Introduction

In September 2019, more than 300 representatives of farmers’ organizations, trade union federations, indigenous people's organizations, fisher groups, women's organizations, environmental groups, and a few progressive political parties from Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and various parts of India met in Hyderabad. This four-day-long convention concluded with the founding of the South Asian People's Action on Climate Crisis (SAPACC). The delegates voiced their concerns about the anticipated effects of the impending climate crisis and ‘critiqued the inadequacy of governments’ policies’ (Adve 2019). In the past, India's climate activists focused almost exclusively on multinational corporations and the governments of industrialized countries, who are responsible for causing the climate crisis. They argued that questioning the Indian government would ‘dilute’ the demand for holding industrialized countries accountable. Therefore, the SAPACC's public critiques of India and other countries in South Asia marks an important shift in the evolution of climate movements in the region.

Social movements and civil society organizations work within the complex politico-economic and institutional context of India. On the one hand, the Constitution of India is regarded as highly progressive, affording citizens a variety of civil and political rights and freedoms and a scaffolding of democratic institutions that are functional to some extent. This context is particularly conducive for the functioning of civil society institutions that focus on relatively less controversial and apolitical questions, for example, Gandhian organizations dedicated to the ‘welfare’ of the poor, or those promoting tree-planting programmes. On the other hand, organizations advocating for the rights and entitlement of the poor, and those demanding effective enforcement of constitutional provisions and a welfare state, often confront a state that is extremely opaque and highly vindictive (Banerjee 2008). This ‘Janus-faced nature of the postcolonial state’ explains why some types of environmental movements thrive in Indian society while others face violent threats (Kashwan 2017, 10). Yet these contradictory workings of the Indian state must be understood in the context of global capitalism and its domestic beneficiaries. Instead of weakening state control in the wake of economic liberalization in the early 1990s and beyond, the Indian state has transformed into a highly centralized and extractive state that abuses its authority blatantly to selectively reallocate land and other natural resources (Rajan 2011).

Edward Said (1978) introduced the notion of imaginative geography: Groups with a hunger for land essentially reimagine the landscapes they desire, elevating the notion of themselves as the owners of the land they seek, a process of reinventing the meaning of territorial landscapes as ‘imagined geography’. This would help them frame arguments justifying why they are entitled to take possession of the landscapes they desire. Before the actors themselves see and conquer the land, they entertain themselves under a discursive understanding that they are the owners of the landscapes that they covet. Hence, this imaginative geography is a theory of human action deriving from the interplay of material impulses and human consciousness (Gregory 1999); it is ‘performative’. Reimagining landscapes is the first step to acting upon them and creating the very outcomes on the land being imagined (Gregory 2004: 17–20). In this process, hegemonic forces with territorial ambitions refashion themselves as owners of the territory they desire by asserting themselves as masters and sovereign of the land.

Here, one wonders, what is the landscape that has emerged as part of the subaltern project of the imagined geographies? This entails the counterimagination and a contra-discourse of the imaginative geographies by the oppressed, intertwined with the notion of egalitarianism and justice, which could be realized through ecospatial struggles. If this imagined landscape and the struggle for the same is for livelihood and basic human and ‘post-human’ survival, the struggling poor would be forced to follow the logic of their own ‘moral economy’ that historically protected their rights to subsistence (Thompson 1991). The large number of ‘land-wars’ (Levien 2013) that have been taking place in Latin America and Asia, particularly in India, offers how the subalterns imagine their struggles as part of their livelihood and citizenship rights. If it was Muthanga in Kerala in 2003, it was Chengara in 2007. If Muthanga was occupied by the Adivasis, it was the Dalits – formerly the agrestic slaves and the most marginalized of all the outcastes of the Hindus – that occupied the Chengara part of the colonially evolved Harrisons Malayalam plantations. Even after three and a half decades of land reform experimentation how does one explain the Dalit land struggles in Kerala? Can Chengara replace Occupy Muthanga in terms of strategies, struggles, and outcomes? How far did the state succeed or fail in addressing the Dalit land question, their resource endowments, and livelihood?

Introduction

This chapter explores the question posed in its title: ‘Does populism challenge the expertise of academic historians?’1 It is well known that populists (or, to be more precise, people who have often been called populists, since at this point I have not suggested a definition of this term) make assertions about the pasts of their own countries and often about historical pasts more generally. In doing so, they are at least in part making knowledge claims about the past and not simply expressing feelings of attachment or aversion. To the extent that their claims have a cognitive content, one might think that this would put populists on a collision course with the narratives that academic historians produce. Moreover, it is well known that ‘the rise of populism in the West has led to attacks on scientific expertise’ (Collins et al. 2020: 1). One might think that this anti-scientific tendency, together with populists’ interest in making claims about the past, would lead them to challenge not just the narratives but also the expertise of academic historians.

But reality turned out to be quite different from what I originally supposed it would be. Although historians are interested in populists, populists rarely show interest in the academic work produced by historians. Even less are populists interested in, or even aware of, the expertise that academic historians claim, by which I mean the toolkit of methods and approaches by which academic historians formulate questions, search for and interpret evidence, evaluate that evidence, and construct accounts of the past well enough grounded to withstand the criticisms offered by their professional colleagues. The fact is, academic historians doing academic work rarely come into the range of view of populists. Even academic historians who step into an activist role and attempt to draw lessons for the present from their study of the past seem to have been barely noticed by populists. I think, for example, of Timothy Snyder's little book On Tyranny (Snyder 2017), written in the wake of the election in 2016 and Donald Trump's election to the presidency of the United States of America (USA), which circulated widely among academics and some other readers, but raised hardly a peep from populists.

Introduction

It is now accepted that the future of coal will be decided in the developing world. Even as Western countries transition away from coal, increased production and consumption of coal in India and China have meant that the share of coal in global energy production has remained constant for the past 40 years, despite attempts at decarbonization (Edwards 2019). Nevertheless, the West continues to produce high per capita emissions compared to developing nations (Lazarus and van Asselt 2018). In response, India has asserted its rights to equitable energy access in the international arena (Jaitly 2021). At the same time, questions of intra-country equity complicate India's position, with many arguing that India must pursue low-carbon pathways to protect its poor and vulnerable groups (Bidwai 2012).

After Independence, coal became an enduring symbol of national development in India (Lahiri-Dutt 2014). The coal industry has deep political roots, engaging powerful stakeholders at different levels (Bhattacharjee 2017). In recent years, coal investments have lost their appeal due to unrest over their environmental impacts as well as a dynamic downward trend in the demand for thermal power (Rajshekhar 2021). Even so, production targets for the state-owned Coal India Limited (CIL) – responsible for over 80 per cent of India's coal production – were increased to 1 billion metric tonnes by 2024. The central government is actively looking to sell more coal blocks to raise money, despite the lukewarm response to recent coal block auctions. Coal imports have simultaneously increased, engendering a new coastal coal geography controlled by private actors (Oskarsson et al. 2021). That renewables cannot substitute for coal, despite policy support from the state, is accepted. Analysts expect coal-fired generation to continue to grow to meet electricity demand growth even if 350 gigawatt (GW) of renewable energy (RE) capacity is installed by 2030 (Tongia and Gross 2019). New energy forms, including renewables, are, historically speaking, energy ‘additions’ rather than ‘transitions’ (Oskarsson et al. 2021). Importantly, this perception is not typical of India alone, as the global energy system remains locked into high coal energy use in the midst of an RE boom (Oskarsson et al. 2021).

This chapter addresses how politics, epistemology, and modernity are co-produced, and, in this process, how the pre-defined notions of politics, epistemology, and modernity themselves are transformed and reconstructed. The emergent theoretical framing is empirically informed by the place-specific campaign against the aerial spraying of endosulfan pesticide wherein ‘life is cheaper than cashew’. The chapter highlights the structural connections between global capitalism and state-driven developmentalism but also how the very state was conscientized by the transverse solidarity of the ‘constituent power’, including the victims and the larger civil society as agents of modernity, the latter understood as resistance for egalitarianism. However, it does not stop there. We shall also touch upon the ‘epistemological break’ (Bachelard 1938; Althusser 1969) that has occurred in the larger context of knowledge controversies and conflicts (see Whatmore 2009).

In May 2010, the left-front government in the Indian state of Kerala took the historic decision to ban more than a dozen toxic pesticides in the state. This was the culmination of over a decade and a half of struggle and movements in protest against the aerial spraying of endosulfan on the state-owned cashew plantation in the northernmost district of Kasaragod. This chapter follows the prolonged struggle led by the victims of the deadly pesticide, the awakening of a general consciousness among the public, the building up of transverse politics and solidarity, and, finally, the persuasion of the state to ban the pesticide, along with other toxic wastes. The chapter is situated in the larger context of what Beck (1986), Habermas (1987), and Gaonkar (2001) would call risk society, a society in which modernity has become ‘a theme and a problem for itself’, and thus the crisis inherent in it is to be managed through a reinvention of politics. The chapter suggests that the concept of risk society and reflexive modernity as the outcome of a series of struggles and movements demanding the ban on endosulfan in the state offers fresh insights into the power of the people and the civil society in joining the victims.

Introduction

Political Islamism and Islamic reform in East Africa have many strands, but their most salient forms can legitimately be described as populist since they position Muslims in East Africa as ‘little people’ marginalized by a Christian establishment and rhetorically use this opposition for political mobilization (Becker 2006; Loimeier 2011; Mudde 2017). It is also evident that history matters to these populists since they have much to say about historical events. It is harder to decide whether this form of populism should be seen as right-wing or left-wing since it combines calls for economic justice with pronounced gendered inequality and extols political emancipation while remaining vague on its desired political dispensation (Becker 2016; Kresse 2007; Willis and Gona 2013). Moreover, the collective of marginalized Muslim ‘little people’ is internally highly diverse in its religious practices, cultural affiliations, and political views.

This chapter uses a mixture of interviews, sermon recordings, informal conversations, and participant observation to explore how Islamists define a place for Muslims in East Africa's difficult present using claims about the past, historical change, and the future. It examines claims about past greatness and present decline, the dangers and promises of the afterlife, and the difficulty of making futures in this world. While a sense of present hardship and loss of direction is practically omnipresent in this discourse, it contains diverse and sometimes contradictory tropes that different adherents combine flexibly. A distinctive feature is the attention to the domestic realm and gender relations as a site of struggle to live a good life.

This case study, then, seeks to complicate the notion that the appeal of populism lies in its ability to simplify societal problems, which sometimes comes close to suggesting that populism appeals to the simple-minded. It chimes with studies that emphasize tensions and slippages in religious populists’ claims and strategies (Hadiz 2014, 2016, 2018; Baykan 2019; Peker 2019). Populists do strive to use simple oppositions, but since they operate in a messy world, their attempts to simplify tend to create their own complexities. More fundamentally, the tropes of populism work because they can mean different things to different people; because they are polysemous, an effect that has been observed long before the current wave of populist mobilization (Dubow 1995).

The past few years have seen many kinds of inflation – among which there is an absolutely inflationary use of the word ‘populism’. Politicians, pundits, and, yes, also scholars tell us incessantly that we live in the ‘age of populism’ and that we are witnessing (or, for that matter, might be crushed by) a ‘populist wave’. The outcome of this inflation has been that many phenomena for which we have rather precise concepts – think of nativism, nationalism, and protectionism as obvious examples – are now labelled ‘populist’. This failure to distinguish impairs our political judgement. It has also arguably inflated the power of populism itself – it now appears that populism is omnipresent and that it is somehow an unstoppable political movement (after all, who can really stop a ‘wave’, let alone what Nigel Farage at one point called a ‘tsunami’?).

Against this background, one wonders whether looking for particularly populist approaches to history might not strengthen the unfortunate trend of conflating populism with all kinds of other phenomena. It is indeed problematic to label political positions that have, at best, an elective affinity with certain kinds of populism as populist as such; it is also misleading, in my view, to declare particular policies (let us say, on immigration or trade) populist as such. However, the case of history is different, and this volume shows why.

Populists, I hold, claim that they, and only they, represent what they often call ‘the silent majority’ or ‘the real people’. This appears to suggest no particular stance on policies nor, for that matter, commitment to any particular historical narratives. And yet this claiming of a monopoly of representation, usually phrased in moralistic language, does have two pernicious consequences, and these eventually also relate to the framing of history. First, and rather obviously, populists claim that all other contenders for power are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a disagreement about policies, or even about values, for that matter (which are, of course, normal and ideally even productive in a democracy); rather, populists say more or less directly that their political opponents are corrupt characters who are betraying the people (sometimes they label them outright as enemies).

Introduction

If, in writing history, we constitute the past and structure collective imagination, then the specific way we narrate the past becomes important in defining the shape of the national memory we produce and the vision of the nation that comes into being. This chapter looks at the way the Hindu right in India frames its history and envisions the nation. It suggests that we not only unpack the framing tropes of that historical imagination, but also the practices that reflect its attitude to the craft of history writing and the place of the historical profession within society. Populist regimes everywhere seek to refigure what counts as history.*

The internal dynamics of the Hindu right have always been shaped by a contradictory dialectic between constitutional politics and extra-constitutional activism, between the seemingly moderate and the aggressively militant voices. This conflict has unfolded differently over the decades. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the Hindu right could not expand its electoral base, though it continued its work at the popular level, opening schools where Hindutva history and Hindutva culture were popularised, doing social work, forming cultural and social organizations that were committed to the ideals of Hindutva. Even as late as 1984, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was not able to win more than two parliamentary seats. Disappointed with electoral politics, desperate to expand its social base, many within the Hindu right felt the need for a militant movement to forge an aggressive Hindu identity. L. K. Advani emerged as the aggressive face of the right – leading the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the late 1980s to build a temple for Rama, a major Hindu deity, in Ayodhya – and Atal Bihari Vajpayee appeared as the moderate voice. While Advani's efforts helped forge an assertive masculine Hindu identity, Vajpayee managed to form a coalition government in 1996.

In the early years of this century, during the time that Vajpayee was managing an embattled central coalition, Narendra Modi was fine-tuning a new militant Hindutva in Gujarat as the chief minister of the province. By 2014 he appeared as the unchallenged populist right-wing leader of India.

Alain Badiou points out that subjects become political when they create events – events as trans beings (see Hallward 2003; Badiou 2005, 2009) – even without the mediation of an agency. Badiou (see Hallward 2004) would also constantly remind us that what is important is post-eventual declaration: to quote Lisy Sunny, one of the Dalit woman leaders of Pombilai Orumai in Munnar, ‘[A]t least now we have a union of our own.’

The protests that rocked the Kanan Devan tea plantations, formerly Scottish James Finlay, in Kerala in 2015, led by the historic Pombilai Orumai – the women's unity – and later a parallel state-wide struggle spearheaded by the mainstream trade unions had been called off following what could best be described as mixed outcomes. While the plantation management has had to shift its position with regard to its decision not to increase the bonus or wages, the workers had to content themselves with a 30 per cent hike in wages as against their original demand for a 100 per cent increase. Yet the struggle has been path-breaking as it helped bring to light the harsh living and working conditions on the colonially evolved plantations. The company's claim that it ‘ranked No. 1 in the category [of] best company for employees’ involvement and participation in India’ and ‘featured among the 100 best companies to work [as per] its employees in India’ was exposed as an untruth. In fact, the observations made at the second All Kerala Thozhilali Sammelanam (All Kerala Workers’ Meet) held at Trichur in 1937 under the leadership of veteran communists including P. Krishna Pillai, N.C. Sekhar, R. Sugathan, and A.K. Gopalan, that of all the workers it was the plantation workers who suffered the most (see Raman 2010), remains true to this day – after nearly seven decades of Indian independence – with hardly a change in the historically evolved plantation-based patriarchal forms of exploitation/oppression.

Introduction

India's water crisis has been widely covered in the international and national press. In the summer of 2019, the New York Times published a series of reports and features on the prospects of Chennai and other large Indian cities running out of water (Subramanian 2019). Data on the absolute scarcity of water, sometimes illustrated using dramatic satellite imageries of water bodies, often dominate discussions on India's water crisis (Sengupta 2019). Recall, for example, the 2019 report about 21 Indian cities running out of groundwater by 2020 (ANI 2019a). We are now well past the dreaded summer of 2020 but there has been no follow-up reportage. The argument that India's water crisis lingers because its effects are experienced unequally along multiple dimensions – caste, class, and gender – is hardly a controversial one for scholars. However, there has been very little discussion in both the international and domestic press of the gross inequalities in access to water. The New York Times report mentions the poor, while another describes how women sacrificed daily showers so that office-going male members of the family could afford the luxury instead (Denton and Sengupta 2019). An overwhelming focus on water scarcity instead of water inequalities, we argue, is one of the major causes for the perpetuation of India's water crisis. In this chapter, we seek to examine how the intersection of social inequalities and climate change contributes to water injustice.

In India, access to water is determined by a complex entwining of caste, class, and gender identities that work to perpetuate structural inequalities. While geography and the quality of physical infrastructure greatly influence the extent of water insecurity, they are not entirely responsible for it. In some parts of the country, safe drinking water is inaccessible, causing widespread suffering, illness, and disease. In other regions, cheap and state-subsidized access to water is taken for granted and easily abused (Fatah 2013). The army cantonment and government districts in Delhi receive 375 litres of water per capita per day. On the other hand, South Delhi's Sangam Vihar, an area with a large number of ‘unauthorized colonies’ and home to many lower-income religious minorities, receives a meagre 40 litres of municipal water per person.

Introduction

In his speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem in 2015, Benyamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, purported to describe a meeting between Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler in November 1941:

The past is a rich resource for populist exploitation as it is directly linked to moral boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter focuses on the questions of how national memory and moral remembrance have an effect on populism's moral and ethical relations to the past. According to Cas Mudde (2004), probably the most influential scholar on populism, morals are central to the populist appeal. Populism is a political stance that juxtaposes ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’. Populism relies on morals that determine ‘the pure’ and ‘the righteous’ values; hence, it is directly linked with disputes over the interpretations of the past. The rise of populism, which began in the 1970s and grew considerably in the 1990s and onwards, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. This is because the populist revelations on what are ‘pure’ and ‘righteous’ values always lean on allegedly ‘true’ and so far ‘hidden’ understanding of what transpired in the past. Hence, as we will see, historical revisionism and claims over victimhood and suffering are the bread and butter of every populist appeal.

Though the term ‘populism’ was first reported in American newspapers in the 1890s in the context of the rise of the People's Party (Kaltwasser et al. 2017), the scholarship on populism has grown considerably since the 1970s creating a dense and fertile field. One of the first definitions of populism was offered by Gino Germani, an Italian intellectual referring to it as a multi-class movement, which ‘usually includes contrasting components such as the claim for equality of political rights and universal participation for the common people, but fused with some sort of authoritarianism often under charismatic leadership’ (Kaltwasser et al. 2017: 5).

Introduction

The current Russian government is revising the constitutional system and essentially curtailing the work of democratic institutions. In the process, it is increasingly turning to history as a means of self-legitimation. During the 1990s, which were difficult years for the economics of the country, ruling elites showed an indifference to history. Since the early 2000s, however, this indifference has been replaced, in the words of Alexey Miller, with ‘the escalation of historical politics’ (Miller 2012: 255), which has reached its peak in the third and fourth terms of Vladimir Putin's presidency. The authorities impose a correct picture, from their point of view, of the historical past with the help of school textbooks, large-scale multimedia projects, such as ‘Russia: My history’, and memorial laws (Koposov 2017: 207–299; Kurilla 2021), and even recently adopted amendments to the constitution.

In this chapter, I analyse the Russian government's uses of history. The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I discuss two theoretical questions: First, can the Putin regime be considered populist, and, if so, what are its defining features? Second, what uses of history are characteristic of contemporary populism and its Russian variant? I will claim that Russian uses of history can be characterized as conservative, drawing on a particular kind of presentism. After David Armitage, I would call this ‘teleological presentism’ (Armitage 2020). In the second section, I will show how this essentially conservative regime of historicity works in the Russian context by focusing on the use of the idiom ‘historical Russia’. This phrase is increasingly used today in official rhetoric when explaining domestic and foreign policy agendas. In the third and final section, I present my vision of an alternative historicity, which could become a challenge for the kind of presentism produced by the current Russian government.

Introduction

The carbon emissions of the world's richest 1 per cent are more than double the emissions of the poorest 50 per cent, despite the fact that climate change is expected to disproportionately affect the poor, especially in the warmer parts of the world (Oxfam 2020; Goswami 2020). This suggests that climate and socio-economic justice are intertwined, and understanding the nature of the relationship between carbon emissions and economic inequality can help us arrive at potential pathways to address both.

Climate and socio-economic justice are crucial in the case of India. India is a significant player in the global economy, as its gross domestic product (GDP) is the fifth largest in the world (World Bank 2021). However, the country also experiences staggering levels of economic inequality. It has the third highest number of billionaires, but it also has the largest poor population in the world (Ankel 2020; Roser and Ortiz-Ospina 2019). The wealth of the richest 1 per cent of the Indian population is more than four times the total wealth of the bottom 70 per cent (Economic Times 2020). These indicators of economic inequality demonstrate a dire need to enhance socio-economic justice in India.

Three different indicators of carbon emissions are widely used for analytical purposes. The present climate crisis resulted from historically accumulated greenhouse gas emissions, measured in carbon dioxide equivalents. The United States (US) is the largest contributor, accounting for about 25 per cent of the global cumulative carbon emissions between 1751 and 2019, while India contributed about 3 per cent (Ritchie 2019). Hence, India's historical cumulative carbon emission is rather low. The second indicator measures annual carbon emissions, or a country's current emission levels. Based on this indicator, India has the third highest carbon emission levels globally; it trails China and the US by a huge margin. The third indicator is per capita annual emissions, which accounts for differences in the population size of countries. When countries are ranked in descending order of their per capita carbon emissions, India ranked 128 out of 210 countries in 2019 (Crippa et al. 2020). Even though India's per capita carbon emissions and its share in cumulative global emissions is low, its current scale of emissions is a matter of concern (Matthews 2016).

Arundhati Roy famously described the COVID-19 pandemic as a

As inspiring and insightful as these words are, such juxtaposition of utopia and dystopia barely scratches the surface of what and who we are as a nation. The soulcrushing images of burning pyres in parking lots turned into makeshift graveyards, which international and national media have immortalized, offer a clue, as does the sombre poetry of Parul Khakhar (Tripathi 2021). India is a land pockmarked with a million fires.

The COVID-19 crisis has come as a shock to many middle-class Indians. Yet, to India's Dalits, Adivasis, women, and other marginalized groups, haunted by centuries of oppression, this crisis is yet another in a long list of historical and ongoing crises. For example, the coalfields of Jharia in Jharkhand have been burning for over a century now. As a result, at least 130,000 families have, quite literally, lived through a century-long trial by fire (Rahi 2019). Since 1995, the state-owned Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL) has claimed to have a ‘master plan’, which is possibly gathering dust in some almirah of the coal ministry (S. Kumar 2021). One would imagine that a pandemic like COVID-19 might scare the minister whose job includes ensuring the welfare of the 3.6 million people who work in mines with a less than adequate supply of fresh air. Yet, in 2020, India's coal minister valorized coal workers as ‘our coal warriors who are toiling day and night to keep the lights on even during the corona pandemic’ (Press Information Bureau 2020). They toiled very hard indeed.

A year later, as India struggled to confront the monstrous second wave of the pandemic, Central Coalfields Limited (CCL), a subsidiary of Coal India Limited (CIL), recorded the highest-ever single-day coal dispatch of 80 railway rakes (PNS 2021).