Jairam Ramesh on Indira Gandhi, the environmentalist

Jairam's new book is a thorough documentation of former PM Indira Gandhi's love for nature

Let me say this at the outset. Jairam Ramesh’s new book is a thorough documentation of Indira Gandhi’s love for nature. It showcases how several of India’s laws on environment and forests emerged from the former prime minister’s passion for ecology. She led with zeal to set in place the Wildlife Protection Act, 1976, set up Project Tiger, legislate the Forest Conservation Act, 1980 and bring to table the air and water pollution Act. 

What the book does not assess is the consequences India either suffered or enjoyed as a result of some of these laws that emerged from the obsessions and beliefs of an all-powerful prime minister. 

The author studiously avoids going down that route. His book largely trawls through Gandhi’s papers, orders, speeches, memos and letters. This limits the ability of the book to present a well-rounded view of Gandhi’s impact on India’s environmental policies. One explanation for this omission could be that such a critique would not be so charitable to Gandhi — even if the author discounted for the fact that every idea can be assessed better with hindsight.

The second chapter of the book looks at how Gandhi picked up her avid interest in all things nature and how she pursued this interest zealously in her formative adult years. Of course, much of the early lessons and introduction to ecology came from her father Jawaharlal Nehru. There were others too. Books on ecology of plants and animals inspired her. But the books on ecology and ecologists and bird watchers such as Salim Ali also shaped her ideas of a pristine environment. This imported sense of an immaculate nature  sans  human beings, clubbed with the long, overhanging influence of the erstwhile kings and royals on the Indian polity has, ever since, plagued India’s forest policies and detrimentally impacted the lives of millions of tribals. 

One rues the fact that Gandhi was unable to revise her understanding as a prime minister and see the reality of India’s inhabited forests. The notions of pristine nature projected by the ecological sciences were, till that era, strongly influenced by the colonising western powers taking over indigenous people’s lands across continents. India imported many of these ideas from British colonial rule. 

But, then, how can she bear the sole blame for the lack of such a revision when an array of prime ministers after her, till the very present, have largely failed to do so as well — even though they are not surrounded by former royalty and pure ecologists? And this despite the fact that we now have a deep understanding of how these nonsensical ideas of “virgin forests” and “pristine nature” have marginalised India’s poor, ruined their forest systems, helped expropriate large tracts of forests to rampant unplanned development and led to political and armed movements that the state has failed to address over decades. 

In an interview, Ramesh does admit that, over time, Gandhi’s environmental sensibilities did improve somewhat to move beyond her central influences. Her speech at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment at Stockholm in 1972 and her push to get environmental regulations on pollution are clear evidence of that. The author’s detailed look at how these regulations came about is fascinating. 

Gandhi’s concentration of political and executive power and the subsequent imposition of the Emergency are well documented. On environment as well, she left a similar imprint by bringing forests and wildlife on to the Concurrent List of the Constitution and vesting great power in the central bureaucracy. In that era, this central command did help stem the rapid conversion of forestlands into agricultural lands, but it also turned many thousands of tribal families into encroachers in the eyes of the law. 

Indira Gandhi A Life In Nature; Author: Jairam Ramesh Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Pages: 293; Price: Rs 437

These centralised regulatory processes, however, decayed over time. They came up short against the altering federal relations in India’s governance and policy. More importantly, they failed to act as a balancing force against the rapacious demands of the post-liberalisation economy on natural resources. In fact, these same law (along with the environmental law of 1986 enacted after Bhopal gas tragedy) became the root cause for a licence raj that has helped neither the economy nor the environment.

The exception to this trend of centralised management of environmental systems in independent Indian history has been the Forest Rights Act of 2006. But the bureaucracies and old-school environmentalists that control the economies around forests ensured that this law first lost some teeth at the drafting stage and then was never implemented in full. 

Since Gandhi’s time central governments have ceded powers of environmental regulation to the states rather reluctantly. In response to courts or events they have tended to improvise over the same basic structure that Gandhi set up for environmental governance. Uniquely, the current National Democratic Alliance has embarked on a new route — of using federalism and decentralisation as an excuse to weaken environmental regulations. 

The lack of imagination and conviction in India’s political leadership over decades has ensured that the country has never revised its dated environmental regime to truly fit the needs of a more federal democratic polity and address the challenges presented by the crony-capitalist natural resource economy. This makes Indira Gandhi look a pioneer (albeit a flawed one) in the field even today. Ramesh’s book is a valuable read but do try to ponder over its contents shorn of the soft hue through which the author has viewed his research subject.