Why on earth would Modi link yoga with climate change?

While addressing the UN General Assembly (UNGA) on September 27, 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had raised the demand that the United Nations (UN) should declare June 21 as the International Day of Yoga. A decision along these lines was taken by the UNGA on December 11, 2014 and this coming summer solstice on June 21 is going to be the first observance of the International Day of Yoga.

Speaking in support of his demand, Modi had said, "Yoga is an invaluable gift of India's ancient tradition. It embodies unity of mind and body; thought and action; restraint and fulfilment; harmony between man and nature; a holistic approach to health and well-being. It is not about exercise, but to discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and the nature. By changing our lifestyle and creating consciousness, it can help us deal with climate change. Let us work towards adopting an International Yoga Day."

All fine and dandy, but why must we constantly overstate our case? What was the need to say that it (yoga) can help us deal with climate change? How can any fitness regimen help humanity deal with climate change? One could argue that yoga helps you to regulate your system. By extension, one could insist that it purges your body of all toxins and so, the pollution that one is breathing could be expelled from the body as a result of yogic exercises. I am not sure if this is true or scientifically provable. I am merely saying that, if one were so inclined, one could insist that yoga is capable of all this.

Even if one were to grant this bit of the argument, how can one extend this to suggest that by changing our lifestyles and creating consciousness, yoga can help us to deal with climate change?

It is true that climate change is screwing up our insides, but climate change is not internal to our systems. It is happening outside of us. It is primarily happening, not in the Third World, and despite our protestations to the contrary, we are still firmly in the Third World.

One of the major causes of environmental pollution is private transport, that everyone is constantly pushing and because we get easily pushed, we opened our doors to an unprecedented boom in private transport, so much so that some of the major producers of automobiles on their last legs in Detroit got a new lease of life because we provided a market to the likes of Ford and Chevrolet, and others.

The other major contributor to environmental pollution is the economy of waste that runs the wheels of the First World and is headquartered in the US. Yet another major cause of environmental degradation are the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used extensively in air-conditioning, refrigeration, pressurised cosmetic cans and a whole lot of ready to use applications manufactured and primarily consumed in the US and other First World countries. In India and other Third World countries, the CFCs are used primarily in the food preservation industry.

For decades, we have been resisting a uniform across-the-board cut in CFC consumption and have argued that curtailing CFCs in India would lead to great food wastage, whereas in the West, its impact will primarily be on the cosmetic industry. Since the refrigeration and cold storage industry has already moved to non-CFCs in the West, we have been asking for a transfer of non-CFC technologies to the Third World before we sign on the dotted line.

But all that was in the past. We have now agreed to voluntarily reduce CFCs without matching guarantees or promises of transfer of non-CFC-producing technologies. Modi's popularity in the West is not without a sound basis. We are doing their bidding and they are patting us on the back.

But let us return to yoga. How is yoga, even when celebrated once a year internationally, under the benign gaze of the UN, going to help us overcome environmental pollution? And how is this claim different in its vacuous exaggeration from the ones made by the redoubtable Ramdev, the yoga swami, that yoga can cure cancer and homosexuality? The most recognisable face of yoga and related practices, does not even know that same sex love is not a disease. How can you describe love, love of any kind, as a disease? Because if you do, you need an expert to inspect your head rather closely.

One must however be grateful to Swami Ramdev for declining the generous Haryana offer to accept a cabinet rank in addition to being the yoga ambassador of the state. If he had accepted the offer it would have become rather difficult for rationalists in Haryana and elsewhere to fight the dual onslaught of a prime minister pitching for yoga as a cure for environmental pollution and the yoga guru going around 'curing' cancer and same sex love with one of his tummy churning yogic postures.