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Mar 289 min read

In Defence of the Ladakh Movement: A Faint Voice of Solidarity During the Ominous Hour of Climate Em

Posted on 28/03/2024 (GMT 18: 20 hrs)

“In the beginning GOD created the world. Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep. And when there were men, in their various ways, they struggled in torment towards GOD Blindly and vainly, for man is a vain thing, and man without GOD is a seed upon the wind: driven this way and that, and finding no place of lodgement and germination. They followed the light and the shadow, and the light led them forward to light and the shadow led them to darkness, Worshipping snakes or trees, worshipping devils rather than nothing: crying for life beyond life, for ecstasy not of the flesh. Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep. And the Spirit moved upon the face of the water. And men who turned towards the light and were known of the light Invented the Higher Religions; and the Higher Religions were good And led men from light to light, to knowledge of Good and Evil. But their light was ever surrounded and shot with darkness As the air of temperate seas is pierced by the still dead breath of the Arctic Current; And they came to an end, a dead end stirred with a flicker of life, And they came to the withered ancient look of a child that has died of starvation. Prayer wheels, worship of the dead, denial of this world, affirmation of rites with forgotten meanings In the restless wind-whipped sand, or the hills where the wind will not let the snow rest. Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.” —- T. S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock

“We are trying to remind and awaken the conscience of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah to safeguard the fragile ecosystems of the Himalayan mountains of Ladakh and the unique indigenous tribal cultures that thrive here. We don’t want to think of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah as just politicians. We would rather like to think of them as statesman but for that they will have to show some character and far-sightedness…” — Sonam Wangchuk

With a heavy heart, I left for my university classes today morning.

The brave Sonam Wangchuk ended his 21-day long hunger strike: the first phase of the ongoing Ladakh movement. This is being followed by women engaging themselves in similar strikes. Wangchuk has said that the war shall continue, in forms old and new. Be it the forthcoming border march with thousands of farmers and shepherds or any other plausible strategy that he undertakes, he won’t be giving up so easily to the state apparatus’ wilful indifference on the burning matters of concern.

As I was walking towards the bus-stop within the roar of automobiles on a pitch-bitumen street, the blazing sun above my head was making my being regressively crawl back, crawl back to the times when the sun was still subjectively bearable and was very much a part of the creative spirit of our suicidal human race.

I couldn’t stop thinking of Ladakh’s climate fast.

As an insignificantly petty activist (more of an armchair intellectual, a validation-seeking keyboard warrior!) and an environmental hypocrite, I travelled the distance from my home to my university by burning fossil fuel.

With full awareness, I showered (falsely under the delusion that water is an abundance, a luxury that could be exploited beyond measure) before I left my home without using a bucket with a definite amount of water-holding capacity.

What a shame! I have no right to write this note of solidarity.

Still, the time demands it. The might of the pen-front needs to be unleashed in all of its historic glory, for the incoming of a cultural restructuration before any possible “political” revolution.

A sentence kept cropping up in my head throughout the time I was travelling: We are running out of time, precious time!

What is ‘time’ to us, faceless humans? We seem to have attempted to strangle ‘time’, holding its throat forcibly and make it obey our dictates by hook or by crook.

In the meantime, time has rightfully deceived us, since we have not let it have its say in the hour of urgency, in the call for action.

And now… we are too late to do the needful that we should have done a really freaking long time ago! I remember the 1992 Earth Summit, where Fidel Castro uttered these exact wordings…

The “needful” is now just the subject-matter of café-talks by privileged “intellectuals”, who are also slowing fading away under the sway of funded, sponsored “inorganic” intellectuals, those who hail the establishment.

An intellectual without social commitment does not deserve to be called an ‘intellectual’. An intellectual who refuses to respond to the need of the hour is a blatantly eco-myopic idiot, for s/he doesn’t understand what it would mean for him/her/them in the days to come, i.e., how the catastrophes are going to put their very existence in question. It already has, though, since we are living within the manifold climate crisis while thinking (not really) the unthinkable, waiting helplessly for the great dissolution to unfold.

We are going to see a lot of unprecedented disasters take place, in scales and magnitudes never thought of before. Disastrous happenings which shall be named by the paid media houses as “natural” disasters, which, in fact, are not so “natural” after all, but thoroughly anthropo-genic. Those disasters would just be a series of legitimate responses on the part of the weary, exploited, raped, molested and abused nature to claim back its long due. We humans have only known “nature” as a resourceful free gift, and have debited its bountiful accounts without crediting back the necessary ecological entitlements due to our basic lack of moral obligation. We humans are the most irresponsible, disloyal and cruel creatures to have ever treaded this planet earth. Our “red flower” (Yes, Jungle Book reference!) of anti-nature structural distributions and constitutive power-relations have only brought destruction entailing self-annihilation.

We talk of the dinosaurs not being able to survive and thus getting extinct. Yet, we forget the crucial point that they had managed to survive for a pretty considerable amount of time before they were wiped out of existence by forces beyond their control, by forces that they did not cause themselves (if we go by the meteor-hypothesis). We humans have damaged and thereby transformed the natural biodiversity (the biospherical reserve) within a very short span of roughly 250 years! We should be ashamed of ourselves, in every bit, in every breath.

Defying our locus, denying or failing to recognize its rights through the mode of biospheric egalitarianism, we have trampled over the natural world like those set of “rational” fools, who were chopping down the tree-branch that they were sitting on.

Wangchuk’s protests reverberate within this time of the climate emergency. He has emerged like that lone voice, later joined in by thousands of supporters, who has taken a stand against unthought industrialization, and in defence of the inherent rights of the ecosystems beyond instrumental valuations, and the rights of the people who are intimate with those ecosystems for livelihood.

“Autonomy” and talks about the implementation of the sixth schedule are indispensable rejoinders that flare up the core climate-concern weaved into the heart of the Ladakh protest, highlighting decentralized modes of self-rule, self-governance. The Ladakh Climate Fast speaks up boldly against territorial encroachment (4000 sq. kms!) by Chinese forces (to which our present government is deliberately “blind”!) as well as against the admission of spectacular mega-projects by the “domestic” crony oligarchical government, without caring about the local-lives, without caring about the life-preservation of our dear old Gaia. Ladakh’s pasture “lands”, if we think about it in the Leopoldian sense of land-ethic, have every right of holistic autonomy and functional sustenance besides demanding the autonomy of the people inhabiting those areas in harmony with nature.

Fasting for nature? Is that even a thing? Well, Swami Agrawal, with his demand to “Save Ganga”, achieved martyrdom after fasting for 115 days! How easily we forget! The people in power reflect: “Our concern is after all with the Ram Mandir, the Central Vista, the Vishwanath Dham, the Bullet Train and so on— everything else can go to hell! Nature is not even a part of our concern! Kedarnath, Joshimath? What happened there? We don’t care! We instead suppress all the news coming from such collapsing landscapes and topographies!”

‘Save Ganga’ Scientist-Swami dies fasting VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 12th October, 2018 ©Frontline)

In the late-capitalist dichotomy (an exclusive disjunction, for me) amidst “environment or development”, development gets the relative importance and the lion’s share from all the political parties of India within the mainstream paradigm, the very same India which has seen the exemplary Chipko Movement (which celebrated its 50th anniversary, coinciding with the #Ladakh_ClimateFast), the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the Navdanya movement and so on across decades. “Environment” never became a central issue for even the I.N.D.I.A. alliance, other than the thoroughly anti-green fascist BJP.

All the talks about “climate concerns” (the Paris Agreement and so on) on the part of the government are lip-services or mere “show-offs” for filling the coffers of the treacherous green capitalist’s dystopic sterility. by their so-called “renewable energy programmes”! Hegemonic subsumption of the grassroots environmental movements and eco-activists by these giant “green” corporates are inevitable in today’s neoliberal era of “issue-based politics”. Profits come from “green” products, “green” banking, ESG funds and so on—hence, let the profits flow where they will and shall: the green capitalists count their notes on the sofa and laugh vicariously.

“Sustainability” or “Sustainable Development” is a commodified myth until and unless we move out of the foreclosed sphere of this debt-ridden developmental paradigm itself that promotes the consumer fetishist society, a society that upholds abundance at the cost of degrading nature completely. When shall we learn the economics of austerity, following the footsteps of Buddhist economics of “minimum consumption with maximum enrichment (of mind, body and inner lives) and minimum wastage”?

Yet, we prefer to remain climate denialists, wilfully disregarding by means of an anthropocentric fetishistic disavowal that the climate threat is THE single-most threat to our existence along with the existence of other flora-fauna, who will suffer the damage caused by our industrial revolution without doing anything by themselves. How the other beings of the animal kingdom perform their domain-increase is vastly different from how we, by claiming to be at the top of the food chain through sheer arrogance and intellectual hatred, expand our territories by forms of ecological imperialism and environmental terrorism. The eco-terrorists must perform their ecotages even more at this juncture!

Wangchuk has resurfaced these very concerns that I am talking of in a very frustrated, self-reflexive tone. His statements must deserve all our focus, globally, if we are to talk of the (approximately) ten crucial years that lie before us. Within this time, we have to decisively arrive at a conclusion with regard to a “Now or Never”, especially when climate refugees are bound to be produced (they are already being internally displaced in large numbers) across all the coastal regions of India and elsewhere, given the fact that these coastlines will soon get submerged into the rising sea-levels.

Wangchuk has well-established his point. The melting glaciers of the Himalayas, an extremely worrying and poor state of affairs, the appearance of hard-rocky surfaces on the embodiments of our (once) aesthetically pleasing Himalayan peaks all point towards a time that demands from us an immediacy of action, an immediacy of “heed”.

We can start with the Schumacherian “small is beautiful”. We can establish farm-lands on our roofs, terraces, lawns and garden-areas. We can produce our own food without parasitically sucking the blood of the countryside. We can minimize conspicuous consumption. I won’t be reiterating the well-marketed cliché of “Recycle-Reuse-Reduce”, since merely such means won’t help out stuff. We need to deviate from our carbon fetishist, energy fetishist life-pattern. What is the need for all that we live by in this age of alleged cybernetics? Can’t we seek a sustainable retreat to nature, in the Rousseauian or Romanticist sense— away from the dark, depressing industrial space of reductive statistical quantities, where we have suffered the grand, irreversible metabolic rift from nature as well as from each other?

Norway has held its climate elections and has talked of climate legislation, which seems to be quite as much applicable to India as well as the rest of the world. Yet, Norway has hypocritically approved seabed mining at the same time!

This is indeed a very confusing time requiring stern measures from us….

Norway’s ‘Climate Election’ Puts Center-Left in Charge VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 17th September, 2021 ©The New York Times)

Norway Makes Historic Vote In Favor Of Seabed Mining VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 11th January, 2024 ©Carbon Herald)

Let’s shrug our shoulders and get to work. Wangchuk’s protests shall continue and it demands our perceivable dedication to the same. Enough is enough.

Thus, OBMA stands in solidarity with the Ladakh Climate Agitation, in all its might. We sincerely hope that it will gain further momentum in the hours and days to come, to let the deaf Saffron Fascists hear the loud explosion of eco-sensitive eco-politics!

If you want to sound your voice of solidarity as well, go ahead and sign the following petition:

We also demand climate legislation in India in favour of a larger environmental justice!

We also demand the scrapping off of all mega-projects, including hydroelectric power-dams by shunning off energy slavery.

We demand a sustainable retreat from the developmental paradigm as preached by the WB-IMF-WTO trio!

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Climate fast: Why is Sonam Wangchuk protesting in Ladakh? VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 24th March, 2024 ©The Times of India)

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