Jairam Ramesh is coming to THiNK2012. Tehelka‘s Shoma Chaudhury on why we should be interested in the high-voltage story of Jairam Ramesh
THERE’S A haunting image from 2010 that many Indians might have missed. Tucked inside a newspaper was a picture of an elderly farmer in a white kurta, slumped defenceless on his knees against an emerald green field, a red bloodstain spreading in a slow seep across his chest.
He had been shot point blank by the Uttar Pradesh Police as he protested the takeover of his fields for the Taj Expressway. In a sense, it’s unimportant to name and locate him. He could have been one of millions of other poor Indians across the country protesting the juggernauts of development sweeping over their lives. Ports, big dams, chemical plants, steel factories, mines, nuclear installations, thermal projects. Projects that are swallowing them whole: life, health, livelihood, land, water, sky. And yet insisting it is for their greater good.
In a horrific incident on 28 February, two villagers were shot dead in Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh, protesting the construction of a power plant by East Coast Energy Pvt Ltd. But these deaths were not unusual either. They could as well have been a scene from Sompeta, also in Andhra Pradesh, just seven months ago when two farmers there were killed in police fire, protesting a thermal plant by Nagarjuna Constructions Pvt Ltd..
Usually both protests and deaths go unnoticed in the insulated islands of urban India. But over the past two years, chances are some of these names have begun to impinge themselves on middle-class consciousness.
Niyamgiri, POSCO, Jaitapur, Polavaram, Chiria, Singrauli, Raigad, Lavasa, Navi Mumbai, Kalinganagar. With unfailing regularity, names like these now burst like mini-explosions on prime-time television and front page newsprint. Chances are people have at least begun to ask, what’s going on?
In a sense, the man at the heart of this, the man most responsible for finally leveraging environmental issues — in their broadest sense of livelihood struggles, public health and conservation — onto India’s political agenda is Minister of State for Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh.
For decades, grassroot movements have fought valiant battles on the ground. Staving off catastrophic change; demanding more complex ideas of growth. Now finally, they have an ally in the Establishment. Someone who can turn up the volume on their concerns. Someone who can break through the sound-proof corridors of Delhi.
But in a curious twist, Jairam himself has become a metaphor for the crisis-laden charge he helms. With every mega project he flags for environmental concerns, he becomes as beleaguered as the constituency he represents. His position within government shrinks. The media discourse around him grows shriller. It is probably no coincidence that Jairam was not made a minister of Cabinet rank: environment was designed to be a junior concern to big business. It was meant to be just the powdered nose on the “growth” story.
But if the mandate was just to have a goodwill ambassador, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had been landed with the wrong man. Jairam is too honest and intelligent a man not to “apply his own mind” to any job entrusted to him. Inevitably, with every passing day, he has grown into his job and made all its underlying contradictions and dilemmas visible. The mighty but unequal battle between big business and ordinary people. The contesting visions of his own government: with Manmohan Singh’s World Bank-trained vision on one side and Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s more inclusive and humane vision on the other.
Today, the environment ministry is perhaps the most crucial ministry in the country: a myriad civilisational questions hover at its door seeking answers. Should India’s natural resources be handed over indiscriminately to corporates in the name of development? Are the differences between growth and environmental concerns really irreconcilable? It’s to Jairam’s credit that he’s turned it into the hot zone it has become.
For 10 years, under successive DMK ministers, the ministry had been nothing but an “ATM machine” filling the coffers of minister and party. Corporates felt they just had to “manage” it; the middle-class disregarded it; the poor despaired of it. Jairam changed all that.
He intuited that the environment ministry was at the centre of every big issue of our time: big national aspirations, big money, big promises. But he also understood the ministry was a threshold: it held the keys to our futures and the livelihoods of millions of poor Indians. He understood he was not there just to be an honest, capable man: he was there to be a custodian. Every project he was judging was worth thousands and thousands of crores. Every decision he was making impacted thousands of lives. Every mistake he made would deplete India. Every correct signature he signed would protect it.
None of this has been easy. Jairam sits at the centre of the most staggering and complex churn. Every move he makes puts a spoke into the most powerful vested interests. “India must be the only country in the world where a minister hits the headlines regularly just for upholding the law,” he says laughingly. But the wit is just a curtain for a fraught situation.
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