Green Lantern

WITH 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 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.