Climate change will fuel India’s Naxalite bloodshed
By Dr DK Giri and Michael Connellan
In 2007, the world heard a watershed announcement. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the globe it was witnessing its first climate change conflict. Ki-moon said the ethnic bloodshed in the Darfur region of Sudan was triggered, at least in part, by man-made climate change.
UN statistics revealed rainfall in Darfur had declined 40 per cent in two decades, as monsoons were affected by a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures. Ethnic Arabs and Africans, who had co-existed peacefully for generations, fell into catastrophic war over diminishing water supplies and farm land. Darfur remains in chaos and the UN has warned one million people face food and water shortages in the coming weeks.
India also faces the prospect of paying the price of climate change in bloody conflict. The vast increases in crop failure and forest degradation predicted for rural India offers the Naxalite insurgency the prospect of long-term growth. The movement has always drawn support from those who find their agricultural livelihoods are simply not putting enough food on the table. The insurgency could be widened, deepened and prolonged if climate change is allowed to ravage our nation’s rural areas.
The Delhi Sustainable Development Summit in February saw US Senator John Kerry address delegates by video-link from Washington. Describing India’s future in a world of climate breakdown, he said: “Scientists are now warning that the Himalayan glaciers, which supply water to almost a billion people, could disappear completely by 2035. This would reduce the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra rivers to cracked earth.”
Kerry warned that “rising sea levels are forcing salt water into the Ganges, with the potential to destroy millions of acres of fertile Indian soil.” He added that farming output in India is projected to fall as much as 30 to 40 per cent by 2080. If this grim prediction is realised, millions of rural livelihoods would become extinct. But the rural dwellers will, of course, continue to exist after their jobs vanish. Despite the drift to the cities, India’s rural population continues to grow in size. Wishful thinking would lead us to hope the death of the Indian peasant means the growth of the urban middle class. It does not. It means the growth of the city slum dweller – and the Naxalite.
It was, after all, the degradation of India’s rural environments that helped to fuel the current level of Naxalite rebellion. Successive governments have overseen swathes of agricultural and forest land being converted to industrial use. It has been estimated that 30 million rural Indians, more than the entire population of Canada, have been displaced since independence in 1947. This process is nothing less than internal colonialism. Naxalism, in its current form, can be viewed as the fight-back.
To stem the red threat, the green banner must be raised. Environmentally conscious lifestyles must be adopted for the sake of peace and state security. The tools of the battle to disarm Naxalites are not only police rifles. They are energy saving lightbulbs and the ignition keys to our cars. It is bizarre, indeed almost incomprehensible that such an epic issue relates directly to the most mundane aspects of modern life. But that’s the way it is.
Despite the high profile recent killings, there has been some good progress with regards to Naxalism. Thousands of villages have accepted cash rewards for agreeing to refuse them support. Surrender policies, which allow insurgents to be rehabilitated and protected, have attracted hundreds. The Forest Rights Act can be interpreted as a smart government move to combat the spread of Naxalism, protecting as it does the rights of millions of rural dwellers to land and livelihoods among the trees.
But climate change is the one factor that could tragically undo all these other human efforts – that is the nature of the beast.
The Congress election manifesto released on March 24 is a 9,000 word list of seductive promises. But the document contains only 205 words related to climate change. That’s just 205 words on the single greatest threat to our nation’s future. Congress claims it will implement “in letter and spirit” the National Action Plan for Climate Change unveiled by the Prime Minister last summer. This Plan refused to establish targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
The BJP’s own election manifesto is 16,000 words long. Less than 500 words of the document are focused directly on climate change and the environment, but it does at least concede that “containing global warming is essential to protecting life and security.”
Two leading UK environmental campaigners have suggested that we replace the term ‘climate change’ with different tags. Johann Hari prefers ‘climate chaos,’ while George Monbiot suggests ‘climate breakdown.’ Chaos and breakdown will indeed be the results of climate change in our rural lands.
This article originally appeared in Civil Society magazine – http://www.civilsocietyonline.com/