Grassroot Politics and Green Illusions: Exploring the Discourse on Environment, Governance and Democracy in Independent India

Environmental discourse in India has always competed in the theatre of its democracy with the help of two powerful actors – the state with its agenda of development in technocratic environmental discourse and the indigenous population represented by civil society with a democratic environmental discourse. Conflicting binaries crowd out this space – development and environment, scientific and cultural, traditional and modern and so on. This paper attempts to trace the Indian environmental consciousness giving space to any alternative or counter environmental discourse that the Indian civilisation might have experienced. The problem of western scientific perspective and its utilisation as a way of culture and a means of power from the colonial times and the privileging of science over other forms of knowledge is examined. The authors analyse the politics of environmentalism as a movement and ideology post independence, and the role of civil society whose powerful articulation of environmental causes have consistently been against the Indian state. According to this assumption, colonialism, modernity and development are exclusively responsible for the degradation and exploitation of nature, marginalising the tribal dweller, the peasant and the rural Indian. The inadequacy of the modern scientific discourse to articulate environmental conflicts has brought in grassroot movements and a powerful dialectic contests to eliminate the opposing argument. The paper concludes that a meaningful framework of Indian environmentalism can rest on a stage where science, democracy and governance have aligned their language and interests.