nation state, India and energy geopolitics

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SVRK Prabhakar

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Apr 1, 2013, 11:02:54 PM4/1/13

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Hi there,

I thought of sharing with you a passionate note on energy geopolitics and climate change written by one of my facebook contacts.

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Ms Anandi Sharan is one of the noted environmentalists based in India.

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The nation state by definition is about bi-lateral and multi-lateral relations with other nations.

When Russia gave away power station technology for free it was a bilateral relationship and India got on with it. Then better technology was sought and we switched to the Germans and Americans and so on, but by then Russia was moving towards getting embroiled in Afghanistan; and in any case Non Alignment allowed a nation to shop around.

The world bank under the USA for a while promoted our fossil fuels. Then neoliberalism struck and Russia also lost its caring attitude and all nations began selling their gas to the highest bidder and keeping their money for the private banks.

This year China thought it could help India via BRICS with an investment fund, but Manmohan Singh said no.

If China were to give India vast numbers, say, half a billion 5 W panels and pico water pumps free on a bilateral basis; and another 20 million agricultural volunteers to come and teach consolidation of land holdings and SRI and so on, that could be considered, because it would fit with how India understands relations between socialist countries. Essentially stuff is shared and things are free for the poor.

But it is also easy to see why India is not so keen on Chinese cooperation. Why can India not mobilise 20 million educated urban volunteers to get the consolidation of village lands done and direct its industries to manufacture a billion solar lights ourselves?

And this in turn raises the question – do we still morally and ethically have this emission space as a nation to manufacture things like solar pumps and condemn millions of our own citizens to death through temperature rise caused by the manufacture of these devices?

All this points to the deep unease about development in India, an unease from which no one can be free: India as a nation and Indians as people are more susceptible to the moral undercurrents of global development than probably any other nation or any other nationals.

The contradiction between city and country is the defining feature of capitalism and the realisation that we need to dissolve it in order that humanity may control temperature rise has disturbed the confidence with which India as a nation enters into cooperation for development with any other nation. Indeed nations generally may not be cooperating at all very much for precisely this reason.

Hitherto bilateral cooperation as well as multilateral funds have been to promote fossil fuels; but now with this moral issue of climate change, what is needed is a new global development pact beyond World Bank and IMF: Kyoto is bigger than all else and makes fossil fuel deals akin to fire-fighting. We are continuing with the fossil fuels because we cannot see how to get out of them.

But we know we must, in order that India may be a more equal and democratic place and so that we have a future, with waters and soils repairing over time.

Binding emission reduction commitments on advanced countries to force them to change the mode of production to *socialised rural* is more important for India (to free ourselves from capitalism and chart out our own development path) than are Chinese investment funds – in other words, India knows full well that BRICS is not enough.

The advanced countries have to change, and become self-sufficient without fossils and nuclear, and leave the lands of developing countries to us.

India has eons of time in front of it to go wherever it wants; and it will, provided the advanced countries stop selling and we stop buying fossil fuel technologies; provided, in other words, there is a global socialist energy revolution.

If advanced countries do not switch to a *socialised rural* mode of production based on self-sufficiency for their own communities, they will drag us all to our deaths; and the future will be very bleak.

The Indian middle class always was collaborationist - it's very education is in the language of the oppressor. But through english we also speak to the advanced countries directly. If the poor are to become the rulers of India, the energy = power base = land base of the previous mode of production must change. And for this the global mode of production must change. The material reality of this country makes Indians the most vulnerable of all to climate change. No one has any reserves to tide us over droughts or floods. Therefore climate change politics is the defining politics of our bi-lateral and multi-lateral relation with other nations. And thus India has always said, and will continue to say, that, as part of their responsibility for what they did in the past, advanced countries must get out of fossil fuels now, immediately, no matter what.