by Sunil Amrith
SUBRAMANIAM’S APPROACH TO AGRICULTURE GAINED A FILLIP from the overwhelming sense of economic and political crisis surrounding India in 1965. By September 1965 it was clear that the year’s summer rainfall was far short of normal: aggregate agricultural production was 17 percent down on the previous year. In a speech to persuade the chief ministers of India’s states of his policy, Subramaniam spoke of a “race against time.” Facing down criticism from the Communist H. N. Mukherjee in Parliament, who accused Subramaniam of forcing through his strategy under American pressure, the agriculture minister accused his questioner of exploiting “the psychological hour when the monsoon has failed,” and preying on the “fears” of the country.36 India’s vulnerability to the monsoons, it seemed, was as deep as ever. “How helplessly we are at the mercy of the elements,” a newspaper editorial lamented in 1965, arguing that all India had to show for the previous decade of development efforts were some “shallow and tentative improvements in irrigation.”37
Economic crisis merged with political turmoil. A series of military skirmishes on the border escalated into war with Pakistan, from August 5 to September 22, 1965. The catalyst was Pakistani military infiltration into Kashmir, undertaken in the hope of sparking a rebellion against Indian rule. Both sides claimed victory after a UN-brokered cease-fire; in contrast with the China war, however, the Shastri government’s military campaign was greeted as a success at home. Shastri urged struggle on both fronts with his resonant phrase: “Jai Jawan! Jai Kisan!”—victory to the soldier, and victory to the farmer. An immediate consequence of the war was the abrupt cessation of American aid both to India and to Pakistan.
US president Lyndon Baines Johnson had already assumed direct charge of PL-480 shipments; with characteristic bluntness he called it the “short tether.” He would ship only enough grain to India to meet immediate needs: a direct and unabashed form of political leverage, which angered the Indian government. Subramaniam played an essential role in negotiations over restarting the shipments after the war. He had developed a reputation in Washington as an Indian leader favorable to the United States, and whose policy views tallied with American advisors’ ideas. Subramaniam forged a rapport with Orville Freeman, Johnson’s secretary of agriculture. The two men met at a UN Food and Agriculture Organization meeting in Rome in November 1965 and signed a secret agreement to accelerate India’s agrarian reforms in exchange for expanded American food aid. Taking over as prime minister after Shastri’s sudden death in Tashkent, where he had gone to sign the peace treaty with Pakistan, Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi visited the United States in 1966 to cement this deal. She received a warm reception from LBJ, but she felt deep humiliation at having to go to the United States as a supplicant. “I don’t ever want us to beg for food again,” Indira Gandhi told an aide in December 1966.38
When the summer monsoon failed for a second successive year, in 1966, India’s food situation worsened. The state of Bihar, one of India’s poorest, was most directly affected. Facing Republican congressmen who were hostile to aid and hostile to India, the Johnson administration emphasized the scale of the food emergency in India—evoking the specter of famine for the first time since independence. In order to push through a bill boosting aid to India, Johnson told Freeman that he wanted the American public to know “that people were being hauled away dead in trucks, and that they needed food.”39 By contrast Indira Gandhi’s government chose not to declare a famine in Bihar for fear of the domestic political fallout. Instead, the central government dismissed early reports of starvation from Bihar as hyperbole—just as the British imperial government had been wont to do. Famine was too much a symbol of a dark past, its conquest too vital to the political legitimacy of the Indian state, to concede this, the first famine since India’s independence. But the scale of suffering in Bihar threatened to explode and on April 20, 1967, the government of India declared the existence of famine in Palamau and Hazaribag districts; five more districts were added in time, along with others that suffered “scarcity.” The nineteenth-century Famine Codes, revised incrementally over the years, came into effect. The full force of the state swung into action to counter food shortages in Bihar. PL-480 shipments from the United States were vital, distributed in twenty thousand fair-price shops. In keeping with traditional practice, the government initiated public works on a large scale to provide employment to augment local incomes and to encourage food imports from other regions of India. Under the leadership of the socialist Jayaprakash Narain, the Bihar Relief Committee mobilized an army of volunteers, as well as donations. A year before the Biafra crisis of 1968, often held up as a watershed in the development of a global humanitarian consciousness, the Bihar crisis reached the wallets, and the television screens, of a public far away.40
Indira Gandhi in January 1967, soon after she became India’s prime minister. CREDIT: Express Newspapers/Getty Images
By most measures, the Indian and American response to dearth in Bihar was a success. Despite major food shortages, far fewer people died than during the nineteenth-century famines; the official death toll was in the region of 2,300 people. Even if this was an underestimate, the contrast with India’s experience of famine under colonial rule was stark.
But the story has a strange and unexpected coda. Housed in the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, is an innocuously named box of archival files: “India Memos and Misc., 1 of 2, volume 8.” I learned about its contents in a fascinating article by two historians of Cold War science, Ronald Doel and Kristine Harper. Doel and Harper argue that the environmental sciences were vital to the Johnson administration’s foreign policy, and to its projection of American power overseas.41 From the 1950s, the deepening American involvement in Vietnam had generated a deepening interest in the hydrology of the Mekong River. As the US military intervened more intensively in Vietnam after 1962, mastering nature became strategically vital. American medics experimented with new drugs for the control of malaria, a prerequisite for jungle warfare: they devised mefloquine. Some went further: they had visions of intervening to alter patterns of rainfall to disrupt the agricultural base of North Vietnam. The United States had seen a long series of attempts at weather control in the twentieth century, a history characterized more by outlandish schemes than by any measurable success.42 Now it became a plank of military and diplomatic strategy. The Bihar drought occurred just when secret American plans for weather control in Vietnam were in testing. President Johnson connected the two, as he became the most unlikely of experts on the South Asian monsoon. Johnson would write in his memoirs that, as he looked at weather charts before approving each PL-480 shipment to India, he came to know “exactly where the rain fell and where it failed to fall in India.”43
In January 1967, Pierre St. Amand arrived in Delhi with others from the Naval Ordnance Test Station on a highly classified mission; indeed, only a decade ago did the work of Doel and Harper bring it to light. Nicknamed Project Gromet, the scheme—with the secret approval of Indira Gandhi’s government—aimed to inject silver iodide into “large, high-altitude cold clouds” to force precipitation. Official acknowledgment of the program came in the form of a sly and prosaic statement: “Scientists from the United States and India are cooperating in a joint agro-meteorological research project, localized in Eastern U.P. [Uttar Pradesh] and Bihar to study the cloud physics and rain producing mechanisms over these areas of India which have incurred several droughts during the last few years.” The problem was that, in January, the skies over Bihar were virtually cloudless. They expanded their quest toward Punjab. US ambassador Chester Bowles, an Indophile, wrote in secret that “both we and the Indians want to demonstrate that if we can [force precipitation] India’s food and agriculture need not be entirely at the mercy of weather vagaries.” Soon after that, the archival trail runs cold; “GROMET quietly died,” its historians conclude.44
Doel and Harper were interested in Project Gromet primarily for what it tells us about US foreign policy under Johnson. Seen in
the light of India’s long history of struggle with the monsoon, it acquires other layers of meaning. In a sense, Project Gromet was the antithesis of the Indian Ocean Expedition. Where the new science emphasized the complexity of the monsoon climate, rooting it in teleconnected land-ocean-atmosphere interactions on a planetary scale, the attempt to make rain in Bihar epitomized the logic of control and containment. Even then, the architects of the plan feared the consequences of engineered rain in India having an unwanted impact across the border in Pakistan.
THE YEAR 1967 WAS A TURNING POINT IN INDIA’S POLITICAL HISTORY. Having ruled India with a comfortable parliamentary majority since independence, the Congress party took a drubbing at the polls in India’s third general election. While they remained in power in New Delhi, their majority was reduced—more significantly, they lost control of state governments in states including Tamil Nadu (to the regional party born of the anti-caste movement, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam), Kerala (to the Communists), and West Bengal (to a coalition including the Communist Party). A generation after independence, the mantle of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru was no longer enough to muster support for the party that had led the nationalist movement. The coalition of social forces that underpinned Congress dominance was fragile; in many places it unraveled. A confidential assessment by the British High Commission in Delhi reported to London that the election results reflected “impatience with the chronic failure to deal with rising prices, low wages [and] food shortages, amounting to famine in certain areas.”45
Occasionally, conventional accounts of this political moment include climate among their explanations for the change. India’s political and economic transformation in the 1960s, writes political scientist Ashutosh Varshney, owes much to the “serendipity of the monsoon.”46 In recent years, it has become common once again for historians to see climate as a force underpinning political events.47 But to think of India’s political transformation as “caused” by the failure of the monsoon would be unduly simplistic. The outcome of the 1967 elections reflected the hopes of India’s voters; it was the outcome of new languages of political mobilization deployed by India’s parties; it distilled new struggles for power and justice and recognition unleashed by mass democracy, which could no longer be contained within a dominant party system. A richer picture emerges if we see climate not as an external force determining human outcomes, but rather as a source of all-too-human fears and anxieties. Only in the context of century-long fears about India’s monsoon climate—the deep historical association of monsoon failure with famine—can we understand why so many experienced the drought of the mid-1960s as evidence of political failure.
III
Indira Gandhi was one of few heads of state to attend the UN’s first conference on the human environment, held in Stockholm in June 1972. In her rousing speech to the plenary session, she set out ecological problems that were already a matter of public discussion in India:
We share your concern at the rapid deterioration of flora and fauna. Some of our own wildlife has been wiped out, miles of forests with beautiful old trees, mute witnesses of history, have been destroyed. Even though our industrial development is in its infancy, and at its most difficult stage, we are taking various steps to deal with incipient environmental imbalances. The more so because of our concern for the human being—a species which is also imperiled. In poverty he is threatened by malnutrition and disease, in weakness by war, in richness by the pollution brought about by his own prosperity.48
But her diagnosis of the root cause differed from that of many of the conference’s promoters, whose vision was consumed by dark Malthusian nightmares in the Third World, epitomized by biologist Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, published in 1968. The opening lines of Ehrlich’s book described a “stinking hot night” in Delhi. “As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area… the streets seemed alive with people,” he wrote: “People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming… People, people, people, people.”49
In response, Mrs. Gandhi set out a position that saw environmental degradation as primarily a problem of poverty: a problem of distribution, not of numbers. She reminded her audience that “we inhabit a divided world.” She attributed historical responsibility for the despoliation of Earth where it rightly belonged: with the wealthy countries of the world. “Many of the advanced countries of today have reached their present affluence by their domination over other races and countries,” she said, and through “the exploitation of their own natural resources.” The rich world “got a head start through sheer ruthlessness, undisturbed by feelings of compassion or by abstract theories of freedom, equality or justice.” But now the poor countries were being told that they could not do the same. “The riches and the labour of the colonized countries played no small part in the industrialization and prosperity of the West,” she reminded her audience, but in the 1970s, “as we struggle to create a better life for our people, it is in vastly different circumstances, for obviously in today’s eagle-eyed watchfulness we cannot indulge in such practices even for a worthwhile purpose.” The development of a middle class in India, or even just the provision of minimally decent standards of living to its poorest citizens, took place with a growing awareness of finite resources. “We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further,” she insisted, “and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people.” Her most resonant phrase, and the one for which her speech is remembered, was in the form of a question: “Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?”
She raised the stakes, asking: “How can we speak to those who live in villages and in slums about keeping the oceans, the rivers and the air clean when their own lives are contaminated at the source?” She resisted the binary choice of development or environmental protection. “The environment cannot be improved in conditions of poverty,” she declared, and “nor can poverty be eradicated without the use of science and technology.” In “science and technology” lay India’s great hope.
Gandhi concluded by describing to the audience how she saw India’s quest since independence. “For the last quarter of a century,” she said, “we have been engaged in an enterprise unparalleled in human history—the provision of basic needs to one-sixth of mankind within the span of one or two generations.”50 In this evocation of speed, urgency, and scale lay Gandhi’s recognition of the demographic and material transformation that was sweeping the world. The edge of Malthusian panic remained, despite Indira Gandhi’s eloquent rebuttal at Stockholm. In time just such a sense, that population growth was an exorable and destabilizing force, fed her own fears of conspiracy. In the context of labor unrest and judicial challenges to the legitimacy of her election victory, they underpinned the siege mentality that led her to declare a state of emergency in 1975, suspending India’s democratic constitution for the first and (so far) the only time, using a colonial-era provision. It would lead Indira Gandhi’s government to enact a brutal population control program involving gross abuses, including forced sterilizations.51
In Indira Gandhi’s vision, many disparate concerns came together to constitute an overarching problem of “the environment”—population growth and the finitude of natural resources; concerns about the impact of rapid development on human health; concerns about species extinction and disappearing habitats. The international conference coincided with the earliest attempts to confront these challenges at home in India. Mrs. Gandhi’s government sponsored the Water Act of 1974, which was among the first attempts to deal with an environmental issue on a national basis in India. The act created pollution control boards at both the state and the national levels; the boards were given the authority to determine permissible levels of pollution, setting limits on the composition and quantity of effluent that factories, for instance, could discharge into water bodies. The legislation took an expansive view of water, covering “streams, inland waters, subterranean waters, and sea or tidal waters.”
But the law proved, and it continues to prove, difficult to implement. Pollution control bodies did not have the will or the power to prosecute powerful local industrialists. The Water Act faced many challenges in the courts, often on the grounds that it violated the constitutional right to carry on a trade or business. For instance, in 1981 lawyers for a firm called Aggarwal Textile Industries, challenging a ruling from Rajasthan state’s pollution control board, argued that “the problem of prevention of water pollution is a problem of vast magnitude and… it would be beyond the means of an individual to prevent or control the pollution resulting from an industry set up by him.” In a significant number of cases, offenders were allowed to continue their polluting activities.52
DESPITE DAWNING AWARENESS OF THE QUESTION OF SUSTAINABILITY, the crux of India’s response to the crisis of food and population lay in a massive increase in the use of water. The early twentieth century’s faith in the possibility of expansion without limit was reinvigorated. The precondition for the growth of the Green Revolution in India was an expansion in irrigation. And the water available from surface irrigation works, however ambitious in scale, was insufficient. Cultivators in arid parts of India had known for centuries, and British administrators recognized in the nineteenth century, that South Asia’s groundwater resources provided the most immediate insurance against drought. Many regions of South Asia had ancient and elaborate systems of well irrigation, though this infrastructure had fallen into disrepair in many places by the nineteenth century. The advantages of groundwater resources are manifest in South Asia: groundwater is locally available on demand and requires far less infrastructure than surface irrigation works; groundwater is spared the large-scale water loss from evaporation that reservoirs experience. Groundwater resources are more resilient to episodic monsoon failure. Until the 1960s, groundwater could not be mobilized on a large enough scale to meet India’s food requirements. The arrival of the tubewell changed that decisively.