Station 50

Man had not walked on the moon when I was born. It took another five years for that “giant step for mankind.” I was born a long time ago; a rather long time.

In the year I was born India lost its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. So perhaps my birth led to a leadership change in the country.

Even while I was a young boy, a not-so-silent change was happening in my country. Seeds of high-yielding food crop varieties were being introduced in the fields of farmers who had access to irrigation. The gift hamper that these farmers received from the government also included chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Together, the ingredients helped these farmers to increase food production in their farms, leading the country to food self-sufficiency. Exempted from the need to import food, there was a new vigour in the country.

Irrigation plus a package of support ensured that the country was self sufficient in food

The political map was also being redrawn simultaneously. While farmers with irrigation were recipients of government largesse to produce more crops from their farms, those who tended rain-fed farms were being ignored. While the Green Revolution was sowing the seeds of growth in less than one-third of country’s farmlands, seeds of discontent were being sown in the remaining two-thirds. I continue to see my country suffer from the fruits that the seeds of discontent produced.

My generation did not face famines that our fathers faced. But, we did live through shortages. And we did realise that jaggery was a reasonably good substitute for sugar in coffee.

We were not the wallflower generation. We just missed it. Thankfully. We did not need acid to see what others could not. We saw what we saw. We didn’t believe that there was anything more to see, or know.

Neither were we from the consumerist generation. We were before that. We believe that taking care of our parents is as important as supporting our children.

We did not know much about Vietnam. But we knew of Bangladesh, Mukti Bahini and Sheikh Mujibur Rehman. As our fathers tuned Marconi-valve radios to catch the latest from the front, we found new games to be played during blackouts. We had heard about Sam Maneckshaw and Jagjit Singh Aurora, the sardar general to whom Niazi had surrendered his revolver. We remember pictures of starvation and genocide from the war, refugees walking across the border.

Manoj Kumar injected us with patriotism – “Meri desh ki dharti.” He also gave us more advice. It was in his nature to do so. He told us not to trust blondes – “Koi jab tumhara hriday tod de, tadapta hua jab koyi chod de …”

Even in our childhood we knew Manoj Kumar’s patriotism was kitsch. But we got a lump in our throat whenever we heard Lata’s Aye mere watan ke logon. We still do, even though the Indo-China War happened before we were born.

We were rather young when the Emergency happened. Our parents experienced it, and through them us. The impact was forceful – we promised that we would never gamble with our democracy ever again.

We saw the turmoil in Assam, Kashmir and Punjab. We heard about killings in Punjab in our daily news on radio. We followed Operation Bluestar and its sequels – Indira Gandhi assassination and the post-assassination riots with apprehension and pain.

We realised that if the earth shakes when a tree falls, it will shake again, and again. It shook in 1984, 1992, 1993 and again in 2002.

India became a nuclear power in our lifetime. Not once, but twice. Some among us gave our lives in the Kargil War that followed.

Our rockets reached space in our lifetimes, though they first landed in the sea. Recently we saw our leader take credit for our spacecraft reaching the Mars orbit – a project that was conceived and implemented well before his time. The media applauded. A senior journalist repeated that his fingerprints were on the Mangalyaan.

That is where we are, when the media is no longer a chronicler of events but considers itself a driver of history. Every evening at nine, when we return from work to the comfort of our living rooms, we watch our political proxy – Arnab Goswami – demand answers for the nation.

Arnab Goswami-ko gussa bahut aata hai. He is the embodiment of our collective anger. He rallies against the “corrupt”, and stumps them in their answers every evening. And, if through the week we have residual anger left in us, then Aamir Khan provides us the platform for catharsis on Sunday mornings. The truth shall prevail, he insists.

We are angry, and impatient. For the first time since the Freedom Movement, we have been able to collectivise our anger. Anna-ji did it for us first; Arvind-ji turned it into a political force; and Narendra-ji continues to harvest the fruits of our collective anger and impatience.

We use QWERTY keyboards to register our anger. Only birds tweeted during our childhood. Now we tweet through our laptops and smart phones, but are unable to hear the tweet of the common house sparrow.

It is ironic that my greatest regret in the past 50 years relates to our first angry young man. He exhorted us to be angry, act and change our lives.

Flash back to boarding school days. Those were the days in the ninth grade when Amitabh Bachchan, Sashi Kapoor, Parveen Babi and Hema Malini were at school to shoot Do aur do paanch. More than a month at the location, they had enough time to indulge us with long autographs. “To Gopi, all the best,” wrote Bachchan when I stretched my notebook to him.

Later, when I came to Thrissur for my graduation the Coolie accident happened. The diehard fans among my friends were anguished. They prayed, sent telegrams to him for his recovery. I mentioned that I had an autograph. They wanted to buy it off me. The bidding began, and finally the deal was struck at one tea and two aloo bondas. Yes, I should have got more. I certainly should have got more for Amitabh Bachchan’s autograph. I was young and unaware of the ways of the market.

Today, I cannot claim to be young, but am still not very aware of the market. I get my high from my work. I write as I understand – as the truth unfolds before me. Unlike the oncologist, I do not need to climb the Everest to get a sense of being. Or, unlike the investment banker, I do not need to dive in the Andamans to look inside. God has been kind; immensely kind.

[I reached Station 50 a few months ago].

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Are the national elections bipolar?

Turn on any television channel and you will think that India is going through bipolar national elections. It is like a boxing match, being fought in proxy. In one corner is one man, Narendra Modi, ably represented by whoever his spokesperson is in the studio that evening. In the other corner is the Gandhi family, again represented by an articulate spokesperson.

Somewhere the richness and colour of the regional parties that became the integral part of Indian polity since 1996 seems to be missing in the predominant media representation of these elections. Conspicuous by their near-absence in the media coverage in this year’s elections are dramatis personae such as Lalu Prasad Yadav, Mayawati, Nitish Kumar, Navin Patnaik, M. Karunanidhi, etc. Mamata Banerjee, Chandrababu Naidu and Omar Abdullah make occasional appearance.

Cut back to the period between 1995 and 1998, when the country was preparing for the 1996 general elections and also when the United Front Government faced many trust motions in Parliament. The television screens were full of leaders from regional political parties.

Plantations such as this cardamom estate in Idukki district have been
in the eye of a political storm in the recent months [Pic: Varun Warrier]

A trend towards bipolarity has its implications for environmental decisions in an ecosystem-diverse country like India. Take for instance the case of the mid-altitude plateaus of Kerala, represented by Idukki and Wayanad districts, which have been in the news during the run-up to these elections. At an average altitude between 800 and 1000 metres, these plateaus were malaria-prone regions. As with the Gudalur plateau in Tamil Nadu contiguous to Wayanad, these plateaus were only sparsely populated till the 1940s. The influx of settlers came when there was effective medical cure for malaria (1).

Those who initially went to settle in these plateaus were from communities that were landless and had the daring to go to dangerous terrains. While the landed gentry stayed back in the plains, and boasted about temple festivals and caparisoned elephants, the landless settlers braved the wild elephant herds and cultivated every inch of land they could lay their hands on. The women tended the farms, protected the children from wild animals while the men trekked for days to the nearest market town to sell what the family produced.

When this settler community gets slapped with orders emerging from the Kasturirangan Committee limiting their activities, it protests (2). While one can argue on the conservation versus livelihoods debate, the fact remains that if a representative has to take these issues effectively to the Parliament it has to be someone who is from the region and knows its history and ecology. He or she needs a political agenda that is tailor-made to represent the interests of the region, and not one that has been averaged out for the entire country. And this is where regional parties score over omnibus national parties.

The 1996 general elections and the years of the United Front Government was the period when regionalism and federalism bloomed in the country. By this time the results from two socio-economic processes initiated between 1989 and 1991 were maturing. As part of the economic liberalisation there was a focus on the middle class as a consumer base for the goods and services. This created a new kind of economic aspiration for a wider group of people. This bolstered the aspirations for development and growth from caste and region-based consolidations that were born after the implementation of the Mandal Committee report in 1989 (3).

Happening in parallel with this was a coming together of local environmental movements to demand greater accountability from the electoral candidates in select constituencies. A group of organisations, led by Narmada Bachao Andolan, established the National Alliance of People’s Movement (NAPM), with an aim of bringing people’s issues into the agenda of the 1996 elections (4). Similarly, another group of environmental organisations formed a network called the Jan Vikas Andolan to publicly question candidates on their environmental concerns (5).

However, it is not the case that regional parties are more environment friendly than the national ones. In fact, the trend in the mid 1990s was that each of the regional parties was pushing for development projects in their regions, oftentimes unmindful of incorporating environmental safeguards.

The difference is that the feedback loops between the people and the policymakers are shorter with regional parties. So when people ask for development or conservation that is location or ecosystem-specific they can communicate and get action for their needs quickly and effectively. The accountability for the policy maker becomes that much sharper. For instance, Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam party, who focussed on the urban areas at the cost of the larger rural population, has had to sit out for a decade.

At a local level, the perceived dichotomy between development and conservation also disappears. For the demarcation of the ecologically sensitive area (ESA) the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (Madhav Gadgil Committee) had recommended consultations through the local bodies under the Panchayats and Biodiversity Acts (6). The High Level Working Group on Western Ghats (Kasturirangan Committee), which was tasked to work out the modalities for implementing the earlier committee’s recommendations, overlooked this and went through marking the ESAs using satellite imagery (7). And this is causing the controversy in the hill districts.

So much so that the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) had to make amendments to its 13 October 2013 notification, accepting the recommendations of the Kasturirangan Committee that declared 37% area of the Western Ghats as an ESA where development activities are restricted.

Through an office memorandum dated 20 December 2013, MoEF stated that the boundary of the ESA and the regulatory regime would be finalised after obtaining the views of the stakeholders and state governments. MoEF assured that the recommendations will not cause restrictions to any normal activities related to plantations and agriculture; and that the restrictions listed in the notification will apply only to new and expansion projects, and not to the existing ones.  

The Kasturirangan Committee reportedly used higher resolution satellite imagery than the Gadgil Committee while demarcating the ESA. However, technical minutiae cannot replace a broad-based democratic process that would have been more acceptable to the people on the ground.

So when the media represents these elections as bipolar, what is being lost is the space that accommodates the various nuances of development and environment discussions in the country.

It could be possible that the media is reading the situation wrong or over-presenting bipolarity. In the theatre of talk shows and televised shouting matches, bipolarity adds drama.

There is reality and there is the media’s perception of the reality. The country today has access only to the media’s perception of reality. Will the real picture be as bipolar as what is being made out will be clear on May 16.

_______________________

1.            Adams T. Gudalur: A community at the crossroads. In: Hockings P, editor. Blue Mountains: The ethnography and biogeography of a South Indian region: Oxford University Press; 1989.

2.            Rajagopal K. Ghats row and its aftermath. The Hindu.  20 March 2014.

3.            Ramakrishnan V, Singh SR. Vital pieces of a jigsaw. Frontline.  16 April 2014.

4.            Warrier SG. The centre will hold. The Hindu Business Line.  26 February 1996.

5.            Warrier SG. Eco issues may feature in select LS campaigns. The Hindu Business Line.  27 March 1996.

6.            Report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel. Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India; 2011.

7.            Report of the High Level Working Group on Western Ghats. Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India; 2013.

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