The Ministry for the Future

31

India is now leading the way on so many issues! We remain horrified by the memory of the heat wave, galvanized, and if not unified then nearly so, in a broad coalition determined to re-examine everything, to change whatever needs changing. You see it all around you!

This situation is partly an accident of history, admittedly, in that BJP was in power when the heat wave hit and so they were associated with it, with whatever justice who can say, and yet as a result they were thrown out of power and discredited forever, such that hopefully they will never come back, and likewise good riddance to their RSS fake-traditional Hinduistic ethnic-nationalist triumphalism. It was not the true Indian way, as all see now, or most. The heat wave made the revulsion against that pernicious nonsense very great. The true Indian way has always been syncretic, right from the very beginning of our civilization.

Meanwhile the Congress party was clapped out, a thing of the past, its heroic era buried by decades of corruption. Possibly a cleaning-up can someday happen for the party that did so much for India, but that’s for another time, a work in progress; in any case, the upshot post–heat wave was a complete loss of faith in both Congress and BJP, such that the world’s biggest democracy was left with no nationally dominant party. This was an opportunity, as many realized, and the work being done now has been accomplished by the creation of a broad coalition of forces, many of them representing very large Indian populations which never had much political power before, or even very good political representation. The energy from this new coalition is palpable everywhere. Things are changing.

And there are good models to study and use, Indian models. Kerala has been big in this regard as a high-functioning state for almost a century now, devolving power to the local, and the state government alternating in a scheduled way between Left and Congress leadership. Much has been taken from Kerala and applied nationally. Then also Sikkim and Bengal have been developing an organic regenerative agriculture that, at the same time it provides more food than before, also sequesters more carbon in the soil, and this too has been taken up across the country. Indian agriculture moving into its post–green revolution is also a giant step toward independent subtropical knowledge production, achieved in collaboration with Indonesian and African and South American permaculturists, and its importance going forward cannot be over-emphasized.

Land reform is part of that, because with land reform comes a return to local knowledge and local ownership and thus political power. The new agriculture is also labor intensive, as to a certain extent people must replace the power of fossil fuels and pay close attention to small biomes, and of course we have that labor power and that close attention. Especially as the caste system is once again acknowledged to be a bad remnant of our past, a remnant also very associated with BJP, who along with selling our country to global financial predators also demonized so many ethnicities, and told so many Indians that they weren’t really Indian. Now it’s time to wipe that slate clean, and you see all the castes, including Dalits, joining society fully—also all the languages put on the same footing legally, as well as all the ethnic groups and religions across the country. Now we are all Indian together. It is truly a coalition. Which makes the name of the party very apt. May the Coalition hold!

Certainly its work so far has been admirable. Since sweeping the elections, the national Coalition government has completed the nationalization of all the country’s energy companies, and set to work decommissioning all coal-fired plants. Completing the clean electrification of the country is being accomplished by construction of massive solar power arrays, and then electricity-storing facilities, and a refurbished national grid. This again has been labor intensive, but India has lots of people. And lots of sunlight. And lots of land.

The Coalition was very willing to take ideas from elsewhere, even from the Chinese, who have much to teach us about nationalization. It’s a very strong feeling now, that India belongs to Indians—that Indians are not to be sold by other Indians as cheap labor to fill the economic needs of global capital—that the colonial and even now the post-colonial days are over. It is the New India now, and everything is to be reconsidered. Many a time we now say to each other, when the arguments get intense, as they always do, Look, my friend—never again. Never again. This reminds us of the heat wave and the stakes involved, but it is also a more general rejection of the bad parts of the past. Never again, we remind each other, and then go on to consider, So what must we do here, to get to an agreement and act on it?

And so India is coming into its own. We are the new force. People around the world have begun to take notice. This too is new—no one elsewhere has been used to thinking of India as anything but a place of poverty, a victim of history and geography. But now they are looking at us with a little bit of confusion and wonder. What is this? A sixth of humanity on one big triangular patch of land, caught under the blazing sun, cut off by a mighty range of mountains: who are these people? A democracy, a polyglot coalition—wait, can it be? And what can it be? Do we make the Chinese, who so decisively stepped onto the world stage at the start of this century, look dictatorial, monolithic, brittle, afraid? Is India now the bold new leader of the world?

We think maybe so.