Why Prime Minister Modi's talk of climate change in Davos was hogwash
Given the surreal times that we live in, it's always reassuring to hear world leaders reaffirm that climate change is still real for them. This time it was Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Davos, acknowledging climate change as one of the biggest threats to the world as we know it.
It was a statement in keeping with India's strong positioning as a climate leader and doing more than it should. But that we are bending over backwards to set ambitious climate goals - given our history as being a site of colonial pillage - is a point I wish he drove home without constantly having to bring yoga into it.
Sustainable lifestyles make for great soft power sell at Davos, but not when you are the world's second-largest coal consumer and third-largest emitter, with a capital that's not particularly conducive to "pranayama".
In his speech, Modi spoke of glaciers and ice-caps melting. I wish he'd spoken of the impacts closer home - fishermen lost at sea, caught off guard by Cyclone Ockhi, agrararian suicides in a year where average rainfall dropped five per cent and devastating floods that took over a thousand lives in the sub-continent.
Modi's speech is also dangerously disingenuous. Just last month, as air quality readings peaked across the country, his government allowed 400 coal power plants to duck installing essential pollution control technology for another five years. Over 200 coal projects - many of them greenfield - still lie on the top of his office's personal wish list. It was only because of a case filed by air pollution activist Sunil Dahiya that clearances for new thermal power plants have been put on hold, unless they comply with new emission norms. Dahiya is a campaigner with Greenpeace, an organisation the present government has relentlessly persecuted for calling out the excesses of coal culture.
Modi's call for rich nations to do their bit and arguments against protectionism struck the right notes, as developed countries must demonstrate they can put their money where their mouth is, beginning with their commitments to the Kyoto Protocol which turned 20 last year. India deserves, and is due to all, the finance and technology in helping it fulfil its most daring gigwatt goals, and to build climate adaptation capacity.
But this must be finance that is easy to access. To win a project under India's clean energy fund, for instance, is nearly impossible, making one wonder what Make In India the government is hoping to seed fund from its unique carbon tax.
While the international press saw Modi's protectionism diatribe as directly levelled at Trump's America-centricism - the latest being a 30 per cent tariff imposed on foreign-made solar cells and modules - the Indian government is currently mulling imposing one, putting Operation Suryanamaskar's success in peril.
For Modi to invoke Mahatma Gandhi's spin on natural resources while making an elevator pitch at Davos was a stretch even by his standards.
For one, his government's continued expansion of Coal India's mines towards a 1.5 billion target has been the opposite of the kid-glove-meets-swadeshi kind of trusteeship, using antiquated, eminent domain land laws to forcibly grab indigenous land, while further weakening protections that allow for local trustees to have any say in the matter.
Two, his government's coal auction regime has not been a vast improvement, with ghosts of cartelisation returning, conflicts around land and pollution that were never dealt with and mines unable to get off the ground.
Instead, contract mining has become the default way to go, with the state taking on the bidding and regulatory prep work, while private miners like the Adani Group rake in the profits without the exposure. By the looks of it, neither Adivasis nor power consumers have benefitted the least from three and a half years of Modi's custodianship.
If Modi really wants Davos and the world to believe in India taking the lead on climate change, he needs to shed his telling proximity to the fossil fuel industry, acknowledge and fix the haze at home, announce the no-go zones in India's forests and wetland buffers, strengthen laws that empower communities with the lowest carbon footprint and make clean energy R&D accessible, without doing away with essential laws and protections.
All else is "pawanmuktasana" for the international press.