Narendra Modi will take oath as India’s next prime minister on May 21 after sweeping the Congress party out of power. Modi, until now the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, has campaigned tirelessly for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the past few months, and has spoken about governance, corruption, development, inflation, dynastic rule in the Congress, but almost never about the environment. Now he will head a BJP-led government that has won the most decisive mandate in India in three decades.
For his seat in parliament, Modi chose to stand from Varanasi, the holy city of the Hindus on the banks of the Ganga. It is a place where millions of pilgrims go to wash away their sins. It is also a place where the Ganga is polluted to lethal levels. Modi has been talking about “defending the holiness of Mother Ganga.” Whether that means a revival of the renamed but still-moribund Ganga Action Plan remains to be seen.
Sunita Narain, head of the think tank Centre for Science and Environment, said, “The new government can’t ignore environment issues. Modi himself has won from Varanasi where pollution is a major problem and it’s already there on the table of the new government.”
Himanshu Thakkar, convenor of the South Asia Network for Dams, Rivers and People, said, “The new government needs to learn why the Congress lost. One of the key reasons was that in spite of pro-poor legislation, they largely ignored people’s concern as far as environmental and social impacts were concerned.”
Talking about the rapid turnover of environment ministers in the last government, Thakkar said, “They removed a person like Jairam Ramesh from the MoEF (Ministry of Environment and Forests) when he was doing good work. They brought Jayanthi Natarajan in. They found she was too environment friendly, then they brought Veerappa Moily. The Congress diluted it at every stage and just played into the hands of vested interests. The new government shouldn’t make any such mistake.”
Thakkar was among the environmentalists worried by the BJP manifesto, which repeated an old promise to interlink India’s rivers. He said, “River linking is definitely on its (the new government’s) agenda as a priority. When Modi visited north-east India, he didn’t speak about hydroelectricity or river linking at all, while in all the other campaigns, he talked about it. In fact he even said that the north-east region is ‘a haven for power generation’. It’s a big risk.”
Talking about what the agenda for the new government should be, environmentalists across the board said it needs to focus on urbanisation, air pollution and water pollution. Thakkar said, “The Himalayan ecosystem will be a key area. Climate change is a big issue and even though the BJP manifesto talked about it, it showed zero understanding of the subject.” A BJP official refuted this point of view, but urged patience when asked to spell out the party’s stand on how the new government will tackle climate change.
On the overall question of trade-offs between development projects and conservation, much of the decision making may soon be taken out of the hands of the environment ministry. The Supreme Court has ordered the setting up of an autonomous National Environmental Appraisal and Monitoring Authority (NEAMA), and the process may start soon.
In his victory speech just hours after the poll results were announced, Modi stressed on the need for inclusion of all sections of society. Environmentalists are hoping that includes nature.