Environmental justice: An Ambedkarite perspective
By Manda Hemanth Kumar
In the 21st century, human life experienced one of the most painful and catastrophic tragedies in the name of Covid-19 aka Coronavirus. This pandemic posed many dangers to human life. It’s contagious nature and fatal consequences literally stopped the world. This gains the attention of the intellectual class to re-think about how we imagine human life and environmental justice. One can argue that hegemonic capitalist ideology is solely responsible for this pandemic. In such a crisis, understanding the Ambedkarite perspectives of humanity and social justice becomes crucial.
Most of the Indian environmental study deals with elite environmental politics and conviniently do miss-out Dalits who have often participated in significant numbers in various environmental movements(Mukul Sharma 2017). In academic discourse, Ambedkar has rarely discussed the framework of environment as much as Gandhi and Nehru. However, Ambedkar’s idea of nature was distinct from the others. For him, environmental experience comes from the everyday activities performed by the people who are segregated society. It is imperative for the scholars who think about equality and environmental justice to think about the segregated environmental spaces and unequally distributed natural resources in a village model or in the city. It is intu itive for any scholar to say that natural resources like water, land etc., are not equally accessible to every section of this society even today.
“ …there was hunger burning within us; with all this, we were to sleep without food; that was because we could get no water; that was because we were untouchable…” — Ambedkar
Ambedkar was very sensitive to Dalits being excluded from the ecologically important resources. This can be observed in two levels, his emphasis and fights against the exclusion of Dalits from possessing land and also his ideas on the nexus between the Caste system and access to forest and water. For Ambedkar, one can not understand environment and nature without addressing the problems of caste structures of the Indian society. Understanding Ambedkar’s ideas on the environment inevitably takes us to the point that society and environment can not be studied together.
Ambedkar has laid the wider framework for understanding the environment. Ambedkarism stands with the idea of modernity which has the elements of scientific temperament, equality, justice and fraternity and is humanistic in nature. Ambedkar believes that that emancipation of Dalits could be possible with modernity and this process would lead to the sustainable development of the environment which is also democratic.
If environmental justice does not address the question of the caste structure in India, that would inevitably lead to the ghettoization of the natural resources. Ambedkarism believes that only by distributing the natural resources to all sections of the society can we shape a democratic and egalitarian society. Otherwise, it will lead to the centuries long, age-old exploitation of the lower strata.Therefore, policies or any action towards environmental justice should address the problems of society as well to achieve a democratic and sustainable living world.
References
- Sharma, Mukul. Caste and Nature: Dalits and Indian environmental Policies, Oxford University Press, 2017.
