By Suchismita Das, Assistant Professor, Ahmedabad University, India
Late in the night of 3rd October 2023, the moraine holding the South Lhonak Glacial Lake in place, at 17,300 feet atop the Eastern Himalaya collapsed, leading to one of the most severe glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF) in Asia in recent years. Over the night, water from ostensibly almost 100 hectares of the 167-hectare lake rushed down the Teesta River – which flows through the northeastern Indian states of Sikkim, then West Bengal and finally onto Bangladesh – carrying in its fury hundreds of uprooted tree trunks, boulders the size of two-story buildings, bridges, debris of concrete houses and remnants of a 1200-megawatt dam, with its five million cubic liters of stored water. Despite the overnight evacuation of villages and towns along the river in Sikkim and West Bengal, more than one hundred people were swept away. Innumerable houses were buried under 10-12 feet of silt. The sole arterial highway connecting Sikkim to the plains, running alongside the Teesta via West Bengal, had broken off or been submerged by the swollen river in numerous places. As of September 2024, many affected families continue living in relief camps, and subsequent landslides along the destabilized terrain keep claiming more of the highway, towns, villages and dam-related infrastructure.
In July 2024 the Indian Finance Minister, while presenting the annual budget, announced in the Parliament, “Recently Sikkim witnessed devastating flash floods and landslides that wreaked havoc across the state. Our government will provide assistance to the state.” Some of my interlocutors living in the flood-affected Kalimpong district of West Bengal produced a short video in response to the minister’s promise of disaster-relief to Sikkim. In the video, the minister’s speech is followed by short clips of submerged houses, broken roads, and hapless survivors drying currency notes dripping with muddy water. The words “THIS IS NOT SIKKIM” is overlayed on these visuals. The video was aimed at drawing attention to a disparity in the experience of the GLOF between residents of the states of Sikkim and West Bengal. Citizens of both the states shared the same initial visceral, affective, material experience of loss across the Teesta River Basin. However in the aftermath, when the central/federal government promised disaster-relief to Sikkim while neglecting West Bengal, the experience of the environmental disaster diverged according to people’s location in different electoral constituencies of the same river basin.
Disaster relief, as the video astutely critiqued, is being decided based on specific electoral and political considerations. In the politics of “coalition building” in India’s multi-party system, governments are formed by cobbling together volatile coalitions of various political parties, and withdrawal of support from any ally, at any moment, can topple the entire government and trigger fresh elections. In June 2024, the coalition called National Democratic Alliance (NDA), led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won its third consecutive national parliamentary election. Jubilance however was muted given that expectations of a resounding saffron “wave”, verbalized in the slogan “ab ki baar chaarso paaar” [this time/election 400 seats (of the 543 total seats in parliament)] turned out to be wishful. Instead, BJP’s seats decreased to 240, from 303 in the 2019 elections, increasing its dependence on its allies to retain the NDA’s 293-seat majority in parliament over the next five years. The government of Sikkim, formed by the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha (SKM), is one such regional ally, contributing one crucial Member of Parliament (MP) to the NDA1. The environment, specifically environmental disaster relief, in this scenario is an emergent currency through which the ruling central government seeks to ensure the continuing support of its allies. Environmental disaster relief then is a new iteration of “vote buying” politics – as a feature of Indian elections which generates intense debates about the legitimacy of using money to secure electoral outcomes. In the same budget, Bihar, governed by an NDA ally with 12 seats in the parliament was promised INR 115 billion for flood-relief, contrary to the unspecified amount for Sikkim. It is in this logic of money as a vehicle of electoral influence that West Bengal – governed by the All-India Trinamool Congress (TMC) which publicly spars with the BJP and is a member of the opposition coalition in parliament – claims to be overlooked for disaster-relief grants, and therein frames the experience of the GLOF as a form of environmental injustice.
As an environmental anthropologist, I find myself drawing on the robust political anthropological literature on Indian elections to make sense of this unfolding environmental disaster, while also witnessing the environment becoming a site of “vote-buying” in new ways. In discussions about the relationship between money and political influence in this context, the environment is usually the resource which capitalists covet, when they fund a desired party or candidate in exchange for mining or logging concessions, allowing candidates to use this money to entice voters to elect them (Banerjee, 2020; Sridharan and Vaishnav, 2016). With climate change, as flash floods, cloudbursts, landslides, and GLOFs become part of an average voter’s everyday vocabulary, environmental redress and restoration rather than environmental resource-extraction may become the dominant, or at least an additional frame through which the environment becomes part of the “vote-buying” process, with all its moral, ethical quagmire. In my larger project I argue that infrastructure-collapse, as is occurring in the region right now, is the site where climate change-induced disasters are viscerally and continually experienced by the widest section of people. In the Teesta basin, as this essay highlights, experience of infrastructure-collapse as an index of climate change is in turn inextricably intertwined with experiences of electoral boundaries and of logics of electoral finance.
At the heart of the money-for-votes issue, both in academic and popular debates, is the moral and ethical question of whether with the growing infusion of cash in election spending, voting is simply an index of a candidate’s buying power as opposed to a reflection of the will of the people (Cody 2020). Moreover, as transparency in election funding declines, the conjoined question is that if candidates are increasingly seeking to buy votes, who is buying the candidate (Sridharan and Vaishnav, 2016)?
Against a straightforward instrumentalist reading of “handouts,” “cash payments,” or “gifts,” anthropologists have found that citizens don’t simply vote for the candidate giving them the most money or gifts. Patronage relationships, granting citizens access to the state through its mediating representatives, are constantly renegotiated according to communitarian solidarities (Guha 2008), moral judgements about political leadership, and judgements about the patron’s efficacy in mediating access to knowledge, networks, and resources that help citizens navigate their everyday life in the state (Björkman 2014). Piliavsky (2014) shows that while voters see “bribes” as a politician’s shame-faced attempt at a transaction, a “gift” is a normatively acceptable exchange that cultivates lasting, mutual ties. The Indian Supreme Court in 2022 weighed in on a similar moral distinction between an ostensibly legitimate welfare scheme and purportedly unethical “freebies” of resources like electricity or water promised by parties to their constituents before elections (The Hindu 2022).
If money spent towards elections is not merely transactional, and its efficacy emerges when placed within particular moral and normative frameworks (Cody 2020), the judgment about disaster-relief as an election handout in the Teesta basin as evident in the “THIS IS NOT SIKKIM” video is complicated by two factors. While “vote buying” usually cultivates a relationship between a candidate and her constituents, here environmental disaster-relief is aimed at generating a durable alliance between a national and a regional party – the BJP and the SKM. Citizens, especially of West Bengal, outraged by the ostensible immorality of the “gift” are almost superfluous to this exchange-mediated electoral encounter. Moreover, the “gift” is also a “ripple effect”2 (Govindrajan 2018) of an election concluded, rather than an enticement for an upcoming vote, which further diffuses the immediate impact that the citizens’ normative judgements can have.
Citizens’ normative judgements of the electoral handout’s inefficacy in the aftermath of the GLOF have congealed around the infrastructural artifact of “NH10”, the sole highway from Sikkim which passes through West Bengal to connect the hills to the rest of the country. The highway is being pushed down by heavy rains and landslides, and pulled down by the river which now flows almost parallel to it, around five meters above pre-flood levels. Repeated, prolonged closure of NH10, as a lifeline of this frontier, makes food more expensive, medical facilities difficult to reach, and the regional economy weaker due to declining tourism. Vehicles carrying people and essential goods regularly wade through the river-water flooded roads, as citizens begrudgingly adapt to this growing “amphibious” way of life in the Anthropocene where distinctions of land and water become blurry (Gagné and Rasmussen 2016). The citizens’ critical reflections on this scenario involve judgments both about the state of the environment and about the state of electoral politics. In terms of the environment, citizens are well aware of the vulnerability that comes from living in a “fragile” mountain landscape whose preexisting susceptibility to disasters is being exacerbated by climate change and unplanned development. And they are equally critical of politicians mediating this experience of environmental vulnerability by making disaster relief a tool for seeking or retaining political power.
NH10 is collapsing indiscriminately across stretches in Sikkim and Kalimpong. Yet the Kalimpong stretch, managed by the Public Works Department (PWD) of West Bengal, has limited funds for repair and upkeep compared to the center-run National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited which manages the rest of the highway. In early September 2024, a news report that the central government was stalling funding for “slope protection” and “landslide mitigation” projects proposed by the PWD (Sarkar 2024) drew the ire of citizens. A prominent member of the local civil society, who has been vocal about the environmental vulnerability of the region wrote on a digital forum, “[This is] a textbook example of how politics interferes in the management of disasters, and how those sitting in air-conditioned offices in Delhi and Kolkata can play havoc with our lives”. As the discussion continued on this same forum, another citizen echoed this moral critique of electoral politics, writing, “Sadly differences were cast aside only for the Ambani wedding3. If only our leaders would expand their empathic boundaries”.
The civil society in the region has most prominently articulated their criticism of the disaster-relief gift to Sikkim as a “technical” criticism of the inability to reconstruct NH10. In monsoon 2024, about eight months after the GLOF as the highway started becoming unusable with fresh rains, an environmentalist shared with me a sentiment that he had been articulating on various other platforms. In his opinion, valuable time during the dry months when some mitigation work could have been undertaken4 had been frittered away due to political bickering. A cluster of organizations working in the Himalayan region summarized their stance in a newspaper bite, stating that, “the size and the scale of the disaster needs appropriate attention and action both by the national and state governments concerned in a collaborative manner that goes beyond political and administrative boundaries” (Chhetri 2024). They have been advocating for “mountain-sensitive policies and practices across the country.” Their petition, demanding a “unified Teesta basin disaster management plan” and the “constitution of an inter-state committee” (ibid), has been submitted to various political and bureaucratic representatives at the national and local level.
In December 2023, I attended an event organized by the civil society of the region to commemorate the GLOF. Members of various organizations, state functionaries, and personnel from the press spoke about their experience of the disaster and expectations for its remedy. One of the convenors ended the session with an appeal to technical expertise, stating,
“Till now there was a channel, a path [of the river Teesta]. Now [post-GLOF] it is going everywhere….How do we deal with the river. It 1736582225 flows 1-15 feet above [normal]. …They should keep our inhabited areas safe…Some experts should tell us what to do. We are in an area where we cannot handle this. For this area of ours, what ideas do you have, you all please tell us. It is not an agitation; it is just a concern that we have. …Tell us how do we live in this area with this massive disaster that has taken place, and some more is going to come within four months [when the rains begin]?”
This call for a solution to be offered by “an independent team of scientists and experts” which will surmount the “relentless playing of politics” is one of the most visible articulations of a moral, normative criticism of the existing mode of disaster-relief tainted by the logics of electoral finance. When bearing witness to this form of petitioning, I have been tempted to see this as a form of depoliticization (Ferguson 1994), where questions of power, political economy, and sedimented social-political hierarchies that largely determine possibilities of success or failure of any development initiative are bracketed off. Instead, either inadvertently or “cynically” (Mathur 2012), development issues – like environmental disaster-damaged infrastructure here – are reframed as technical problems amenable to technical solutions that yield auditable metrics of success (Li 2007).
However, I have found it more germane to think of this activism in the hills, following Bornstein and Sharma (2016, 77-78), as a form of “techno-moral politics” where non-state groups represent the interests and rights of a suffering public by interweaving “technical proceduralism with moral concerns and idioms.” Instead of characterizing the growing emphasis on policy over politics as depoliticization, they see it as an alteration in the form of politics in which a moral struggle between right and wrong trumps an ideological struggle between “right” and “left” parties and groups. In the Teesta basin, this moral struggle is one for survival in a precarious environment. Since Borstein and Sharma’s study, the space for NGOs and civil society to mount avowedly political protests have further shrunk under threat of punitive incarceration. With disaster-relief being aimed at cultivating an electoral relationship between the SKM and BJP, citizens of Kalimpong especially find themselves to be peripheral actors. Moreover, with no national or state elections coming up in the next few years, their moral judgments cannot be converted to immediate election mandates. Given these constraints, a techno-moral politics, materialized through the road, seems to be a more prudent mode of engaging the state.
In the politics of petitioning the state, Cody (2009) highlights a tension between Indian constituents presenting themselves as citizen petitioners, appealing to a civic ethos or as subject beggars, appealing to the dharmic duty of hierarchical superiors. I have heard multiple citizens of West Bengal, beginning with a prominent environmentalist, refer to themselves as children of a lesser God. Even as this appears to be a religious, hierarchical framing by supplicating voting subjects, it also seems to critique the impotence of political patrons themselves. Citizens of Kalimpong are suffering, in this moral idiom, because their local patrons, characterized as “lesser gods,” are weak political mediators for necessary resources, unable, for example, to weigh upon the center to sanction funds for necessary PWD works. Techno-moral politics, even when emphasizing policy gaps, can thus cannily fold in moral critiques through religious idioms which call out ineffective electoral representation.
In the last decade India saw a fivefold increase in climate extremes, with a fourfold increase in extreme flood events (The Hindu 2024). Currently over 85% of Indian districts are exposed to extreme climate events, with the number of affected citizens predicted to be 1.47 billion by 2036 (ibid). To support vulnerable nations of the Global South facing the brunt of these climate challenges, the UN Climate Change Conference 2022 (COP27) agreed to a global “Loss and Damage Fund.” To underscore its strong sovereign status, India does not seek foreign humanitarian aid for extreme environmental events (Bhan 2018). Thus, as more of its citizens and regions experience such events, how “disaster-relief” passes through the churning of the electoral “vote buying” matrix is something political anthropologists will have to pay closer attention to. Any strategic and discriminatory use of disaster-relief as currency for consolidating electoral power needs critical scrutiny across the globe, especially in the Anthropocene where the biosphere’s ability to sustain life is eroding and the manifestation of electoral gifts to citizens is likely to become increasingly “environmental.”
Footnotes:
References:
Banerjee, Mukulika. 2020. ‘Money and Meaning in Elections: Towards a Theory of the Vote’. Modern Asian Studies 54 (1): 286–313.
Bhan, Mona. 2018. ‘Jinn, Floods, and Resistant Ecological Imaginaries in Kashmir’. Economic and Political Weekly 53 (47): 67–75.
Björkman, Lisa. 2014. ‘“You Can’t Buy a Vote”: Meanings of Money in a Mumbai Election’. American Ethnologist 41 (4): 617–34.
Bornstein, Erica and Aradhana Sharma. 2016. ‘The Righteous and the Rightful: The Technomoral Politics of NGOs, Social Movements, and the State in India’. American Ethnologist 43 (1): 76–90.
Chhetri, Vivek. 2024. ‘Movement to Protest “Indifference” towards October 4 Flood by Centre and Bengal’. The Telegraph, 28 June 2024.
Cody, Francis. 2020. ‘Wave Theory’. American Ethnologist 47 (4): 402–16.
—————–. 2009. ‘Inscribing Subjects to Citizenship: Petitions, Literacy Activism, and the Performativity of Signature in Rural Tamil India’. Cultural Anthropology 24 (3): 347–80
Ferguson, James. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development,’ Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gagné, Karine, and Mattias Borg Rasmussen. 2016. ‘Introduction – An Amphibious Anthropology: The Production of Place at the Confluence of Land and Water’. Anthropologica 58 (2): 135–49.
Govindrajan, Radhika. 2018. ‘Electoral Ripples: The Social Life of Lies and Mistrust in an Indian Village Election’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1–2): 129–43.
Guha, Ramachandra. 2008. “The Career of a Concept”. Hindu, January 2008. http://ramachandraguha.in/archives/the-career-of-aconcept.html
Li, Tania. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mathur, Nayanika. 2012. ‘Effecting Development: Bureaucratic Knowledges, Cynicism, and the Desire for Development in the Indian Himalaya’. In Differentiating Development: Beyond an Anthropology of Critique, edited by Soumhya Venkatesan and Thomas Yarrow, 193-209. London: Berghahn.
Piliavsky, Anastasia. 2014. Patronage as Politics in South Asia. Cambridge University Press.
Sarkar, Pranesh. 2024. ‘“Inadequate” Funds for NH10 Repairs’. The Telegraph, 6 September 2024.
Sridharan, Eswaran, and Milan Vaishnav. 2016. ‘India’. In Checkbook Elections?: Political Finance in Comparative Perspective, edited by Pippa Norris and Andrea Abel van Es, Oxford University Press.
The Hindu. 2024. ‘Over 85% of Indian Districts Exposed to Extreme Climate Events: Study’, 6 September 2024.
—— 2022. ‘Sops for Votes: On Election Promises’, 29 August 2022.
