The War for the Earth is often said to have begun on Crash Day. And it was later that same year when container ships began to sink, almost always close to land. Torpedoes from nowhere: a different kind of drone. It was noticed early on in this campaign that ships often went down where they could form the foundations for new coral reefs. In any case, they were going down. They ran on diesel fuel, of course. Loss of life in these sinkings was minimal, but world trade was severely impacted. Stock markets fell even lower than they had after Crash Day. A worldwide recession, a feeling of loss of control, price spikes in consumer goods, the clear prospect of the full-blown depression that indeed followed a few years later … it was a time of dread.
Two months after Crash Day a group called Kali, or the Children of Kali, issued a manifesto over the internet. No more fossil-fuel-burning transport. That was about twenty to twenty-five percent of civilization’s total carbon burn at this point, and all of it vulnerable to disruption, as the manifesto put it.
Next up, the Children of Kali (or someone using that name) told the world: cows. Later that same year the group announced that mad cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, had been cultured and introduced by drone dart into millions of cattle all over the world. Everywhere but in India, but especially in the United States and Brazil and England and Canada. Nothing could stop these cattle from sickening and dying in a few years, and if eaten their disease could migrate into human brains, where it manifested as Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and was invariably fatal. So to stay safe, people needed to stop eating beef now.
And indeed in the forties and ever after, less beef got eaten. Less milk was drunk. And fewer jet flights were made. Of course many people were quick to point out that these Children of Kali were hypocrites and monsters, that Indians didn’t eat cows and so didn’t feel that loss, that coal-fired power plants in India had burned a significant portion of the last decade’s carbon burn, and so on. Then again those same Indian power plants were being attacked on a regular basis, so it wasn’t clear who was doing what to whom. Scores of power plants were being destroyed all over the world, often by drone attacks. Power outages in those years were most common in India, but they happened everywhere else too. The War for the Earth was real, but the aggressors were nowhere to be found. It was often asserted they were not in India at all, and were not even an Indian organization, but rather an international movement. Kali was nowhere; Kali was everywhere.
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Our Sikkim became a state with fully organic agriculture between 2003 and 2016, aided by the scholar-philosopher-feminist-permaculturist Vandana Shiva, an important figure for many of us in India. Of course Sikkim is the least populated Indian state, with less than a million people, and the third smallest in economic terms. But it grows more cardamom than any place but Guatemala, and one of its names is Beyul Demazong, “the hidden valley of rice,” beyuls being sacred hidden valleys in Buddhist lore, including Shambala and Khembalung. Sikkim is precisely this kind of magical place, and its version of organic agriculture, one aspect of permaculture generally, became of interest across India in mid-century, as part of the Renewal and the New India, and the making of a better world. Here again Vandana Shiva was an important leading public intellectual, combining defense of local land rights, indigenous knowledge, feminism, post-caste Hinduism, and other progressive programs characteristic of New India and the Renewal.
Important also has been the example of Kerala, at the opposite end of India, for its crucial innovations in local government. A state blessed by location on the southwest coast of India, with a long history of interactions with Africa and Europe, home to fabled Trivandrum, Kerala has long been governed by a power-sharing agreement between the Left Democratic Front, which was very influenced by the Indian Communist Party, and the old Congress party, which though out of favor at the national level, always kept a fairly substantial level of support in Kerala, as representing the party of independence and Gandhi’s satyagraha, meaning peace force. The LDF has been the dominant party in Kerala since Indian independence a century ago, and one of the main projects for the party has always been devolution to local governance, closing in on the goal of what one might call direct democracy. In Kerala now there are panchayats for every village, then district governments that coordinate these panchayats and oversee disputes and care for any necessary business at the district levels; and above them is the state government in Thiruvananthapuram, looking after such business as involves the whole state together. The focus on local government has been so intense and diligent that there now total 1,200 governmental bodies in Kerala, all dealing with issues in their particular area whatever it might be.
Strangely, perhaps— or perhaps it is not so strange— it is often said of both Sikkim and Kerala that they are exceptionally beautiful places, and both attract more tourists than most Indian states. But in truth almost every Indian state is beautiful, if you take the trouble to visit it and look. It is a very beautiful country. So the answer to the success of these two states cannot be put down entirely to the beauty of their landscapes.
Although treated very poorly for a long time by various invading interests, including the Mughals, the Rajas, the British, globalization, and corrupt national governments from every party, but especially from the Congress party in its waning days of power, and then the Hindu triumphalist BJP party, both now disgraced for their connections to the heat wave, India continues to rise above all
