This paper dwells on the catastrophic predicament (predicating both the recent past and immediate future) facing contemporary India, centering around the perpetuation of what may be defined as a non-relational praxis between technology, religion and the environment. A marked paradigm shift is revealed in terms of an unhealthy collusion between muscular nationalism, a jingoistic evolutionary divine and sheer bio-denials in cataclysmic succession. A technology-backed theophany excludes the environment and climate justice as part of the posthuman narrative of overall species’ well-being. Development chronicles, chained to anthropocentric monopoly, entail and foretell calamitous outcomes that have been sanitized as petty casualties for profitable utilitarianism. This has shunned an Indian posthuman future that could and ought to have been founded on species welfare and attentive to a cosmopolitan democratization. Instead, the natural equilibrium has been avariciously exploited and tampered, with zero tolerance and total disregard for fragile Indian ecosystems. This plutocratic privileging of investment capital over natural sustainability is the contemporary Indian ‘Billboard Religious Imaginary’ that shuns a traditional mindful evolutionary divine, in favor of a baneful pantheon-promotional. This results in a posthuman defeatism for the subcontinent, where all psycho-spiritual technologies are rendered farcical. This jingoistic anti-heterodox also results in a post-disciplinary dead end, where scientific and logical meaning themselves collapse. This paper critiques this atrophied and mercenary planning ethic in India today, that is sans ethics and anticipatedly fatalistic in the light of proper posthuman contiguities and continuities.
While there is a marked clarion call for post-anthropocentric social work today, present-day India is clearly going in the opposite direction. In their book Post-Anthropocentric Social Work: Critical Posthuman and New Materialist Perspectives, Vivienne Bozalek and Bob Pease opine that human exceptionalism has to be vehemently challenged and, at this precarious present, radically subverted, so that the subtlest “entanglements of humans, non-human life and the natural environment” (n. pag) are not ignored or trampled over. The cornerstone of this realization concerns the optionless endorsement of an ethical sensibility that we have seem in the case of ground-level environmental movements like the Chipko Movement (1973) and ‘ecotage’ (ecological sabotage) activities demonstrated in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wretch Gang (1975). Ramachandra Guha notes in an essay titled ‘The past and present of Indian environmentalism’ that “a wide spectrum of natural resource conflicts in the 1970s and 1980s” had already become the norm, although not all of this base-level activism received media hype and public attention. What was a common noticeable paradigm in all these cases was the fact that local communities were persistently deprived of their access to natural resources on which they were dependent for their livelihood, by agents and agencies favoring urban and industrial development. Peasants, pastoralists, artisanal fisherfolk, tribal herdsmen and indigenous gatherers of forest produce lose out to factory owners, commercial trawlers, and industrial developers. What is most alarming in this phenomenon is that eco-precarity has never been given a serious thought because the development paradigm has constantly been promoted via a ruthless bio-denial at work. Ground-level pro-earth movements in India were branded as conspiracies of Western imperialism to keep the subcontinent ‘backward.’ Guha mentions the names of prominent environment reporters such as Anil Agarwal, Darryl D’ Monte, Kalpana Sharma, Usha Rai, Nagesh Hegde, Madhav Gadgil and A.K.N. Reddy who promoted the cause of eco-sustainability and social justice – something which Guha describes as ‘environmentalism for the poor.’ The marginalization of the poor from the mainstay of natural resources was translated as a bourgeois agenda, as the pedagogy and curricula of secondary and higher education projected courses on environmental sociology and history.
The present debacle of posthuman defeatism should and can easily be traced back to the changing perceptions of the ninetees’ when globalization and liberalization was welcomed on Indian soil by votaries of the Congress-lobby who perceived the license-permit-quota-Raj as anti-development. The dismantling of state controls over indigenous natural reserves and resources, not only meant that Environmental Impact Assessment(s) “were brushed off even as they were asked” (Guha n.pag), but also that environmentalists were dissed, demonized and downsized as “socialist stooges” and “old-fashioned leftists” (Guha n.pag). Interestingly, when foreign investment was actually forthcoming, these environmentalists could no longer be blamed as capitalist cronies who were agents of advanced Western countries. A change of terminology was inevitable but the status of both the ecology and its campaigners remained unaltered, and instead went from bad to worse. The Union Environment Ministry was set up by the Late Indian PM Indira Gandhi, a conscientious environmentalist who corresponded with the likes of Salim Ali. But this Ministry has been in three decades (1990-2020) completely warped by Central executive hegemony.
Environmental stress raises hard questions throughout the globe. But in the Indian context, they have been daintily swept under the rug. Unregulated mining, industrialization of grazing land, commercial trawlers depleting oceanic reserves, choked river-basins, polluting groundwater aquifers, drying up water tables, untreated waste accumulation, and fast disappearing green cover – all became issues that not only went seriously unaddressed but went from bad to worse. Guha describes India as “an environmental basket case,” where the nature agenda has been turned farcical, in sync with what we have seen with Trump’s America, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and AMLO’s Mexico. The worst performers as far as the Environmental Democracy Index is concerned are Haiti, Malaysia and Namibia; with the likes of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines and The Republic of Congo dissing monitored compliance and public involvement in impact assessment, at every level. Among the top-five most polluting countries, India is positioned third, contributing to 7% of global pollution, next to the USA (15%) AND China (30%). Low air quality, hyper-consumption of fossil fuels and accelerated contaminations, has posited present-day India as a callous nation in major bio-denial, at a time when even smaller nations like Denmark are projecting half of its energy consumption to come from renewables by 2030 and to be completely independent of fossil fuels by 2050. Dearth of local oversight, corruption, fraud, industry deregulation, rollback of environmental policies, According to Niklas Hohne, a climatologist, founding partner of the ‘NewClimate Institute’ and creator of the ‘Climate Action Tracker’ that determine a nation’s “fair share” of development, vis-à-vis bio-preservation, based on a variety of criteria like past emissions, per capita pollution and economic capability. Indeed, the idea of posthuman defeatism can neither be fathomed, critically appreciated, not ethically normalized, unless climate pledges of nation-states made in international panels like the Paris Agreement (2015) in the UN Climate Change Summit, match with their climate change report cards.
Posthuman ecocriticism understands that the Anthropocene has ushered in human exceptionalism from the geo-sphere, resulting in ‘Posthuman Cognitive Estrangement’ from one’s immediate ‘natural’ environment. Whether this leads to a post-natural configuration of ontological presence, is indeed debatable from the point of view of environmental ethics. In the face of a precarious ‘planetary environmental,’ nature is no more discounted as “an inanimate background that merely hosts human affairs” (Jon n.pag). A ‘new materialist ecopolitics’ or ‘posthumanist normativity’ is the urgent need of the hour, without which the desired ends of environmental activism will never be arrived, especially when and where Third World environmentalism is concerned. Unless we recognize and prioritize “the webs of our material dependency on non-human critters” (n.pag), our empirical experiences and our ‘response-ability’ to non-human life forms will not complement each other. The systematic erosion and even usurpation of the ‘biological idea of culture’ that was traditionally intrinsic to the Indian ontological ethos, needs to be critiqued and thwarted at every step.
In man’s ‘self-fashioning’ and presently ‘self-becoming’ in the natural world, the hybrid configurations of human and non-human taxonomies are complex. We are already thinking in terms of a post-human praxis, within which human/non-human/in-human natures are co-existing and co-interacting. Serpil Oppermann in the essay ‘From Posthumanism to Posthuman Ecocriticism’ points to Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, who in their in their ‘Introduction’ to The New Materialisms, argue that “the ways we understand and interact with nature are in need of a commensurate updating” (5). It is quite likewise that ‘human agency’ (whether in singular or collective terms) come under the critical scanner in amidst a posthuman reality, where material feminisms, material ecocriticism, eco-materialism, agential realism, prismatic ecology, bioethics, critical animal and plant studies, and material ecocriticism – congregate to generate radical epistemic conformations. Katherine Hayles’s postulation of a posthumanist ethics, cry for the urgency to get out of some of the old boxes and opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means” (Hayles, 285). This is also in alignment with Cary Wolfe’s idea that we must “rethink the notion of the human tout court” (1998, 42). This is not only acknowledging but making sacrosanct the truth that all species have permeable boundaries in our natural-cultural continuum. Posthuman defeatism in present-day India stems from the basic fallacy that the ‘material human gaze’ has been ruthlessly over-prioritised, since the nineties, while various pro-conservationist nations all over the world were, in the words of Roberto Manzocco, increasingly prioritizing “the cognitive panorama beyond the human horizon” (Manzocco n.pag). It is indeed debatable whether, like bees, humans are at all capable of co-operative socialist behavior. But the extreme immediacy of de-routing the continued trajectory of ‘humancentredness’ or ‘anthropomorphism.’ Seen from the perspective of the ‘ontology of the posthuman,’ we have to systematically question, what Francesca Ferrando calls, “our anthropocentric prejudices” that color everything where we posit or have to posit our very ‘imagining.’
In the present post-millennial decade, so ruthless has been human agency on the Indian subcontinental terrain, that non-human spatial collectives have almost been considered inanimate and techno-scientifically pliant in every manner. A violent state complicity in geo/gyno-cydal ‘project’ ventures, have severely strained “the marriage of social justice and sustainability” (Guha’s words). This is also in keeping with Helena Feder’s call to uphold what she describes as “the biological idea of culture” (Feder n.pag). That there is a limit to man’s ‘construction of nature’ is axiomatic. But “a (state imposed) bio-social context of unrestrained capitalism” (Nayar 241), stifles consciousness raising reactions in a big way. This is the moment when anti-state resistance against such heinous acts of ecocide ought to be bolstered momentum and persistent anthropomorphic, patriarchal and capitalist attacks on the natural landscape and its topographical ‘minorities’ ought to be thwarted.
One such stolid contemporary example in present-day India is the exertion of a muscular right-wing nationalism in favour of a pro-development agenda on a national scale and even in terms of overseas investments. The ramifications of these ‘projects’ clearly violate climate justice and social justice. On countless occasions, we have witnessed anhilatory debacles that reminds us of what Lawrence Buell mentioned in The Environmental Imagination that “[A]pocalypse is the single-most powerful metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal” (93). Hence, unless “a seismic shift in the way life is imagined and experienced” (Oppermann, 35) is regularized, our agentic role in the present-day scenario, will never practically materialize. Any man-made ‘project’ will have to negotiate with a given eco-narrative, and we must objectively ascertain whether the venture will eventually be worth it or not. This is where things are going haywire in India today.
Addressing the World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS) in February, 2021, PM Modi spoke candidly about interconnections between conservation, public health and the fate of the rural poor. However, lines such as “The road to fighting climate change is through climate justice” and climate justice is basically about the long-term picture and trusteeship for the poor (de-quoted), appear empty rhetoric, when the bigger picture is revealed. Incidentally, the PM had also been selected for the UN Champions of the Earth Award, alongside the French President Emmanuel Macron in the Policy Leadership category, for efforts regarding the International Solar Alliance (Refer to CoP21 Climate Conference held in Paris). However, broader statistics reveal a bigger picture. Shreeshan Venkatesh, writing for the fortnightly English magazine Down to Earth reports that the best words to describe the Modi-led BJP government’s attitude about climate change are “Ambivalent. Schizophrenic. Lukewarm.” Ecological conservation is not at the top of the government’s agenda. Instead, mercenary modernization and a rush to make cosmetic amendments has become the mainstay with environmental management in this country. We won’t preserve our national ‘natural endowments’ from the perspective of Deep Ecology. Instead, our proactive anthropocentrism would upset the existing status quo of bio-centric balance and then we would project ‘projects’ like mini afforestation drives, to cover up the misdemeanours and hide evident transgressions.
One must keep in mind that the present Indian PM, as the-then CM of Gujrat, had published an e-book in 2011 titled Convenient Action: Gujrat’s Response to Challenges of Climate Change, where tribute was paid to the leading American environmentalist and statesman Al Gore. Modi had critiqued climate sceptics, who ignore their moral duty, by stepping out of, what William Rueckert in his 1996 essay ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,’ described as “an ecological poetics…an ecological vision” (Rueckart 114). In Modi’s own words, “Having been in public life, I am aware of behind the scene lobbying by vested interests that normally accompany any such carefully orchestrated campaigns” (‘Is Narendra Modi a Climate Sceptic?’ The Guardian. 9, Sep., 2014). One has to seriously examine what made him get hoisted on his own petard.
One learns that the phenomenal electoral victories of Modi Sarkar in the 2014-2020 phase the pressures of the RSS and private corporate players feel heavy on Modi’s policy making and decision taking. Although Modi renamed the ‘Ministry of Environment and Forests’ as ‘Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change,’ fund allocation to this ministry was slashed by half. Laws and regulations related to environmental protection were removed or diluted. Relaxations were especially noticeable for flurried industrial activity. Mandatory clearances from the National Board for Wildlife for projects close to protected areas were lifted. Modi went anti-NGO in general and sought to thwart representatives from non-governmental organisations in the NBW, although the Supreme Court of India stalled this move. Approval from tribal councils for projects inside forested areas were lifted for small mining projects. Even the moratorium on new industrial activity in the most polluted areas of the country was lifted. The Energy Information Administration informs that while China’s emissions are levelling by 2030, India is perceiving a projected rise of the same by 60% between 2020-40. Hence the ‘bio-denials’ that come with unchecked corporate investment needs to be resisted.
The ‘billboard religious imaginary’ is a stark reminder that while Modi was bolstering the ‘multi-alignment’ policy as far as trade deals were concerned, the mono-maniacal Hindutva drive, largely to appease right-wing organizations, spell ecocides. Critical landslip zones have been activated, flash floods in Chamouli and Uttarkashi have accelerated, soil erosion has been augmented because of rampant felling of slow growing high-altitude trees like the deodar (Himalayan ceder), birch, oak, ton and kail trees on the base of steep mountains – to activate the 12000 crores INR, 900 kilometre long, ten-metre wide, two-lane Char Dham Mahamarg Vikas Pariyojana. The National Green Tribunal has noted violation of the Bhagirathi Eco Sensitive Zone Notification, debris dumping in the river Ganga (destroying shrubby vegetation and affecting monsoon river flow), and resulting in weakened mountain bases that threaten the lives and livelihood of indigenes. In fact, long-term assessments reveal that impetuous altering of existing geo-spatial patterns, prove highly counter-productive in the long term. But subterfuges of contracting, tapping legal loopholes (viz. bypassing the mandatory Environmental Impact Assessment), and ironically, even the National Environmental Policy 2006, set up by this very government. The NEP 2006 advocated caveats like “best practice norms” and ‘Green Road Construction’ for infrastructure construction in sensitive ecosystems. Anthropogenic intervention has accentuated cloudbursts, seismic unrest and landslides, affecting everything to do with the Bhagirathi, Alakananda and Mandakini valleys, whose catchments are protected because the combined Himalayan green cover provide a major catalyst to carbon sequestration. From upsetting the seismically fragile Himalayas, avaricious private investment in environmentally sensitive Lakshadweep, flouting the same EIA norms prescribed in the Ninth Five Year Plan Period (1997-2002) and Provisions of EIA Notifications (2006). There are innumerable examples, where playing with anthropogenic vulnerability has resulted in an ecologically intolerant ‘Modi’-fied India, earning him the negative tag of a delusional Viswaguru.
Conclusively therefore, we must have a workable blueprint ready for the state of affairs of this part of the ‘Pale Blue Dot.’ The nation is increasingly becoming, what the Journal of Democracy describes as “an illiberal India” as far as the heedless dismantling of environmental protections is concerned. The Bishnoi Movement during the 1700s, the Chipko and Appiko Movements during the seventees, the Save Silent Valley Movement of 1978, and the Jungle Bachao Andolan of 1982, are social stories where popular and judicial will offered potential resistance to the introduction of bio-perils. But since the eventual unsuccess of the Narmada Bachao Andolan of 1985, the mounting forces of liberalization, globalization, and privatization seems to have increasingly diluted public action. Since crony capitalism eventually manifests itself as a reckless Anthropocene, posthuman defeatism can be thwarted, if only intertwined multi-species temporalities are preserved and protected through sheer ground-level vigilantism of the body-politic. Only thereby, will posthuman inclusivity make way for a mindful safeguard for “transcorporeal and exposed interdependencies” (Olga Cielemecka and Christine Daigle n.pag).
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