Indian Environmentalism: Discourse, Politics and Fragments

Abstract

It is often customary to represent environmentalism in the industrialised North as a predominantly middle class phenomenon whereas Indian environmentalism is hyphenated with questions of equity and distributive justice. When it is true that Indian environmental activism is a response to developmental challenges posed by the state and the penetration of global capital, there is an uncritical and unproblematic theorization of such activism that often reduces Indian environmentalism to questions of life and livelihood. The present paper challenges conventional theoretical assumptions of Indian environmentalism by highlighting the fractures within the theory and practice of Indian environmental discourses. It engages with questions like how competing conceptions of environment and development bring forth new dimensions to human-environment relationship. How the political expressions of these movements repress and produce conflicting narratives? What counts as environment and environmental problems? Drawing from the theoretical vocabulary of post-structuralism, the paper uses existing theoretical literature as an entry point to engage with more critical questions of representation, authenticity etc. It also uses qualitative data drawn from visits to two areas of environmental activism (anti-POSCO movement and anti-Vedanta movement in Odisha) which includes interviews with various groups of people. At a theoretical level, the paper argues that representing Indian environmentalism as a survival imperative not only zoifies affected people, but also projects the North as the subject of environmental history. The site visit and interviews establish that affected people in the POSCO and Vedanta project areas are not uniform in their response to ideas like, development‟, state and „people‟. It is also revealed that questions of identity, class and gender mediate the way people experience state and „development‟.