JOIN USAre these the leaders who will usher in a new world post-Covid?
Christiane Amanpour started off the Friday edition of her absolutely brilliant show Amanpour with a segment on the pandemic in Brazil with this telling comment: “America, Brazil and India are now the top three countries in the world with Covid-19 cases. The common link between the three countries – their populist leaders!”
Be that as it may. Someday, this damn virus will stop mattering, regardless of our leaders. So, we must think of that post-Covid future. What will it look like?
Many people are thinking, dreaming and writing about it. At DH itself, we receive dozens of articles a week predicting much good, indeed a new world in which people, leaders and countries have changed for the better; they are all working towards greater equality – social, economic, education and opportunity-wise; they are all thinking about the environment and acting to ensure that the relatively clean environment due to the lockdown becomes permanent; greedy, rapacious capitalism has given way to ‘social enterprises’; and politics and politicians have changed for the better.
But that’s just us, common people and newspaper writers with too much time on their hands, and naivete. What about our leaders? What are they thinking? What kind of a post-Covid world are they building?
Consider this: Bolsonaro began to preside over the destruction of the Amazon forests, called the “lungs of the world,” long before the Coronavirus struck, and continues to be at it even now. Soon, ‘Amazon’ might come to mean only Jeff Bezos’ online shop.
In America, Trump is on course to reversing 100 environmental rules. And he’s getting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the very agency meant to protect America’s air and water quality, to do it for him. The rules reversed include protections for wetlands and wildlife protected areas, vehicle emissions and fuel economy rules, mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, rules that restricted toxic and greenhouse emissions from the fossil fuel industry, those relating to environmental impact assessment of projects, and so on. 68 rules reversed or diluted so far, 32 more to go, says the New York Times.
Nearer home, in April, under cover of the lockdown, the Standing Committee of the National Board for Wildlife, chaired by our Environment Minister, met online and cleared 16 projects of highways, railway lines and power transmission lines through national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, apart from several more in other eco-sensitive areas. These include the Hubbali-Ankola rail line, for which nearly 600 hectares of pristine forests in the Western Ghats, and some two lakh trees, will be cut down. The line will cut through tiger, elephant, leopard and sloth bear corridors and destroy them forever. Other projects will cut through a tiger corridor in Telangana, a national park in Uttarakhand, a wildlife sanctuary in Goa, and so on.
For a government to be able to do such things, it has to destroy existing institutions. Just like Trump has gotten the EPA to reverse green rules, the Modi government has got the National Board for Wildlife, established under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, by the environmentally-conscious and wildlife-loving Indira Gandhi in 1972, to do exactly the opposite of its mandate.
Similarly, under cover of the lockdown, the Environment Impact Assessment norms for projects ranging from Modi’s pet Central Vista project to coal mining have been redrawn to smooth the approvals process. Indeed, India’s new Parliament building will be built on lies – the environment ministry’s Expert Appraisal Committee, too, met in April and gave approval for the triangular building by considering the EIA of only that building, instead of looking at the impact that the full Central Vista project will have on Delhi. The modus operandi is simple: The Central Vista project is likely to make Delhi, whose air is already unbreathable (except during the current Covid-19 blessing), a gas and dust chamber. It will be resisted. So, approve the EIA in a piecemeal fashion so that no one piece of the Central Vista project is seen to have environmental impact beyond the threshold. Talk of the Chinese salami-slicing Indian territory on the borders. Modi is ‘conquering’ Lutyens Delhi by the same tactic!
But none of this should come as a surprise to anyone. Our environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, is also our industries minister, is also our propaganda minister.
The NBWL is headed by the prime minister and is by law required to meet at least twice a year. Under Manmohan Singh, it used to meet every month. Since 2014, Modi has not had time, amidst six years of polarising election campaigning, globe-trotting and collecting thousands of crores from anonymous donors via electoral bonds, to convene and chair a meeting of the NBWL even once! But last month, he had time to launch the auction of 41 coal mines for commercial mining – in the forests of India’s central and eastern states, which face destruction as a result. And it is government-sponsored, too – with Rs 50,000 crore of the alleged Rs 20 lakh crore stimulus package earmarked for coal infrastructure development.
That’s just the story of what our leaders are doing to the environment under cover of the lockdown. Meanwhile, in the states, labour laws are not being reformed but just thrown away wholesale; and arrests -- of dissidents, of alleged rioters, of seditionists, etc -- are being made as per the government’s convenience. And if all that is not enough, Covid-19 testing and treatment contracts and purchases are turning out to be lucrative business for private hospitals, ministers and officials.
And you want a new, just and greener world after the Covid-19 crisis? Under these leaders?