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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Perspectives |
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Politics |
Green Lantern
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| How Jairam Ramesh demonstrated India’s potential for global leadership at Cancun |
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Published : 1 January 2011 |
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HENRY ROMERO / REUTERS |
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| Jairam Ramesh in Cancun: another environmental stalemate.
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ITH SO MUCH THAT IS ROTTEN today in the
state of India, one wonders if redemption
is possible. The revelations emerging from
the 2G scam show a machinery of state
whose wheels are so well greased by corporate cronyism
and corruption that they threaten to spin the country’s democracy
into the mud pits of oligarchy. In 2009, an Asian
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Development Bank Report warned that unless India took measures to reign in corporate control, “the market and political power of major corporations will become a drag on long-term growth and a source of distortion in policy.” It also warned of the inevitable loss of faith by the masses in a democratic market-based system. Despite the much-celebrated emergence of the great Indian middle class, the wealth gap in India is growing. The combined wealth of India’s growing number of billionaires is equivalent to a whopping 31 percent of the entire nation’s gross domestic product—three times the comparable figure for the United States and ten times that of China.
As the 2G tapes reveal, India’s powerful corporate houses treat the government of the people as their own private
rubber-stamp agency and profit centre, expecting New
Delhi to dole out lucrative infrastructure contracts as well
as permissions and clearances for privileged access to national
resources, especially land and minerals. What suitcases
of cash fail to get the government to cough up, public
opinion suitably molded via the media can facilitate. When
that also may fail, there is always the private sector’s ‘nuclear
option’: the threat to scare off foreign investors and
bring India’s golden growth machine to a halt if, God forbid,
the laws of the land protecting the environment and citizens’
basic rights are actually implemented.
This may explain why the business press has reliably depicted
Jairam Ramesh, India’s Minister of Environment
and Forests, as a one-man threat to India’s economic miracle,
who sends the ‘wrong signal’ to investors. Though he
has granted approval to projects like the construction in
Jaitapur of a nuclear power plant by the French nuclear
giant Areva—subject to 35 conditions and safeguards, reasonably
enough—Ramesh’s willingness to suspend, revoke
or impose moratoria on development projects previously
green-lighted in contravention of laws protecting the environment
and people’s rights has shocked the oligarchy. One
after another, projects dear to the pockets of some of the
world’s most powerful corporations but potentially devastating
to India’s poorer citizens and its damaged environment—
from genetically modified vegetables (Monsanto)
to mining operations (Vendanta)—have been brought to a
screeching halt by the environment minister.
Amidst the stinking muck of India’s domestic politics,
Ramesh appears as the rare bureaucrat who actually takes
both his job and his country’s laws, in both letter and spirit,
seriously; a servant of the people who actually believes that
a country that produced such a human being as Mohandas
Gandhi should do more than pay mere lip service to Gandhi’s
message about the link between environmental sustainability
and social justice. Jairam Ramesh also may be,
if the Cancun Summit on climate change held in December
2010 is any indication, one of India’s best assets as it seeks
to play a larger role on the international stage and assert
leadership in setting the global agenda.
A year before Cancun, as predictions of the devastating
effects of global warming became more dire, world leaders
met in Copenhagen under the auspices of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change. There
was great hope that the election of Barack Obama would
result in the United States finally taking an aggressive
stance to rein in the country’s profligate carbon production.
(According to the US Department of Energy, in 2008 the
average American emitted 20 metric tonnes of carbon, the
average German 10 tonnes, the average Chinese 5 tonnes, the average Indian 1.3 tonnes.) That hope was dashed as
the United States failed to assert the leadership on which
so much of the world was counting. In the face of a financial
meltdown and record unemployment, Obama was in no position
to offer anything meaningful at Copenhagen. India
and China, meanwhile, refused to accept that their growth
be sacrificed so that suburban Americans could keep guzzling
cheap gas and lighting their homes with coal-produced
electricity. The meeting ended in a stalemate.
What a difference a year can make. Against all expectations,
the Cancun meeting produced a breakthrough agreement
on climate change—one that has restored hope the
world can be saved from the worst of global warming’s
devastations. It also launched Jairam Ramesh to international
acclaim as one of the most effective leaders in a bloc
of emerging nations no longer content to sit fuming on the
sidelines while the wealthy nations watch the planet burn.
India’s close alliance with the United States and its abandonment
of the principles of the Non-Aligned Movement
were hailed by the George W Bush administration as proof
of India’s coming of age. But the Cancun Summit demonstrates
that India’s emerging global clout is well served by
multilateralism.
The implications for the United States from Cancun are
profound. Jairam Ramesh asserted in word and deed the
power of emerging economies, long shunted to the margins
of the institutions of global order, to lead a fractious world
to consensus around urgent global threats. Despite this,
Ramesh was roundly criticised in India for suggesting that
India might be open to committing to non-voluntary carbon
limits. The complaints came from both sides: on the right,
members of the BJP, including Narendra Modi, the politician
who has arguably derived the most benefit from India’s
corporate oligarchy, argued that any cap will limit India’s
growth by constraining its carbon output; from the left, the
influential Centre for Science and the Environment argued
that the world’s historically big emitters and wealthier
countries, especially the United States, must make more of an effort and not expect India to sacrifice where they will
not. But Ramesh argued that for multilateral solutions to
work, every country had to be open to compromise.
That the Cancun Summit, a meeting attended by representatives
from 190 different countries ranging from the
tiny, drowning Maldives to the carbon big boys of China
and the United States could achieve any kind of a consensus
is a miracle. Moreover, the issue of equity in dealing with
climate change, a key Indian position, was enforced by the
creation of a 100-million-dollar Green Climate Fund paid
for by the wealthier countries. Bangladesh, likely to be devastated
by rising sea levels, will receive help from the fund,
a development very much in India’s interest.
At Cancun, as it has during negotiations of the Doha
round of the World Trade Organization or at the G20, India
teamed up with fellow emerging giants in pressing the United
States to make deeper cuts in proportion to its wealth
and its oversized share of carbon production. Whether or
not a politically weakened president Obama with a Republican-controlled Congress hostile to admitting that climate
change even exists and a United States still reeling from
record unemployment will be able to deliver any meaningful
commitments remains to be seen. What is clear, however,
is that emerging powers are no longer waiting for the
United States to act to assert leadership.
Cancun showed that the United States risks being further
marginalised in a world losing its patience with an
unrepentant resource hog and mega-carbon polluter. From
Mexico, Ramesh returned to New Delhi where, fresh from
his triumph in Cancun, he muscled through a memorandum
of understanding with China for the two countries to
collaborate on creating the green technologies which alone
can fulfill the promise of economic growth without environmental
collapse.
If there is any sign, after this season of scandals, that
India’s democracy is redeemable, it is the support Jairam
Ramesh clearly enjoys from powerful elements in his party
and his government. In the Baghavad Gita, the lotus leaf remains
unsullied by the filth below it. As the Cancun meeting
reached its successful conclusion, Jairam Ramesh referenced
the famous quote by Mexican revolutionary Porfirio
Diaz that Mexico’s main problem is that it is too close to the
United States and too far from God. He then praised Mexico’s
foreign secretary Patricia Espinosa’s job overseeing the
meeting, saying: “since I come from a country which has
more goddesses than gods, not only has God been present,
but a goddess has been present today.” Hindu iconography
places Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, pristinely atop the
lotus. For India to achieve durable and equitable prosperity
while preserving its international credibility, it must rise
above corruption and unfettered corporate greed, reassert the rule of laws designed to protect and serve the people,
and give more than lip-service to the values of its founding
fathers and mothers.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Kabir Arora
10 January 2011
12:19 AM
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I'm not sure when Center for Science & Environment joined the band of leftists but otherwise the inputs here are awesome. And good to hear that some one is also appreciating the politicians who have done better than their colleagues. Atleast Jairam has been far better Environment Minister than his predecessors. On a special note lets not be taken over by our emotions.
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