Let the Subaltern Speak: Why Climate Assemblies Might Breathe Life into Indian Climate Politics

New participatory institutions would make lived realities more difficult for political elites to ignore.

Photo by Shashank Hudkar on Unsplash

India’s climate actions attract a great deal of scrutiny. Commentaries swing between hailing bold long-term ambition and scathing criticism for going slow on the global stage with an insistence on historical responsibility for emissions. But as the crisis becomes clearer and the country’s role as a swing player becomes more prominent, it makes sense to dive a level deeper and supplement debates on what India does with an understanding of why it does so. This exercise is of broader value because climate politics in India bears more than a family resemblance to climate politics in other countries of the Global South. 

A closer look reveals an almost perplexing fact: Climate politics is not popular politics. The public’s voice is surprisingly muted amid the major climate-related transformations underway, which is unusual for a large and rambunctious democracy like India.

This does not mean public concern about climate change is non-existent. Its signals take the form of everyday issues that press up against and deform lived reality: Water scarcity, agricultural distress, environmental degradation. In a polity as large as India, these signals are also dispersed among hundreds of decentralized governance units. There emerges, then, the distinct possibility that strategic climate action becomes lost in the haze of localized firefighting. 

The challenge is partly institutional. What sort of institutional setup could gather and amplify dispersed political signals to the point of delivering a climate policy agenda sanctioned by public will? The emerging model of climate assemblies presents possibilities. Deliberative assemblies might widen the scope of the conversation – helping move from renewable energy to a host of issues closer to lived experience like health, agriculture and so on – and help tackle the effects of startlingly high, and growing, levels of inequality. 

Climate who? 

Today, India’s prodigious climate policy output is an artefact of technocratic rationality engineered in capital cities across the country. It is driven by national and state governments sensing economic opportunities in climate action, such as attracting vast amounts of green capital through foreign direct investment, building home-grown national ‘champions’, reducing dependence on imported oil, and building a brand-new manufacturing base. The persuasions of economics are buttressed by an urge to improve India’s image in the eyes of international audiences, seek rents for officials, and build a legacy for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These forces have undoubtedly been productive, with new targets and policies in renewable energy, electric vehicles, renewable manufacturing, and green hydrogen. 

Yet, climate change features nowhere in the drama of national and subnational elections and is barely mentioned in election manifestos. A sizeable part of the population (estimated at a quarter) does not know about (or has no opinion about) climate change, and around half of those who do recognize the term associate it with local environmental issues like pollution and heat. These issues likely feature quite low in their list of electoral concerns.  

The ensuing political vacuum is reinforced by legislatures that are out of step with the urgency of climate science. Parliament has not moved on legislation despite mounting evidence of a climate-ravaged future, and rarely debates the issue. The over two dozen state legislatures that control important parts of the climate agenda (in such areas as water, health, local administration, agriculture) have been similarly lethargic. The reticence of these institutions, and their members, mean fewer stump speeches on the subject, fewer discussions about the big picture by elected representatives during post-disaster visits, less vital information flow from elected leaders to the public, and overall a more constrained sphere of public conversation.  

Civil society has played only an occasional role in shaping climate policy, never operating at the heart of the process. The country’s large and once powerful national trade unions have generally stayed clear of pushing demanding more ambitious climate policy. Labour unions have been a declining force in Indian politics in recent decades for several reasons and, in any case, have not taken a vocal stand on decarbonization yet. 

Early signs suggest that labour is approaching the transition with caution. In recent years, unions have mainly focused on resisting the government’s facilitation of private capital in the once state-run coal sector (by allowing new private coal mines and foreign direct investment among other things), reflecting worries about declining coal employment due to technological change and new institutional practices that encourage layoffs and wage cuts. This focus on the quality of employment informs views on decarbonization; some large trade unions have been sceptical about whether enough renewable jobs can be created for a just transition, and whether these jobs will be permanent and with benefits. This scepticism is driven by the fact that 20th century coal enterprises were run by the government in consultation with a few large unions, while the modern renewables sector is a mostly private affair. There have been indications that some large unions are thinking of setting up parallel bodies in the renewable space, but these plans seem far from concrete. 

The hesitation among large unions puts them at odds with a host of other movements and collectives that have been pushing for more progressive climate policy. Several environmental groups, farmers’ organisations, fish workers and others have, at various moments, made public statements or come together to call for more ambitious climate policy. But these currents have generally operated at the fringes of climate policy and have not coalesced into large, organic, and society-wide climate movements like those that have changed the conversation in Europe and the United States in recent years. Though close to the state, Indian political parties rarely, if ever, engage with climate issues, with actions in highly climate-affected states like Bihar being the exception to the rule. 

An evident skew in policy

What does this political landscape – an executive branch focused on green capital and infrastructure, general legislative lethargy and low levels of public engagement – mean for the shape of climate policy? For one, the low levels of partisan polarisation on climate (unlike the US) and a framing that emphasises economic growth means the state quickly shifts policy gears in some areas (such as electric vehicles and massive battery storage) but seizes up in others, most notably adaptation. 

Institutionalisation of the adaptation agenda is weak, with no active national policy foundation, an underperforming national adaptation fund, obsolescing state climate plans, and the weak absorption of usable scientific knowledge in local governments across the country. This is a problem in a country consistently ranked among the most climate-vulnerable in the world, where the consequences of climate impacts are worsened by high poverty, an already-stretched state, and a patchy and under-resourced social safety net. 

Climate assemblies could help fill this deficit. By shifting the focus to adaptation concerns in different geographies, from the Himalayas to the coast, they could make it clear to the political system that impacts are indeed being felt, and that action could be politically popular. They could help weave a strategic golden thread between many disparate areas of government activity in areas such as water, insurance schemes, primary healthcare. Coordination is a prerequisite to the things India presently lacks: large pools of strategic adaptation funding and a more robust institutional base within the state. In mitigation, assemblies could serve as a way of deliberating timelines, technologies, and the underlying philosophy of the transition. 

The most important justification for participatory climate decision making is the highly unequal nature of Indian society. Climate actions are about more than saving natural systems; they are being cast as a way of delivering more just and stable human systems. The Green New Deal is one manifestation of this idea. The context within which India’s next generation of climate policies will operate is alarming. Inequality has reached unsustainable levels in the three decades since economic liberalisation in the early ‘90s. The latest World Inequality Report shows that the top 10 per cent hold 65 per cent of wealth (the top percentile holds a full third), while the bottom 50 per cent hold six per cent. The pandemic has rapidly worsened this disparity. This leeches into India’s politics: 88 per cent of India’s current Parliamentarians are crorepatis, Indian millionaires at the pinnacle of affluence and power (1 crore Indian Rupees = USD 132,000). 

The WIR report sees the need for a massive internal reallocation of emissions just to meet India’s self-declared 2030 targets; India’s top 10 per cent would have to emit 58 per cent less to allow for an equitable distribution of carbon across the population. Currently, India’s bottom half emit one ton per person annually, while the top 10 per cent emit over eight times that amount. Internal equity challenges will only grow more challenging with steeper emission targets, such as India’s 2070 net-zero target announced at COP 26 in Glasgow. 

A more consultative political process could also alter the distributional consequences of Indian mitigation. For example, the current focus on mega-scale solar parks could be complemented with a push for decentralised renewable options and a focus on improving rural productivity. It could also establish a glide path for the potentially fraught transitions in India’s coal belt, helping negotiate policies that resolve long-standing internal disparities in these communities. 

Indian climate assemblies would have to be different

There are few institutions, then, for popular expressions of climate politics. A more all-encompassing response that takes vulnerability and inequality seriously will require political experimentation. Citizen climate assemblies like those in the UK and France are one way of breathing life into a subdued climate scene. Recently advanced by Extinction Rebellion, these institutional innovations have rapidly been assimilated into the mainstream of climate governance thought.

Assemblies in France and the UK seem to have borne mixed results; they were truly deliberative across a representative cross-section of society but seem to have failed in pressuring governments to adopt their policies in full or even the underlying spirit of their recommendations. But the hundreds of recommendations of these assemblies together serve as a democratically legitimised policy agenda for decarbonisation. 

The most important difference between the Indian format and those tried in the UK and France would be the scope of questions put forward. Those assemblies asked pointed questions about decarbonization to a population already seized by climate urgency. The Indian equivalent would have to be much broader in scope, tackling a series of questions across mitigation and adaptation. This stems from the difference in context; if the UK and French examples were about arriving at answers in a fractious setting, the Indian experiment would have to be about establishing a baseline of democratically legitimate action in a host of vexing and largely ignored climate arenas.

To leave a political mark, these assemblies would have to be structured with care. In the context of low climate awareness, a lot will ride on the provision of clear, actionable information to participants. And for recommendations to be truly representative, participants would have to be selected to bridge the bewildering array of social cleavages in modern Indian society – caste, class, religion, excluded tribal populations, remote geographies, and the like. 

Assemblies would also have to be intentionally located in climate-affected and fossil-fuel dependent communities to elicit opinions that are otherwise lost in the aggregates of electoral politics. One could imagine coastal forums to address the complicated adaptation challenges posed by a 6000 km coastline, another set on urban development (on the future of mobility, for example, which affects working class commuters, a sprawling community of internal combustion engine workers, and those at risk due to air pollution), another on forestry practices, and so on. Appropriate siting is important for another reason: Communities that have already experienced extensive climate impacts (such as a decade of drought in Maharashtra or forest fires in Himalayan states) or are on the frontlines of the energy transition are more likely to be active participants with strong policy preferences (when armed with the right information) than the average voter. 

These assemblies would have to be split along levels of climate governance. India’s federal structure places important powers in the hands of state and local governments. Therefore, these assemblies should be aligned with the Constitutional division of powers. 

Like the UK and French assemblies, independence from the state would have to be a core principle. The value of such assemblies lies in their legitimacy, in their acting as a proxy for the popular will. The threat of these institutions being hijacked by political opportunists is substantial. To be useful, these assemblies should deliberate on a host of practical, near-term policy solutions. This brings it slightly closer to the UK format, which focused on evaluating a series of specific policy proposals, than the French model which built a new vision on a blank slate.  

There are undeniable risks with this proposal. For one, there is little doubt that independent citizen’s assemblies operating parallel to the state are alien to the practice of Indian governance. Indian mitigation policy has, for example, operated through closed-room sectoral consultations and inputs from specialised consultants. Institutions established to determine the national climate plan were dominated by national ministries and technical experts from large national NGOs and think tanks. This is notwithstanding the many hundreds of climate forums established by grass-roots NGOs and development organisations over the last decade, whose recommendations—I can attest from personal experience in some of these programs—were almost always overlooked by policymakers. 

The most challenging question is how to get policymakers to take recommendations seriously. Because the political salience of climate change is low, proposals from these assemblies can always be dismissed as being unrepresentative. One way around this is to establish processes to make sure they are seen and heard. A minimum standard could be accountability of the executive to the assembly or, at the very least, legislature for why actions were not carried out (or carried out in a diluted manner) though this would require prior commitment from the executive, through either statement or law.  

For long-run sustainability, these assemblies must also be given some authority over climate policymaking in government. India’s government currently lacks a dedicated body to tackle climate transformations head-on in analytically sound ways. Policies are mushrooming everywhere, driven by bureaucratic priorities across many dozens of state and national ministries, but with little conversation about what they amount to and whether they are consistent with each other. This is quite unlike the UK’s Climate Change Committee, for example, that conceives of coherent policy options and stimulates national discussions around them. Independent climate commissions are an increasingly popular global solution and have been proposed in India. Climate assemblies could play a crucial role in such a commission, helping it sort through climate futures in democratically-sound ways. 

The Indian example could well serve as a template for, or warning to, other countries in the Global South that share similar climate politics. Climate assemblies are useful because they are adaptable and universally relevant. India has long pushed the boundaries of democratic possibilities in the developing world, once eloquently described by Sunil Khilnani as ‘a substantial bridgehead of effervescent liberty on the Asian continent’. This would be an important experiment in Indian democracy. It would deepen India’s steady record of a universal franchise since independence in 1947 by creating a proxy climate franchise. It would also be consistent with the Constitution’s preamble, which establishes India as a socialist, secular, democratic republic.  

As they confront the defining crisis of the 21st century, India’s democratic traditions must adapt. Climate change forces urgent choices with long-term consequences. Waiting for weak signals to be amplified in the political system risks wasting the moment. An issue that, in the Indian context, is as subtle as climate change risks being lost in the noise. Creating an alternate island of democratic energies could help.

Aditya Valiathan Pillai is an associate fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, a policy think tank in New Delhi, India. He has studied the politics of climate change in India and South Asia and worked with NGOs and movements for close to a decade.