What a visit to Nairobi taught me about Indira Gandhi’s environmentalism
TK#12: Indira Gandhi unknowingly gave the world a vocabulary for climate justice, way back in the 1970s. But her domestic environmental policies had quite the opposite impact
It was a humid and warm day in March this year in Nairobi, Kenya. My colleagues and I, over a dozen of us from the Constructive Institute in Denmark, made a beeline towards the headquarters of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The tiny pavements reminded me of the one’s back home in India. We jumped on and off it frequently.
TK, short for “To Come,” in publishing and journalism is used by editors to mark missing information. This is Mahima Jain’s newsletter. TK #12 explores Indira Gandhi’s domestic environmental policies vis-a-vis her rhetoric in global forums.
After a rigorous security and passport check, vetting and UN-issued photo-IDs we were finally let in. We made a beeline to see Inger Anderson, Executive Director, UNEP.
We sat around a large roundtable in a conference room with slightly open windows, and had a candid chat. [See Anderson’s media statement on constructive journalism here.]
During our visit I learnt about UNEP’s origin, and its India connection, which I was unaware of. I learnt that the former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had an active role to play in rhetoric around the environment and poverty, the formation of UNEP, and the Global South’s participation in environmental debates since 1970s.
In this edition of TK, I share the story of Indira Gandhi’s speech at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, and her role in the formation of UNEP. Here are three questions I explored, which offer us an insight about her rhetoric and policies, and her role in global environment discussions.
Why is Indira Gandhi’s 1972 speech important?
In 1972, global discourse on the environment largely focused on pollution, deforestation and whaling. The call for a global dialogue was led by the West. The rest of the developing world felt that such ideas were yet another way for the developed world to dictate what was right for others, and thereby stalling development elsewhere. The resistance was almost universal, as this article in The Guardian notes.
But something needed to be done. Sweden led these discussions and the UN held the first global conference on the human environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm in June 1972, with 113 countries attending. Apart from the host nation’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi was the only other leader invited to address the conference. She became the voice of a vast majority and voiced the concerns of the developing world, while ensuring their participation in these dialogues.
“Her speech at the conference was ground-breaking in that it linked environmental conservation with poverty reduction – one of the key principles of the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs,” Inger Anderson wrote in 2022.
Praneeta Mudaliar and Prakash Kashwan have explored Gandhi’s rhetoric in detail in their January 2024 paper titled “Poverty and Pollution: Revisiting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Speech for Contemporary Debates on Environment and Development.”
Gandhi argued, “Environment cannot be improved in conditions of poverty. Nor can poverty be eradicated without the use of science and technology . . . The environment problems in developing countries are not a side effect of excessive industrialization but reflect the inadequacy of development.” These questions remain highly relevant even today, especially considering the concurrent crises of extreme inequalities and the ongoing climate crisis.
Indira Gandhi’s Stockholm speech, specifically her probing question, “Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?,” is often referenced nationally and internationally.
Gandhi’s speech is considered so important that scholars such as Pakistani economist Tariq Banuri call it one of the four pivotal moments in the global environmental discourse (the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968, and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 1972 are the other three).
She was one of the strongest supporters of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), which eventually led to the creation of the IPCC. She argued for the UN to have an office in the global south. The UNEP headquarters in Nairobi is the only one in the Global South, but it could have been in New Delhi. Former environment minister and Congress leader Jairam Ramesh recounted the incident in The Hindu in 2022. He recalled that the choice for a UNEP headquarters was between New Delhi and Nairobi; particularly since the momentum Gandhi’s speech generated. However, India did not press its case and withdrew in November 1972 citing fraternal links with Kenya.
What were Gandhi’s environmental policies in India?
Mudaliar and Kashwan explore this question in detail in their insightful paper. Their main argument contrasts her rhetoric on the global stage with her domestic policies. Yes, Gandhi was “a staunch environmentalist and an avid naturalist” but her actions also raise several red flags. I share three excerpts:
1
Gandhi focused on environmental protection in her policy agenda and also led the Ministry of Environment. She devoted substantial attention to preserving nature and wildlife, specifically, charismatic species such as lions, rhinoceroses, and tigers. She passed the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972, which paved the way for the creation of several national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. However…
Some of the most consequential advances in Indira Gandhi’s environmental policymaking occurred during one of the most difficult periods in Indian democracy. In response to widespread political opposition and civic unrest….During the emergency, Indira Gandhi’s actions aimed at protecting the environment were also authoritarian, leading to historians and journalists noting that Gandhi was an “authoritarian ecologist.”
Often this went beyond ecology, as in the form of a campaign for population control via draconian measures of women’s sterilisation, and the demolition of slums in Delhi.
2
Gandhi’s developmental policy didn’t depart from what the West subscribed to. She did exactly what the others were doing, with little focus on sustainability:
Though Gandhi did not quite blame the poor, she focused excessively on widespread poverty, as if that had to be the main reason why the Indian state had failed to prevent large-scale environmental degradation. A more critical explanation would focus on bolstering environmental regulations to prevent and address environmental pollution, which affects the poor and socially marginalized groups the most. Despite Gandhi’s framing of the inter-connections between poverty and the environment, she failed to articulate an alternative development agenda that would lead the Global South away from the ravages of industrialization. On the contrary, Gandhi argued that developing countries must build factories, dams, mines, and canals, irrigate more land, and chemically fertilize the soil no matter what development model they choose, just as industrially advanced countries have done in the past.
3
Apart from the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972, Gandhi passed other laws such as the Forest Conservation Act of 1980, which was built on the colonial legacy. It eventually displaced millions of adivasis in the name of protecting the environment and saving the tiger. As Mudaliar and Kashwan conclude:
....despite Indira Gandhi’s provocative arguments about poverty-environment links, the policies and institutions that she enacted for wildlife conservation are linked to large-scale violations of the rights of Indigenous peoples and other rural communities dependent on forest resources. Ironically, these policies failed to address extractive economic development, which is the root cause of deforestation and habitat degradation because of the failure of the state to enforce safeguards meant to minimize the environmental impacts of large development projects.
How does Gandhi’s speech shape our present?
Despite these faults, Gandhi gave the developing world a vocabulary to argue for the interests of their countries, the poor and poverty alleviation. Her arguments continue to be used in climate negotiations till date.
Mudaliar and Kashwan write:
“...the poverty-centric perspective in Indira Gandhi’s speeches also greatly shaped India’s thought and positions on climate change and the environment in international negotiations for political and substantive reasons. Twenty years after Stockholm, at the UN Conference on Environment and Development at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, India held steadfast to a rhetorical emphasis on poverty eradication, international climate justice, and equity.”
Leaders across party lines and across the world have at various points used Gandhi’s words to make a case for the Global South’s agenda in climate negotiations. As this article in The Guardian story points out Gandhi’s statements on poverty and pollution “unknowingly, threw the future climate change movement under a bus. This statement has echoed down the halls of climate change debate ever since.”
Mudaliar and Kashwan note that often Gandhi’s main arguments are misused. They aren’t used to recognize “the contextual and structural challenges that the poor face, but for India’s political and economic elites to promote models of economic development that they claim to be necessary for alleviating poverty.” Leaders across party lines follow economic policies similar to the ones initiated by Gandhi since the 1980s, and have resulted in India becoming one of the most unequal countries in the world.
Finally, the authors also draw yet another parallel to the ongoing climate negotiations. They see the same dissonance, and the intention-action gap that Gandhi demonstrated in the Global North’s climate discourse. The elite and businesses in the Global North “seek to reduce climate action to non-transformative technological solutions…that serve to justify business-as-usual approaches while pushing away the responsibility and costs of climate action on consumers and people in the Global South. Concurrently, environmental and climate policymaking is increasingly being steered toward market-based solutions…”
While there’s no simple way of understanding Gandhi’s policies, it would do well for policy makers and leaders to engage with the questions she articulated, they say.
Thanks for reading TK. Do consider subscribing for more—those who are new here, I am Mahima Jain, an award-winning independent journalist covering the socio-economics of gender, environment and health. You can see some of my work here: www.mahimajain.in.
Best,
Mahima Jain