shied away from undertaking rigorous domestic climate action citing high levels of poverty and a need to focus on economic growth (Kashwan and Mudaliar 2021).

Our analysis of India's national and state climate action plans offers insights into the often-unstated normative principles that guide decision-making on climate change within the country. In this study, we demonstrate how, if at all, these action plans incorporate questions of justice and equality. We argue that most of India's climate action plans demonstrate a superficial understanding of socio-economic inequalities and hence fail to adequately address the disproportionate impact of climate events on the poor and marginalized.

We begin by discussing the principles that guide climate policy internationally and domestically. We then provide a critical overview of national and state climate action plans. We then scrutinize these action plans in terms of substantive equality and climate justice criteria, namely caste, gender, poverty, and co-benefits for development. We then analyse the action plans with regard to their treatment of these substantive criteria, the limitations in their approach, and possible strategies to address these limitations.

Background

Internationally, India is known to have pioneered the approach of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), which allows developing countries to prioritize poverty alleviation and economic growth over climate mitigation.

Much before the Western radical youth ‘invented’ Occupy politics of 2011 (Occupy Wall Street, Occupy St Paul) in the West, inspired largely by the Arab Spring, there were instances in the Global South where precarious workers and communities unleashed their agency with unpredictable outcomes. What Hardt and Negri (2012) attribute to Occupy politics – their imaginations, revolts, slogans, movements and insistence on democracy as characteristics of multitudes – was also relevant for the subaltern struggles in the Global South. It is remarkable how the multitudes, both in the West and in the Global South, though spatially and temporally distinct, declare historically evolved truths through imaginative interventions towards a more egalitarian way of living. In South Asia, they also practised it as social movement identity politics in a world where corporates, often with the support of the state, threatened their rights to the commons, including their traditional environmental rights to land and water resources, and their human right to a decent living,3 thus bearing wider connotations than the Western-style Occupy protests. Latin American and African resistance movements such as the Landless Workers Movement in Mexico and Zapatistas/Chiapas in Brazil, and those in Buen Vivir (Ecuador), Cochabamba (Bolivia), the Estallido Social (Social Uprising) in Chile, and Ongoni (Nigeria) share similar traits in the way they assert and attribute new meanings to land rights, autonomy, food, water, environmental sovereignty, and identity. As a critical complement to the earlier-mentioned literature, the present monograph examines the livelihood, environmental, and identity struggles of the marginalized with a focus on Kerala, the state known for its twin legacies: the communist experiments and social development.

More on Premises

The protests, struggles, and movements in the Global South challenging corporate capital and the state, and even the mainstream male-led trade unions, take the form of what I would refer to as ecospatial struggles, resulting in the conceptualization of political ecospatiality in which ‘eco’ represents the varying dimensions of critiques of economics and ecology/environment and ‘spatiality’, the power relations ingrained in the social body politic (see Raman 2020b; Peluso and Watts 2001; Wapner 1996; Lefebvre 2011; Massey 1994; Harvey 2000).