Confronting War and Ecocide: Local Resilience vs. Postcolonial ‘Development’

Wars and environmental crimes have always deeply marked planetary life. In a world whose fundamental model of domination and profit maximization is in crisis, these forms of violence are ushering in a new phase of barbarism. We will not get out of this impasse with lofty intentions that obscure the economic conditions of the ‘international community.’ In his contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, Rahul Goswami takes a personal look back at the past five decades, reflects on events in India and Europe, and argues that we must rely instead on local resistance.

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The year was 1983. An 18-year-old, nervous and hesitant, boarded a plane at Bombay airport for his first trip outside his country. Just two months earlier, communal clashes in the northeastern Indian state of Assam had claimed more than 2,000 lives. The young man had friends who he knew had fled the region. Would they reach Bombay? Somewhere else? He wouldn’t know until he returned, several weeks later.

The young man had much to learn and relearn. Helmut Kohl was the Chancellor of West Germany. Erich Honecker was the leader of East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic. The long, heavily fortified and watchtowered border between the two Germanies, like the formidable wall that ran right through the city he was visiting, West Berlin, were unexpectedly stark and menacing symbols of terrible conflicts that had been and were continuing in other ways. There seemed to be two kinds of worlds on either side of these borders, he decided one day as he stood on an observation platform in West Berlin. One was gray and brown and bleak, the other colorful and well-stocked with goods of all kinds, brimming with art and music. It was confusing and disturbing.

Bombs connect the different worlds

That young man was me, and that year I began what would become a routine annual visit to spend a few weeks with my mother, who lived in what was then West Berlin, and my German stepfather (a proud Berliner, a civil engineer, who cheerfully became my tutor and guide in all things German). The world from Berlin, I found, was very different and quite intimidating from that of Bombay, where I had spent my childhood. The great Asian city, the financial engine of India, was much larger, more frenetic, as cosmopolitan as West Berlin. But it was familiar territory. Here, despite the Easter decorations on the Kurfürstendamm, the organ grinders, the luxurious automobiles, and the new political ground (the Green Party had entered the Bundestag), there was an uneasy sense that behind the glittering First World stage, powerful and shadowy forces were at work. I had little time to dwell on this impression. One morning the newspapers – Tagesspiegel and Berliner Morgenpost – announced in heavy headlines that the American Embassy in Beirut had been hit by a suicide bomber. In June, Britain’s Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher, was re-elected by a landslide: the year before, Thatcher’s Britain had gone to war over the possession of the Falkland Islands. It seemed that war was closely linked to political fortunes. Little did I know then how often I would see this over the next 40 years.

Back home in India, July of that year brought terrible news from Sri Lanka. It was the beginning of what would become a very bloody and protracted conflict, the civil war in Sri Lanka. It had begun when the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) killed a detachment of soldiers. This spiraled into anti-Tamil riots in Sri Lanka, resulting in the deaths of up to 3,000 Sri Lankan Tamils, followed by further reprisals by the LTTE. As our newspapers and television (still in black and white, still only a few hours a night) carried the bulletins from Colombo, each more grim than the last, came a blast from a war that most thought had been consigned to history, the Cold War. Not so, for that September, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by a Soviet Air Force fighter. And the next month, the eyes of the world turned back to the Middle East, as suicide truck bombings destroyed both the French army and the United States Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, killing more than 300 people.

The violence of the Green Revolution

Aerograms from Berlin arrived regularly. In one, my mother wrote of the acid rain that had begun to fall in parts of Germany and Western Europe; children were kept out of school and outdoor workers had to wear special suits when it happened. It sounded completely unreal to me in India. Was this a First World disease? I decided it was.

But 1984 quickly proved to be as eventful as the previous year, as political and social unrest in the Indian state of Punjab captured the country’s attention and raised concerns elsewhere, as militant members of the Sikh population demanded a new, independent region. Not a week went by without violence in Punjab, a state that, along with Haryana, was the epicenter of India’s agricultural Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a connection I would have to revisit several times in later years, for the violence of the Green Revolution, which became the title of activist Vandana Shiva’s very popular book, began as a slow but inexorable environmental debacle, an agrarian transition that created wealthy elites who in turn became vectors for what culminated in the multiple tragedies of 1984, many small and one colossal. The spiral of militancy in Punjab worsened, and in June 1984, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered an army operation to remove the militant leadership from the Golden Temple in Amritsar. This was the catalyst for the assassination of Indira Gandhi in October.

That December, the world’s worst industrial disaster unfolded in the form of a leak of a deadly gas, methyl isocyanate, from a Union Carbide chemical plant in the central Indian city of Bhopal. More than 4,000 people died, and an estimated half a million were sickened and left with numerous health problems, including blindness, chronic respiratory problems, and birth defects.

By the time I started working for a daily newspaper in Bombay in late 1988, the decade-long Soviet-Afghan war was winding down, Chernobyl had blown its vast clouds over Eastern Europe, the Montreal Protocol had been signed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had been established, and large dams were being built all over India, which worried me greatly. There was a distinct new consciousness that we as young adult Indians felt, at our own pace, about conflicts and wars, about the assault on the commons, about the distant shaping of our economy (and thus our daily household life) by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, about definitions of development and equally about alternatives. As a journalist, I could debate ideas about development in print. But opposing large dams required feet on the ground and eyes in the villages. The efforts of many hundreds of people, channeled through the Narmada Bachao Andolan (the ‘Save the Narmada River Campaign,’ as the central Indian river was to be restricted by a series of dams), led to the first-ever independent review of the World Bank’s funding of large dams in 1992 and, following the review report, to the Bank’s withdrawal from the dam project in 1992.

Building grassroots resilience

It was not a victory. The dams across the Narmada were built. Those who were displaced from their villages, which were submerged by the reservoirs created by the dammed water, received little compensation or recognition for years afterwards as being legitimately affected by a ‘development’ project. At best, from an environmental advocacy point of view, it inspired many other groups and organizations (not only in India) to protect their rivers and water bodies. The direct experience as an activist, and the associated direct experience of making the issue relevant through journalism to those far away from the dam sites, forced me to think anew about war and military conflict. Wasn’t it also a kind of war that the state could inflict on those who opposed its version of ‘development’? And wasn’t the aftermath of such violent encounters – there are so many, the history of people’s confrontations with a state’s dogma of ‘development’ is numerous – in many ways the same as the aftermath of a war?

These were questions that a generation ago, I think, were usually labeled as inconvenient and therefore shelved. The state did this routinely, which wasn’t surprising. What is surprising, however, and what I have seen in recent years, is that the meta-state (the United Nations agencies and multilateral organizations) does it as well. My work since 2010 has been in the area of traditional knowledge and living heritage, and the clients have been mostly UN agencies. Documenting and safeguarding traditional knowledge practices and cultural expressions of living heritage is often done under difficult circumstances: there is war and armed conflict (whether between states or sectarian), a ‘natural’ disaster event (such as a flood or earthquake) or a ‘natural’ disaster process (such as climatological drought), erosive globalization (where, most often, there is no younger generation to carry on a tradition or practice).

No longer can states and multilateral agencies point to the existence of laws and regulations, due process, conventions and instruments as evidence of a civilization that has both the will and the means to stop war, stop environmental criminality, and repair the damage. It hasn’t worked anywhere near as advertised, and this is the 80th year of the UN. On the contrary, what I have witnessed over 42 years convinces me that what matters – whether it is responding to the threat of conflict or repairing after an environmental disaster – is local strength and capacity. Just as I outlined in this brief commentary the events of 1983 and 1984 that helped shape my view of our world, every year since then has been a drumbeat of wars, conflicts, ecological crimes, ‘man-made’ environmental disasters. What has pulled survivors out of these crises and helped them get back on their feet is not the well-meaning but distant international declarations and global initiatives, but local will and resilience. This is the collective human quality that deserves our attention and applause.