It is ironic that a government and a system that seeks to reclaim the Indian ethos and the ancient Indian way of life is today working with models that are precisely the opposite
The debate on the ever-alive topic ‘Does God exist?’ between the well-known poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar, an atheist, and the graduate of Islamic studies Mufti Shamail Nadwi, a believer, has drawn much interest and comment. Akhtar is the darling of those who stand with reason, logic and secularism, values that are under attack in India today. He is the first Indian to win a little-known Richard Dawkins Award, which is presented annually to a “distinguished individual … who publicly proclaims the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead.” But we may ask: Where exactly has modernity and value-free science led us? The sting lies in this counter question that found no place in the Akhtar-Nadwi television-style debate.
The march of science and technology, fused into a compact called technoscience, has delivered remarkable progress on the one hand but on the other hand has brought exploitation at a scale so stunning that it has also delivered the unfolding climate crisis, brought humanity on the edge of an ecological disaster and landed us in the age of the Anthropocene.
There is progress at an immediate and material level for a few but regress at a long-term planetary scale, an essentially Western-style plunder and conquest of “mother nature” that is often traced right back to the 17th century and the dawn of the Age of Reason and the subsequent Enlightenment movement of the 18th century. The march deep-wired the scientific method and the reductionist approach which brought the wonders of modern science in new discoveries and inventions that continue to this day. But this science also became a religion of sorts that prayed at the altar of objectivity, maximised extraction and so-called efficiency and somewhere in the process de-humanised the project of humanity living in peace on a fragile planet.
When Francis Bacon (1561-1626) said that mankind “should endeavour to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe” and Rene Descartes (1596-1650) “described the Earth and the whole visible universe in the manner of a machine,” they unleashed the path to the plunder of nature pictured as a dead rock, not as the sensitive ecosystem of a living planet that it is now recognised to be.
Earth as the “pale blue dot”, the image of our planet as a flicker in the cosmic vastness, brings humility and inspires awe. But that perspective is lost when science becomes a cold and calculated excavation by equipment and equations. This diminished understanding of nature is at the root of the crisis across the world but particularly in India.
The attempted takeover of the Aravalli mountain range by one business group under the label of progress and growth is only the latest chapter in this long-running game of a nation that has forsaken nature in its quest for mindless extraction. These policies continue to be built on approaches that the advanced economies of Europe have long given up as they moved towards some form of sustainability.
With the sense of the sacred gone, the Aravalli range that forms the oldest fold mountains (so-called because they ‘fold up’ when earth’s tectonic plates collide) on the planet is seen as 800 km of dead rock to be exploited for resources and material assets for consumption here and now at a cost that will be paid much later and will never be fully comprehended.
Yet when what is dismissed as profane is given the status of the sacred, the Aravalli mountain range becomes the God that guides and protects. In the words of an official document of the government, it “gently guides the monsoon clouds eastwards towards Shimla and Nainital, thus helping nurture the sub-Himalayan rivers and feeding the north Indian plains” while “in the winter months, it protects the fertile alluvial river valleys (the para Indus & Gangetic) from the assault of cold westerly winds from Central Asia”.
India today sits at the bottom of the rank of countries in the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which combines a range of indicators like climate change mitigation, air pollution, waste management, sustainability of fisheries and agriculture, deforestation, and biodiversity protection. The EPI is produced by centres working under Yale and Columbia Universities.
It is ironic that a government and a system that seeks to reclaim the Indian ethos and the ancient Indian way of life is today working with models that are precisely the opposite. For example, the very first verse of the Isha Upanishad tells us that the entire universe, animate and inanimate, is enveloped by God or Isha (Ishaavasyamidam sarvam), a verse that Gandhi said captured the essence of the entire Hindu philosophy. But instead of nature being worshipped as a form of the Lord as seen in the Upanishadic understanding, this government has embraced development models that turn the scriptures and all that is held sacred on its head as it rushes in to plunder the land, the mountains and the seas.
Coupled with this violence is the attendant violence of crony capitalism, the violence embedded in growing inequality, and the violence in showcasing a growth militarism that counts numbers but forgets people.
None of this is to suggest that India must reject science or progress, but to ask for an ecological intelligence that sees that the tools of science may not always bring progress, particularly when we disregard the subjective experience or forget that small can also be beautiful as the economist E F Schumacher put it.
This is often explained by ecologists as the Gaia hypothesis, named for the primordial Greek goddess of the Earth, which tells us how our planet is a delicately balanced self-regulating system, alive and conscious.
The Billion Press
(Jagdish Rattanani is a journalist and faculty member at SPJIMR)
