An Indian friend of mine, Sri Sagar Dhara, who is attending the COP 26 meeting, has sent a report from Glasgow on the prospects for Bangladesh and Pakistan in the year 2100. Being a South Asian (Indian) myself, I read it with great interest, which caused the following thoughts to occur in my mind.
Please read the highly interesting article
of Sagar first. Link
Then my comments.
Saral’s Comments
I thank Sagar
Dhara for this article focusing attention, unusually, on Bangladesh and
Pakistan, two of India’s “dear” neighbors, who after all are no small islands
in the Pacific or the Indian Ocean. How dear they are to us has been
demonstrated by the recent NRC exercise in Assam and the three wars at India’s
Western front. The description of the plight of the people of Bangladesh and
Pakistan in the near future is, I hope, realistic, coming as they do from
knowledgeable people from the two countries. But Sagar’s conclusion? Is it at
all realistic? And his exhortation to us Indians? What chance does it have of
being accepted?
Empty Idealism or Down-to-Earth Realism
Sagar writes: “…. should India help? As a country that
believes in vasudaiva kutumbakam (the whole world is a family), of course India should
help … .” “Vasudaiva kutumbakam” is a
noble, but, sorry to say, empty ideal. I have heard/read it as a slogan a few
times in the speeches and writings generated by outwardly idealist NGO
activists. The slogan itself was perhaps coined by some sage in ancient India
some three thousand years ago. But today, it is a far cry from the reality. I
do not know when “India” ever believed in this ideal.
In the Christian Western world, I
have more often heard the cynical saying: “Everybody for himself and God for
all”. That is also roughly the conclusion of human ethologists on the reality
of human nature. The current treatment meted out to illegal migrants at the
Polish-Belarussian border corroborates this.
Empty idealism devoid of all
realism is the bane of NGO welfare activities. Two years ago, at a big
gathering of Fridays for Future, I
heard a speech by a young woman who is active in the efforts to save illegal
African migrants from drowning in the Mediterranean Sea and help them reach the
shores of Europe and enjoy a better life there. She asserted inter alia “every
human being has a right to choose the country where (s)he wants to live.” I do
not know where other than in her fertile imagination this right has been
codified. But I know that her activities are promoting fascism in Europe as a
reaction.
A German politician, the then
President of the state, whose traditional task it is to give idealist speeches
in high-flown language, said in 2015 or 2016, at the height of the illegal
migrants crisis in Germany, something like this: “Our hearts are very big, but
our capacity is limited”, whereby he stretched his arms on two sides to make
the sign of embracing people. He meant Germany’s capacity to accept immigrants.
No Solution ?
Sagar writes, the
people of these two countries would suffer for “no fault of theirs”. That is
roughly true. But not entirely. Nobody else is to blame other than those
Bangaldeshis (and West-Bengalis) who in the past went farther and farther
south, clear cut parts of the Sunderbans and
settled down on the very low-lying delta areas. Such flood-prone and regularly
cyclone-ravaged low lying areas should not have been inhabited at all in the
first place.
I understand, population pressure did
not leave many ordinary poor people any other choice. But surely, it is not the
Western imperialists that created the population pressure in Bangladesh (and
West Bengal). Bangladesh became an independent country in 1971 when its
population amounted to 65.5 million. Today, i.e. in 2020 figures, it stands at 164.7 million. In the same
period, Pakistan’s population rose from 59.73 to 220.9 million (Source:
Internet, Google). The leadership of these countries, usually highly educated
and well-informed, could have done something at least in this area of policy,
which has been fully under their control. If they had, the suffering today
would have been much less.
Sagar reports: a principal scientific
officer from Pakistan, when asked, “Does Pakistan have a solution?”, replied “No”. An apparently rich farmer
from Bangladesh, who, mind you, has the financial means to travel to Glasgow
and stay there for a few days, suggested the solution that India should accept
climate refugees from Bangladesh. This is surprising, capitulation!
It
is true that, climate change being a global problem, Bangladesh and Pakistan cannot
tackle all their climate change related problems on their own. But nor can
India do that. And in the future, India too will require help from the countries
to tackle climate change impacts on its territory.
So can anything be done at
all? At least to mitigate the bad effects of climate change, if not to solve
the whole problem? I think yes. World Bank sources say that at present, the
population growth rates of the three countries are as follows: Bangladesh - 1%,
Pakistan - 2%, India - 1%. That means, at current rates, every year, the
population of Bangladesh is growing by 1.64 mil., that of Pakistan by 2.29
mil., and that of India by 13.8 mil. Obviously, in this area at least, these
countries could do much more to take off the pressure. This is the easiest
thing to do. Other things are much more difficult. For, as I formulated
two-three years ago as an impossibility theorem:
“It is impossible to fulfill the
continuously growing demands, wishes, aspirations and ambitions (100 per cent
renewables for instance) of a continuously growing world population while
our resource base is continuously dwindling and the ability
of nature to absorb man-made pollution is continuously diminishing. It is
a lunatic idea that in a finite world infinite growth is
possible.”
Dr. Manmohan Singh, the then PM of India,
said already some 10 years ago, he had the most difficult task of creating 10
million new jobs every year. How can then the present-day government create
jobs in India also for the climate refugees of Bangladesh and Pakistan?
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