IN THE RUN-UP to india’s 16th general election, several issues of vital importance to the future well-being of the country have become obscured in the din and cacophony of the hustings. None of the major political parties have spelt out their programmes and positions on the critical issues of universal public health services, quality education for all, and perhaps even more important — ecology and environment preservation and upgradation.
According to State of India’s Environment 2014, the annual audit report of Down To Earth magazine published by the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment — the country’s most respected environment monitoring think-tank — India’s water, air and land resources are being despoiled and depleted at an alarming pace. A national water scarcity is imminent because India’s rivers are being destroyed by pollution, obsolete water management policies and grossly inequitable distribution. For instance, it’s common knowledge that all our major rivers including the Ganga, Yamuna and Brahmaputra are choking, polluted by thousands of tonnes of untreated sewage and toxic industrial waste being dumped into them every day.
Similarly, dense and moderately dense forest covers only 12.3 percent of the country’s total land area against the recommended 33.33 percent. Yet timber mafias are omnipresent, and tribals knowledgeable about sustainable environment development are being forced out of their forest habitats. Likewise, large swathes of arable land are being corrupted by excessive usage of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and intensive waterlogging in some areas. Simultaneously arable land area is steadily shrinking as huge tracts of agricultural land are being swallowed by expanding cities even as the quality of air, water and civic amenities in urban India is going from bad to worse.
Two egregious errors made in post-independence India’s national development effort are the causative factors of the imminent environmental disaster that future generations — if not our own — will surely suffer: neglect of education, and tolerance of quotidian corruption in governance at all levels. While sustained neglect of elementary education encourages the population to casually pollute the environment in myriad ways, endemic corruption in the Central, state and local governments makes it impossible to enforce even the most elementary environment protection laws.
Clearly, upgrading the country’s education system and eradicating deeply entrenched corruption in government, are long-haul processes. Meanwhile, no matter which government or political alliance assumes office in New Delhi on May 16, one of its first priorities should be to legislate and implement sustainable policies to mitigate further degradation of soil, water and air. No price in terms of money, lost output or inconvenience of reforms-affected minorities is too great to pay to reverse the galloping destruction of the nation’s ecology and environment, sine qua non.
Minority indulgence not wrong
The controversy stoked by the opposition BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s public refusal to wear a token Muslim skull cap offered by a highly respected cleric as a mark of respect way back in 2011, has been resurrected by a recent (April 12) interview on India TV with this frontrunner in the race to the prime minister’s office in Delhi. During the course of the interview, Modi justified his refusal on the grounds that acceptance would have been interpreted as “appeasement” of the Muslim minority community.
The Oxford English dictionary defines appeasement as “to placate (someone) by acceding to their demands”. Given that Muslims — although the country’s largest minority community — constitute a mere 15 percent of India’s population, it’s difficult to understand Modi’s objection to indulging this poor, backward (as confirmed by the Sachar Committee Report, 2006) community. Surely acceptance of a friendly overture — even if interpreted as appeasement — is a small price to pay for communal peace and harmony, a necessary precondition for Modi’s economic development mantra.
It might be instructive for the BJP and its prime ministerial candidate to learn that Hindu India has a long tradition of appeasing — even mollycoddling — minorities. A case in point is the tiny Parsi community. Over the past 13 centuries, the Parsis have flowered into one of the most prosperous communities of India. In the nation’s commercial capital they have established exclusive residential colonies, fire temples and enclaves for conduct of outlandish funeral rites on prime real estate in Mumbai and beyond. Nevertheless, their exclusivism and eccentric practices have been tolerated and respected, even if not welcomed. This small community of barely 100,000 has produced distinguished business tycoons, doctors, lawyers and other wealth generators who have created millions of jobs and made huge contributions to the public exchequer by way of direct and indirect taxes — out of all proportion to their number.
Similar examples can be readily found abroad. For instance in the US, despite their disproportionately high involvement in crime, the Afro-American community continues to be ‘appeased’ by way of official affirmative action policies in education and employment, as is the Italian diaspora which has been tarnished by its association with organised crime.
The common public interest demands that the trials and tribulations, real or imaginary, and anxieties related to identity, employment opportunity, safety and security of minorities are given sympathetic hearing and maximum possible accommodation. For laggard India to usher a new era of progress, good governance and economic development for all as repeatedly promised by Narendra Modi, the country’s minorities need to be indulged, even appeased, by government and the establishment.