In the baking heat of Delhi, the squirrels are lying flat on their belly in flowerpots I had watered in the morning, cooling their bodies with the residual moisture that takes its time to evaporate.
There were no cooling flowerpots at the meeting I attended of grass-roots workers from across India. They ranged from earnest environment experts and opponents of big dams to anti-nuclear campaigners who fear a Fukushima-like disaster could not be ruled out in India, not least because foreign collaborators of nuclear plants they build will not accept responsibility if things go wrong. What are they afraid of?
The meeting included critics of India’s recent economic policies that have widened the rich-poor divide and now, in a payback moment for businesses that supported Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election, threaten to evict millions from their ancestral mineral-rich forestlands, abodes of predominantly tribal people in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and the north-eastern states.
An eerie apprehension was palpable among the discussants of a state-directed assault, aborted by Manmohan Singh under public pressure. A military campaign was imminent, if the discussants had it right, to uproot the tribespeople’s resistance, which according to the Indian state is led by the “most serious internal security challenge” — the Maoists.
The state doesn’t want to admit how exploiting mineral and water-rich land was a ruthless way to reap private profits during the country’s ongoing economic downturn. It only projects the Maoists as a nuisance.
We have seen this before. “It is the dream of every merchant to be able to sell without having to buy,” wrote historian Irfan Habib about Clive’s plunder of Bengal. A bloodless way to send the Maoists packing was to terminate what the local people have for decades called “the bania-contractor-politician nexus”.
The nexus, they say, has exploited tribal women, land, water, timber and minerals mercilessly. The state doesn’t want to hear that.
The men and women I met were no Maoists, of course. On the contrary, the Maoists have targeted some of the environment activists gathered there. The motley group was, in fact, meeting to figure out the challenges its members faced from the nation’s first unadulterated Right-wing government.
The meeting consisted of eager, experienced, patriotic and extremely worried but equally hardy activists up for a fight. What struck me though from their discussion were familiar disputes over what needed to be done to get things back on track. It was tempting to share the assumption that there would be another chance to redeem their pledge as humanists.
Were some of the participants right in abandoning the Congress Party as unworthy of their trust? The question was a familiar point of discord. Or had the Congress abandoned its secular sheen, as some others argued, to become a B Team of the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party?
The BJP had got an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha after a long, unrelenting journey since its inception as the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1952.
Should the defeated Left parties link up with the Aam Aadmi Party? There was a dispute among the discussants about the AAP. Was it a standard-bearer of secularism and economic populism, even if it was somewhat inexperienced to fill the vacuum created by the Left’s absence?
Or should the vanquished comrades go back to the Congress, cap in hand, even if they felt betrayed by it at times, given the enviable physical reach of India’s oldest political behemoth?
Some comrades suggested that the AAP was a Hindutva ploy to weaken the Congress. Others saw its involvement with electoral politics as counterproductive. They wanted the AAP and themselves to go back to leading and organising people’s campaigns.
Someone brought up the subject of doctored EVMs (electronic voting machines) to shore up a suspicion first articulated by the BJP about the veracity of the voting system that India has adopted for elections.
There is a strong argument against EVMs by BJP leader Subramanyam Swamy, which is available on YouTube. He apparently filed a case around the 2009 elections, which the Congress surprised the forecasters by winning emphatically.
And now some of the Leftist activists were using arguments not dissimilar to Mr Swamy’s to explain the trauma inflicted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s one-man campaign on an entire array of his leftist foes.
Major democracies do not rely on EVMs to assess their people’s opinions. This is what Mr Swamy claimed, and someone should ask him if he still holds that view.
It would be preposterous, of course, to explain the victory of Hindutva, which has earlier owned its inspiration from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, on a flawed system of balloting used in Indian elections.
As the meeting pondered its existential quandary my mind was scouring the morning’s newspaper that spoke of the Intelligence Bureau advising the Prime Minister’s Office to rein in activists of the kind I was listening to.
Whether they can regroup or continue to lick their wounds in talent-filled seminar halls will be decided among other factors by the state’s intentions.
The IB report says that while caste discrimination, human rights and big dams were earlier chosen by international organisations to discredit India at global forums, the recent shift in the choice of issues was to encourage “growth-retarding campaigns” focused on extractive industries, genetically modified organisms and foods, climate change and anti-nuclear issues.
The squirrels, I notice, have been driven away by a parliament of crows. Then came the parrots, the mynahs, a restless sunbird, and though they have become rare, a couple of sparrows, to sip water from a bowl kept for them. Everyone is waiting for the monsoons, the winners and the losers alike.
By arrangement with Dawn
