Sayantan Bandyopadhyay -  -  -

2024 was an election year in India but climate change was not debated as a policy issue very widely in the media and on the campaign trail, even though climate change these days is often ideated around the world as a climate emergency due to unpredictable floods, cyclones, heatwaves and other climate-induced disasters that are becoming commoner with time.

2023 was the hottest year for India on record and 2024 broke the records of 2023. This led to questions of how climate change impacts are directly influencing India's populace. Energy-related issues have been influencing Indian domestic politics since Independence in the form of gas cylinders, fuel, and cheaper electricity. But it has not yet been extinction-type climate politics where Greta Thunberg is shouting on the streets that if X/Y/Z parties are not voted to power India will perish.

In India, as pointed out in the Yale Centre of Climate Change Communication's report, Climate Change in the Indian Mind 2023, there is widespread awareness in terms of 84 % of people believing climate change is real whereas 55% believe India should actively reduce emissions. So, if the impacts of climate change are visible then climate change is slowly moving from the periphery to the centre of public discourse. One can see how unemployment, education, healthcare, economic growth, and caste inequality all are linked to climate change. It needs to be noted how floods in Chennai were brought up even in Parliament by Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) on how cities are becoming rivers and rivers are becoming seas. The Bhartiya Janata Party(BJP) and Shiv Sena lost elections in the flood-ravaged districts of Maharashtra's Kolhapur, Sitapur and Satara. 

The government has a mandate to ensure food, water and a decent standard of life for its citizens which is impossible to achieve in the absence of addressing climate change issues. It is often said a bad monsoon in a country where more than half of the populace depends on monsoons for irrigation may not lose you the elections but its bad management will. 

Climate change Impacting elections

The most direct influence of climate on municipal elections was seen in the recent Bangalore Municipal elections where candidates were faced with questions on flooding, water management, rainfall, and pollution along with electric vehicle policies. India of today may not be prepared to give any political party votes just because it claims to be a 'green party'. But India of tomorrow may see more green parties popping up along with more mainstream political parties adopting climate change in their manifestos, execution and diction when winnability starts depending on their climate action and environmental protection strategies.

Indian political parties have moved ahead from the time when climate change hardly used to feature in their election manifestos. Now environmental issues are prominently visible in the election manifestos of almost all political parties. The All Indian Trinamool Congress(AITC), which is mostly a West Bengal-centric party, even has two pages on climate change in its manifesto discussing climate change for India and Bengal respectively. Regional parties are more focused on their constituencies. The Aam Aadmi Party(AAP), which rules Delhi and Punjab, talks about air pollution, which is the bane of North India, at length but forgets to talk about water, sound, fossil and other types of pollution.

The BJP  talks about LiFE(Lifestyle for Environment)-based sustainable development where India will slowly move towards a net-zero and achieve the Panchamrit plans of 2030. It talks of sustainable living, reducing emissions and reducing dependence on fossil fuels. It seeks to demonstrate the importance of renewables, green energy and cleaner technologies while conveniently forgetting about forest conservation, Indigenous communities and wildlife conservation.

The Indian National Congress(INC) talks of either reviving or boosting many initiatives started by their various governments. It has promised to bring back protection against deforestation, and wildlife conservation and has promised to roll back the anti-conservation amendments pushed forward by the BJP-led government from 2019 to 2022. It talks of creating a new job via the Green Transition Fund and Green New Deal Investment Programme to create millions of green jobs and help people transition from fossil-fuel-based jobs to sustainable jobs by absorbing the transition costs. It will also protect the rights of the indigenous forest communities and create independent bodies like the USA's Environment Protection Agency (EPA) to give it more teeth.

The Communist Party of India(CPI) and other communist parties talk of indigenous forest rights and of ensuring the vast majority of coal, oil, and natural gas employees don't become jobless in the transition to cleaner energies. The Bahujan Samaj Party(BSP) talks of creating a reliance on cleaner technologies as over-reliance on coal leads to the exploitation of socially marginalised sections under the garb of energy security.

Sustainability ingrained in lifestyle

Climate politics in India is not an existential Godzilla kind of fight for survival It is more nuanced and has its various layers. The times have changed from a time when the US used to claim USA's lifestyle was non-negotiable in the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. No mainstream political party can claim that in India in this century.  The Indian Colosseum sees a battle of how to navigate development priorities by growing, developing, and providing fast accessible affordable energy to the 1.4 billion population without endangering others' survival on this planet. This is a tricky situation Indian political parties find themselves in, but due to its largely sustainable lifestyle the India of tomorrow even if it's developed won't be a carbon-emitting hegemon as sustainability is ingrained in its centuries-old traditions.

Climate politics will continue to shape India's politics through its disastrous effects like heatwaves, floods, disasters, glacial melting, glacial lake outbursts flood (GLOF), cyclones and erratic rainfall. India needs to have a robust competitive framework where political parties ideate, brainstorm and debate on how to give more teeth to the Ministry of Environment Forest and Climate Change(MoEFCC), create bodies like the USA's EPA and ensure all environmental laws, disaster management work in tandem under the Gaia’s hypothesis highlighting the “One-Health Approach”.

(The author is a Junior Research Fellow and PhD Scholar at the Centre for South Asian Studies(CSAS), School of International Studies(SIS), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Views are personal. He can be contacted at sayantanb21@gmail.com and on Twitter Sayantanb21)

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