📰 A self-reliant foreign policy
In a multipolar world order, this means having variable combinations with like-minded partners
•Self-reliance is the theme of India’s 74th Independence Day. This concept is commonly associated with the economy and production of key goods and services within the country in light of the global ‘supply shock’ caused by the pandemic. But it also has a parallel dimension in the domain of foreign policy. If the domestic goal is to reduce dependence on imports for critical commodities, the foreign policy corollary is to recalibrate the time-tested axiom of ‘strategic autonomy’.
•India has historically prided itself as an independent developing country which does not take orders from or succumb to pressure from great powers. Whether the world order was bipolar (1947 to 1991), unipolar (1991 to 2008, when the U.S. entered a long cycle of economic crises and China caught up with it in overall power), or multipolar (present times), the need for autonomy in making foreign policy choices has remained constant.
Showing flexibility
•Yet, strategic autonomy has often been adjusted in India’s history as per the changing milieu. In moments of crisis, India has reinterpreted freedom and shown flexibility for survival. During the 1962 war with China, the high priest of non-alignment, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, had to appeal to the U.S. for emergency military aid to stave off the Chinese from “taking over the whole of Eastern India.” In the build-up to the 1971 war with Pakistan, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had to enter a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union to ward off both China and the U.S. And in Kargil in 1999, India welcomed a direct intervention by the U.S. to force Pakistan to back down. In all the above examples, India did not become any less autonomous when geopolitical circumstances compelled it to enter into de facto alliance-like cooperation with major powers. Rather, India secured its freedom, sovereignty and territorial integrity by manoeuvering the great power equations and playing the realpolitik game.
•Today, although there is no prospect of an outright war with China in the wake of its incursions across the Line of Actual Control, India is at an inflection point with regard to strategic autonomy. Non-alignment 2.0 with China and the U.S., as they slide into a new Cold War, makes little sense when India’s security and sovereignty are being challenged primarily by the former rather than the latter. Fears in some quarters that proximity to the U.S. will lead to loss of India’s strategic autonomy are overblown because independent India has never been subordinated to a foreign hegemon.
The essence of self-reliance
•In the threat environment marked by a pushy China, which the U.S. is now beginning to confront frontally, India should aim to have the proverbial cake of American support and also eat the cake i.e., stay as an independent power centre by means of intensified cooperation with middle powers in Asia and around the world.
•For India, which values freedom, placing all its eggs in the U.S. basket to counterbalance China would be an error, as that can constrict India’s options in other theatres of national interest such as its ties with Iran and Russia and efforts to speed up indigenous defence modernisation.
•Diversification is the essence of self-reliance. A wide basket of strategic partners, including the U.S., with a sharper focus on constraining China, is the only viable diplomatic way forward in the current emerging multipolar world order.
•It is no longer a question of picking one out of two titans or oscillating between them. In an era of dense networks, India must reconfigure autonomy to mean what the American scholar Joseph Nye calls ‘power with others’ to accomplish joint goals.
•We are free and self-reliant not through isolation or alliance with one great power, but only in variable combinations with several like-minded partners. India is familiar with the phrase ‘multi-vector’ foreign policy. It is time to maximise its potential.
Tiger conservation needs a reboot to match the scale of India’s aspirations in other domains
•On International Tiger Day, July 29, authorities proudly declared that India should “celebrate” the increase in tigers from about 2,000 in 1970 to about 3,000 now. This is an annual growth rate lower than 1% after 50 years of incredible, sometimes heroic, efforts. Clearly, India has done better than other tiger range countries, but at what cost and what efficiency needs deeper scrutiny.
•On the same day, a functionary of the Delhi-based Global Tiger Forum admonished us not to aspire, ever, to have more than 3,500 wild tigers. In a country with such an expansive land base, a robust economic foundation, and a rapidly urbanising educated population cheering for the tiger, this dismal projection cannot be our vision. Even a back-of-the-envelope calculation can show that India has the potential to hold 10,000 to 15,000 wild tigers. What is lacking is a pragmatic plan to get to that goal.
•In contrast to the above dismal scenario, I can report what I witnessed in the Malenad landscape of about 25,000 sq km in Karnataka. Field observations over 50 years and research suggest that there were only around 70 tigers in this landscape in the early 1970s. I had feared they would all be gone soon. The substantial increase of tigers that followed, against all odds, was due to the work of dedicated foresters and conservationists under the leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. There are now about 400 wild tigers in Malenad. My own estimates, based on long-term research, show that the Malenad forests can potentially harbour about 1,300 cats. Clearly my experience is at odds with the current bureaucratic projections.
Mission drift in tiger protection
•Two legal instruments that enabled tiger recoveries in India were the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 and the Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980, which reinforced Project Tiger. The political leadership and field efforts behind this recovery had to overcome very difficult social challenges: slow growth of the economy, excessive reliance on forest exploitation for livelihoods and government revenues, dire poverty, and protein dependency on wild meat that drove massive local hunting. These challenges were overcome and tiger recoveries occurred, but only sporadically in a few reserves.
•Around 2000, things began to change. There was a decline in political commitment to conservation and the gradual transition of the field-oriented Forest Department to one whose primary aspiration was to be like the multitasking Indian Administrative Service. This was followed by unnecessary and massive borrowings from the Global Environment Facility-World Bank combine to create new models for tiger recovery. Some of us conservationists, including Valmik Thapar and the late Sanjoy Debroy, wrote to the World Bank to abandon the proposed eco-development model, but to no avail.
•This mission drift in tiger protection overlapped with the upsurge of emancipatory political movements for the release of wildlife habitats for cultivation and exploitation by loosely defined “forest-dwellers”. This populist movement led to the implementation of the Forest Rights Act of 2006, which has turned into an open-ended process of forest conversion even within wildlife reserves. Impacts on tiger habitats have been severe.
•At the end of the 20th century, accompanying these broader social changes, personnel changes too played a part in weakening tiger conservation. When Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee promoted his capable and enterprising Environment Minister Suresh Prabhu, the portfolio landed in the lap of garden-variety politicians of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. When one of the most capable leaders of Project Tiger, P.K. Sen, retired, he was replaced by a bureaucrat who managed to game the system to stay on for an unprecedented 13 years.
•The tiger extinction in Sariska Reserve caused a public outcry in 2005, leading to the appointment of a Tiger Task Force (TTF) by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Unfortunately, the TTF turned out to be unequal to the task. Its politically correct ideologies and muddled science resulted in a report that created a tiger management model that benefited the forest bureaucracy more than it did the tigers.
•Based on TTF recommendations, the United Progressive Alliance government began investing heavily, but not very intelligently, in tiger conservation. Excessive funding of a few reserves while neglecting large areas with greater recovery potential became the norm. Progress on voluntary village relocation schemes from within reserves slowed down (except in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, where major initiatives funded by these States greatly helped tiger recoveries). Tiger reserve managers were soon attracted to the massively funded eco-development activities originally formulated by the World Bank. In reality, they needlessly replicated the rural development work already being done by several other agencies and NGOs.
•Another feature of this emergent government monopoly over tiger management was the lack of data transparency and rigorous, independent tiger monitoring.
Bound in red tape
•The tiger was fully bound in red tape. One had hoped when the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) took over in 2014 and began to wind down bureaucracies in favour of new initiatives and enterprise, that the red tape strangling the tiger would also be unwound. But there was no such luck: within two weeks of the NDA assuming power, the same national and international bureaucratic apparatuses that ran the show after 2005 performed a trapeze act and clasped the hands of the new masters.
•Therefore, the show goes on: One prime example is the aforementioned Global Tiger Forum, an international bureaucracy snugly entrenched in Delhi. It has done so in defiance of its own original charter and attempts by multilateral aid institutions to pry it loose and park it in Southeast Asia. Another case in point is the National Tiger Conservation Authority. It has bloated in size, swallowing up schemes totally unrelated to tigers, such as the recovery of snow leopards and translocation of African cheetahs to India.
•India needs to get out of this tiger circus. The role of the forest bureaucracy should be once again restricted to wildlife law enforcement. Merging Project Tiger with other Central schemes for wildlife conservation would be a good first step. Government monopoly over domains of tiger conservation such as tiger research, monitoring, nature education, tourism and possibly even conflict mitigation should be erased. The vast reservoir of talent and energy in society should be drawn in to engage with these diverse domains, by involving private enterprises, local communities, NGOs and scientific institutions.
•India’s tiger conservation needs a reboot to match the scale of the country’s aspirations in other domains — a new vision that encompasses the talents and aspirations of a growing number of citizens who want to save tigers without turning the clock back on material progress.
📰 Stop the dismantling of environmental rules
The government has a social obligation to protect the environment; it must withdraw the Draft EIA 2020 Notification
•The Sanskrit words, ‘Prakriti Rakshati Rakshita’, greet visitors at the Indira Paryavaran Bhawan, the home of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, (MoEF&CC). They mean ‘nature protects, if she is protected’. This ancient Indic wisdom inspired Indira Gandhi throughout her life, as referenced in many of her letters and files. She shared a deep kinship with nature. She was also cognisant that the environment cannot be protected without eradicating poverty. The origins and spread of the global novel coronavirus pandemic and its catastrophic impact are a warning to the entire world. The protection of the environment must go hand in hand with promoting public health and access to dignified livelihoods for all.
Erosion of the framework
•India with its rich biodiversity and widespread inequality must especially pay heed now. Our nation has all too often sacrificed the environment and the rights of our people while chasing the chimera of unbridled economic growth. Of course, progress requires trade-offs, but there must always be boundaries that cannot be transgressed. But over the past six years, the government has thoughtlessly — or worse, with intent — eroded our environmental protection framework. The biennial global Environmental Performance Index report has consistently put India at the bottom of its rankings. We were an alarming 177th out of 180 countries in 2018, faring badly on virtually all indicators — environmental health policy, biodiversity and habitat, air and water pollution and climate change.
•The pandemic should have made the government reflect and reconsider its environmental and public health governance. Instead, the Ministry is handing out clearances during the lockdown without proper public consultations. The announcement of coal auctions by the Prime Minister in previously declared ‘no go’ areas, signals that the government is in no mood to course-correct. The disastrous Draft Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), 2020 Notification, which among other provisions, gives a clean chit to polluters violating environmental regulations through ex-post facto approvals, will unleash unprecedented devastation on our environment.
Opaque reviews
•It was apparent that a Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party government would be destructive to India’s environment going by Mr. Modi’s track record in Gujarat as Chief Minister. During the 2014 election campaign, Mr. Modi slandered the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government and the Environment Ministry for being an impediment to the nation’s growth. From the very start, the government has desperately sought to project an image of ‘Ease of Doing Business’ to the world, mindless of consequences. It formed multiple committees, diluted laws and regulations across the board, and opened up vast tracts of forest land to a select few in the private sector.
•In 2014, the T.S.R. Subramanian Committee was set up to review six major environmental laws. Another committee was formed to amend the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ), 2011 Notification. Both faced immense criticism for opacity and not consulting a wide range of stakeholders. The TSR Committee Report was never released, but some of its recommendations were surreptitiously implemented. On similar lines, the 2018 CRZ Notification was rejected by the National Fishworkers Forum and other stakeholders, for threatening the livelihoods of fishing communities and destroying coastal ecology along India’s 7,500-km long coastline. These communities contribute more than Rs. 50,000 crore annually to the Indian economy. They are severely impacted by climate change and natural disasters and are left to fend for themselves by the government. Likewise, the National Board for Wildlife, the Forest Advisory Committee and Expert Appraisal Committees are approving projects in and around protected wildlife areas without following due process.
•The North Indian plains and the National Capital Region are engulfed in a debilitating smog year after year. According to a study in the British journal, The Lancet , 12.4 lakh deaths i.e. 12.5% of all deaths in India in 2017, could be attributed to air pollution. Yet, there has been no concerted action to address this public health emergency. Instead of stringent measures to control emissions from thermal power plants, the government extended deadlines for compliance and has made a U-turn on clean coal.
Attack on Adivasis
•The government’s greatest assault has been reserved for the land and the rights of Adivasis and other traditional forest dwellers. The historic Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006 was passed by the UPA government to undo centuries of injustice. Our deep cultural traditions as well as experience from all over the world have demonstrated that well-defined land rights to forest dwellers are beneficial for both marginalised populations and the environment. The twisted interpretation and shoddy implementation of the FRA, 2006, has led to Adivasis and forest-dwelling communities being harassed by the Forest Department. Their legal claims to land are buried in bureaucracy. The FRA link to project approvals has been abandoned in practice, and the curtailment or elimination of public hearings means that civil society and independent or concerned voices are muzzled.
•Indira Gandhi had once said that forest development corporations had become forest destruction corporations. The veracity of her observation is borne out by several proposals or actions that militate against the interests of forest dwellers.
•For example, there is a proposal to overhaul the colonial Indian Forest Act, 1927 to give enhanced policing and quasi-judicial powers of the forest officials. It gives forest officials powers to use firearms with unjustified levels of immunity from prosecution. Earlier, the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016 was passed by the government in both Houses of Parliament, ignoring the Opposition which pointed out that it bypasses the FRA, 2006, and disempowers Adivasis, forest dwellers and gram sabhas.
Promote public health
•In the name of reforms, the government rolled out the red carpet for crony capitalists, systematically disenfranchised the marginalised and vulnerable populations, and abandoned its responsibility to both domestic and international commitments on climate change and environmental protection. This is a completely wrong way to go about things.
•The government should recognise it has a social obligation to protect the environment and promote public health. India’s environmental protection framework is not a regulatory burden and the government must incentivise industry to shift its mindset from clearances to compliance. The Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector must be subsidised to follow green norms. Nobody denies that India needs a modern EIA framework. But it must be based on best available scientific knowledge, enhanced public participation and regular social audits. The concept of cumulative impacts of projects in a region or ecology — on the Ganga, for example, must be adopted. You cannot have ‘Nirmal Ganga’ without ‘Aviral Ganga’.
India as a green hub
•Simply put, the government must stop dismantling India’s environmental regulations. An essential first step is to withdraw the Draft EIA 2020 Notification. What is essential is widespread public consultation to shape a national agenda that will place India at the forefront of the battle against global warming and pandemics. We have an incredible opportunity to reset our economy and demonstrate leadership to the world with a growth strategy that transforms India into a green manufacturing hub. The erstwhile Planning Commission’s expert group report on low carbon growth strategy and the many suggestions in the 2019 Congress Manifesto can be a starting point. In times of mass reverse migration, environment protection through public works programmes including afforestation and watershed development, can be turned into a grass-roots movement involving youth, women, communities, gram sabhas and non-governmental organisations. Indira Gandhi was the first major world leader to recognise the environmental crisis confronting the world in Stockholm in June 1972. Can India once again rise to the greatest challenges of the 21st century?
