Sanjay Jha
Last week, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi dramatically tweeted that the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award was being renamed Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award, it was a manifestation of an orchestrated BJP programme to gradually obliterate the Gandhi family from national events of import and several infrastructure projects that adorn their celebrated surname
Politicians are an extremely insecure bunch. Please do not be fooled by their rugged macho speeches, all fire and brimstone, and their muscular predilections. They live their entire lives worrying about what people think about them, an understandable quagmire in a democracy where it is the popular sentiment alone that can provide them a sustainable future. But for some of our leading national superstar leaders, it borders on a visceral paranoia. It is like those adolescent somethings frantically monitoring their ‘likes' on Instagram after posting a selfie where they are pouting prettier than Priyanka Chopra. A politician's narcissism can be deleterious. And the fears, deep.
Last week, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi dramatically tweeted that the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award was being renamed Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award, it was a manifestation of an orchestrated BJP programme to gradually obliterate the Gandhi family from national events of import and several infrastructure projects that adorn their celebrated surname.
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In the run-up to the 2024 general elections, expect more such headline-grabbing tableaus, as it suits the BJP narrative of targeting the Congress party as a private family fiefdom that had brazenly monopolised the branding of state institutions and public assets in their favour. There is, of course, partial merit in the argument but that is only part of the concocted propaganda. There is more to it than meets the eye.
It is true that the Congress went berserk in naming every conceivable concrete structure and soft power play (ranging from expressways, international airports, educational institutions, state-funded programmes etc.) after the Gandhi family, in the foolish belief that they were assured of permanent power. This particularly became stratospheric when the culture of sycophancy within the Congress landed on Mars without the need for a space capsule. It was a genuflection that the party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru could have done without.
The fact that a disproportionate number of high-profile projects have been appropriated by the Congress leaders has riled the BJP, which has a pathological animus towards Nehru in particular, and his subsequent political lineage. However, the fact is that the Congress has governed India, directly/indirectly for 55 of the 74 years since Independence, and every ruling dispensation would logically have a bias towards its own leaders.
‘New India'
Modern India at its core essence is a Congress-construct, forcing Modi to continuously pontificate on his grand vision of a ‘New India' (basically, Hindutva Undiluted) which is nothing but hollow grandstanding, as nobody knows what that means other than RSS and BJP acolytes. But the BJP is making differentiation with the Congress's version of Old India, a front-burner on its political pitch.
Modi thought that he was killing two birds with one stone in renaming the iconic awards after the legendary hockey great Dhyan Chand (he won three Olympic gold medals). Besides bankrupting the Gandhi name, it would sound churlish of the Congress to oppose it on the day when the Indian men's hockey team won a bronze medal after a gap of 41 years in a spectacular comeback match against the formidable German team.
Did not bite the bait
Thankfully, the Congress did not succumb to Modi's calculated gambit. It welcomed the renaming. But then it raised a pertinent question: Would Modi kindly get his name removed from the recently constructed Motera cricket stadium in the world (where Modi played footsie with former US President Donald Trump last year when the pandemic had already established a foothold on Indian soil)? Why did the BJP blatantly rename the Feroz Shah Kotla cricket stadium in Delhi after their controversial leader Arun Jaitley, who was mired in several corruption allegations if World Cup winning player Kirti Azad is to be believed? Would the BJP be magnanimous enough to disengage the names of its RSS veterans and other party stalwarts like Syama Prasad Mukherjee, Deen Dayal Upadhyay, Sushma Swaraj and Manohar Parrikar from several institutions that demand independence from political branding? If the BJP agreed to this rational and fair proposition, it would be both within their fundamental rights and moral custodianship to remove the names of Congress leaders since 1947. So far, the BJP's silence on this transparent negotiation proposal has been deafening. No response whatsoever. If the attempt was to ridicule the Gandhis for being overzealous in their naming spree, perhaps this jaundiced act in haste has boomeranged on both Modi and the BJP.
Name games
It is a weird irony if not downright farcical that while the name of a brutally assassinated former PM who died a valiant martyr for his country is removed from a prestigious award, the ruling PM arranges a monolithic stadium in his name, reminiscent of the pre-World War fascist era of cult politics. Incidentally, the National Stadium in Delhi and several hockey stadiums carry the glorious legacy of the great Dhyan Chand. A better idea would have been to give Dhyan Chand the Bharat Ratna or name a new special award for Olympic medal-winners under his name. But then as Dr Shashi Tharoor correctly said. “Mr Modi's government is not a game-changing but a name-changing one”.
Let the PM himself de-politicise the abuse of government platforms for public relations and vulgar publicity. What the Prime Minister must do is to immediately order that his photograph is promptly removed from Covid vaccination certificates. It is reprehensible and a repugnant shame that a country that has had over 400,000 deaths (reportedly could be ten times higher, at 4 million) on account of Covid (the Delhi HC had said that people responsible should be “booked for manslaughter”) is seeing a tasteless marketing spree amidst unspeakable horror and dismal tragedy. The government is boondoggling its own innocent citizens.
Will the BJP walk the talk, please?
The author is former spokesperson of the Congress party
We, the people must do it: Climate debate must begin at the grassroots level
Bhavdeep Kang
Presenting dystopic visions of the future, fear-mongering, hectoring by environmentalists and data-heavy reports by climate scientists, are alienating. On the other hand, the ‘Chipko' movement, while it lasted, touched millions with its simple visuals of women hugging trees to conserve forests. The point is that people, not technology, are at the centre of any climate debate.
The late Anil Madhav Dave, India's environment minister from 2016-17, was known for cycling to Parliament, “(not) to get praise or a photo in a newspaper. I am doing it by choice”. His point was that climate change is, ultimately, a matter of choice. It is the sum of all the daily decisions we make, on what we need, why we buy, how we travel and where we dispose of waste. He was one of the few who recognized that effective action on climate change had to come from below.
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For Dave, climate change was real, because it affected his beloved Narmada. He could see “irresponsible human activities” reducing India's oldest and most sacred river to a “cricket pitch” in the near future. To gain first-hand knowledge of riverside communities and their challenges, he rafted down its 1,300km-length.
Greta has a point
Few politicians are as committed. Teen activist Greta Thunberg may have burnt her fingers by naively weighing in on India's farm laws, but makes a fair point when she says global leaders have utterly failed to take climate action seriously. They are politicians, after all, and climate change is not a political issue in most countries of the world.
Geopolitical and domestic agendas push greenhouse gas emissions to the back of the queue. The sensational disclosures in the IPCC 2021 report are already off the front pages, the climate crisis having given way to matters of immediate moment, like Covid-19, OBC politics and not the least, football legend Lionel's Messi's move to PSG.
The one thing that Covid-19 did not change, climate scientists tell us, is the relentless increase in carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere, which breached 419 ppm in May 2021. Why didn't the global shutdown during the Covid-19 pandemic reduce CO2 levels? Indeed, according to the measuring site at Mauna Loa, “the first five months of 2021 showed a 2.3 ppm increase over the same five months of 2020”.
Impact of GHG emissions
That's what makes the impact of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions even more scary. The global warming gas sticks around. Even if global GHG emissions are drastically cut now, there's no slowing down the juggernaut – average temperature will rise by 1.5° Celsius in the next couple of decades. It's going to take consistent green behaviour to put the brakes on warming to a point where the bulk of humanity can survive. Back in 1970, science fiction author Larry Niven speculated that humans would evolve and adapt to the new atmospheric conditions, but by then, billions would have been decimated.
The question of why, given alarming events like wildfires, heatwaves, cyclones, droughts, floods and so on, climate change is not a part of daily conversation, much less of behaviourial choices, has been asked over and over. Most people, not just the climate-sceptics, fail to recognise that climate change affects them directly and calls for immediate action, lest it spiral into an extinction-level event.
The media has taken note, created environment ‘beats' and specialists, civil society and schools are talking ‘sustainability' and eco-friendliness, communities and individuals are installing solar panels and harvesting water, global leaders are promoting green technologies and celebrating eco-warriors and in India, spiritual leaders are preaching harmony with nature. But it's not enough; the pace and quality of the response both lack a sense of urgency.
People must step up
Many cling to the naive belief that science will solve the problem with magical technologies, like giant ‘space mirrors' to block sunlight, or massive Azolla farms that will suck CO2 from the atmosphere. The European Union conceived a capitalist solution to a capitalism-induced problem, in the form of an emissions trading system (EUETS), based on the ‘polluter pays' principle. It also meant that polluters could continue to pollute. In the words of the late environmentalist Anupam Mishra, “Yeh paap ka vyapaar hai (this is a trade in sin)”. Not surprisingly, carbon trading met with limited success, though it did make a few people very rich.
There's no sense in blaming politicians or climate-sceptics – the push needs to come from below, and the people need to take ownership of the environment. Only then, as Dave said, will behaviour skew towards limiting consumption of resources and perceiving pollution as not merely illegal but community-unfriendly and therefore, socially unacceptable.
Changing the conversation in a way that evokes an emotional response, through films, stories and interactions, is one possibility. Presenting dystopic visions of the future, fear-mongering, hectoring by environmentalists and data-heavy reports by climate scientists, are alienating. On the other hand, the ‘Chipko' movement, while it lasted, touched millions with its simple visuals of women hugging trees to conserve forests.
The point is that people, not technology, are at the centre of any climate debate. Only when the ‘samaj' connects with climate change will the media, social and otherwise, consistently and relentlessly red-flag environmental violations and impacts – drying of water sources, chopping of forests for ‘development', factories belching smoke, shoals of plastic on riverfronts and so on. And only then will pressure build up on global leaders to act.
The writer is a senior journalist with 35 years of experience in working with major newspapers and magazines. She is now an independent writer and author
