What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly—our nearsightedness? Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost.
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Two decades of this kind of “Progress” in India has created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it—and a much, much vaster, desperate, underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts, and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines, and Special Economic Zones. All developed in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.
Already forests, mountains, and water systems are being ravaged by marauding multinational corporations, backed by a state that has lost its moorings and is committing what can only be called ecocide. In eastern India bauxite and iron ore mining is destroying whole ecosystems, turning fertile land into desert. In the Himalayas hundreds of high dams are being planned, the consequences of which can only be catastrophic. In the plains, embankments built along rivers, ostensibly to control floods, have led to rising riverbeds, causing even more flooding, more waterlogging, more salinization of agricultural land, and the destruction of livelihoods of millions of people. Most of India’s holy rivers, including the Ganga, have been turned into unholy drains that carry more sewage and industrial effluent than water. Hardly a single river runs its course and meets the ocean.
For the sake of argument, let’s for a moment contemplate the absurd and accept that India Inc. and the captains of industry are right and that India’s millions did in fact vote for the speeding up of market “reforms.” Is that good news or bad news? Should we be celebrating the fact that millions of people who have something to teach the world, who have another imagination, another worldview, and a more sustainable way of life, have decided to embrace a discredited ideology, one that has pushed this planet into a crisis from which it may never recover?
What good will forest rights be when there are no forests? What good will the right to information be if there is no redress for our grievances? What good are rivers without water? What good are plains without mountains to water and sustain them? It’s as though we’re hurtling down a cliff in a bus without brakes and fighting over what songs to sing.
Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Roy, Arundhati)
