The contribution of colonialism and imperial expropriation to the unfolding climate crisis has been well documented on a global scale. This chapter seeks to interrogate the role of caste as a structural element in shaping environmental inequities within India and beyond. Scientists across disciplines agree that the current system of production is unsustainable at the planetary level, even if a consensus on how to address this issue remains elusive. I argue that in the case of India, accounting for historical and contemporary caste-based extraction is crucial for any meaningful realization of climate justice.

Globally, academic scholarship and policy have come to acknowledge the uneven and unjust ways in which the burden and responsibility for the current crisis are distributed across nations, ethnicities, races, and genders. There is an emerging consensus that the historical pathways of colonialism and capitalist development are directly responsible for this uneven distribution. This pattern is seen across the histories of energy production, plantation economies, and commercial agriculture, as demonstrated in the detailed work of political ecologists (for example, Li 2017). Consequently, the idea that mitigation, adaptation, and resilience-building strategies must account for this historical unevenness is no longer controversial.

We see this acknowledgement in the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ formally adopted by the United Nations in 1992. Under this principle, world governments recognize the lesser contribution of formerly colonized countries such as India towards planetary environmental degradation. This can be read as an acknowledgement of the unequal distribution of political power and economic prosperity across world nations because of colonialism. Acknowledging this historicity of the climate crisis is important, but our understanding of it would remain incomplete without a serious stock-taking of those dimensions of inequality and unevenness that significantly pre-date the rise of colonial capitalism and are yet implicated in its development trajectory. These dimensions of inequality often operate at the national or sub-national levels and therefore escape scrutiny on the global stage. In the case of India, one such important and all-pervasive dimension of inequality is caste.

For decades, anthropological and historical scholarship on caste focused only on ritual, scriptural, and mythical dimensions, thus constructing the issue as a matter of religion alone. Anti-caste scholars and activists such as Ambedkar, Phule, and Periyar have resisted such ‘orientalist’ representations of caste.

Introduction

It would be a stretch to claim to write about populist philosophies or theories of history because populism does not possess the kind of reflective systematic coherence that distinguishes philosophical theories. Still, it is possible to identify, I argue, a distinct populist attitude to historiography that can be derived from a political theory of populism. This attitude to historiography is expressed by the rhetoric, speeches, and speech acts such as tweets of populists from different parts of the world and different ends of the political spectrum.*

There is a great, indeed ever-increasing, variety of theories of populism. Even within the confines of this volume, no single theory or meaning of populism is accepted by all. I have advocated a theory of populism as the politics of the passions (Tucker 2020). Accordingly, I argue that populism approaches historiography as a narrative expression of the passions projected on the past. This passionate-emotive attitude to historiography generates corresponding values that judge competing historiographies according to their passionate intensity that expresses ‘authenticity’. Finally, I consider the more recent populist use of perspectivism, constructivism, and dialectics to confuse and silence its potential critics.

Populism

Populism, as I understand it, is the rule of political passions. This fits the classical Greek understanding of demagoguery and the Roman understanding of populism with the exception that populism is not exclusively of lower classes because elites are just as likely to succumb to their passions, while the common people may project their passions on elitist leaders. These passions override political interests and shape political beliefs. Pure passions tend to be self-destructive – for example, when people become very angry and burn their homes, start wars that hurt them more than their enemies, or demand economic policies that gratify immediately but generate inflation or accumulate debts that destroy the economy. As La Bruyere (quoted in Elster 1999: 337) puts it, ‘Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason, but the greatest triumph is to conquer a man's own interest.’

Harry Frankfurt (1988: 11–25) distinguished first-order desires from second-order volitions, wills about desires, what a person would like their desires to be and not to be.

Introduction

For admirers and detractors alike, Donald Trump's presidency signified a rupture, whether a revelatory inflection point on the brink of a national calamity or a nightmarish transgression of norms and dereliction of duty. Back in 2015, he was the ‘chaos candidate’. Ever since he amplified and dramatized a sense of crisis with the rhetoric he unleashed to announce threats and denounce enemies, both foreign and domestic, as well as through the venues he chose to engage the public, whether large public rallies or daily cascades of tweets (Moffit 2015). The crisis turned more acute and tangible towards the end of his presidency during the COVID-19 pandemic and the eruption of protests following George Floyd's death. It climaxed with the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, when belligerent language and populist rage turned into political violence.

Conflict, crisis, and the sense that a momentous shift is afoot, that the present in some sense is already historic, prompted an intense, both overt and implicit, engagement with the past in American public life. Allusions to the past proliferated in an effort to justify, condemn, or simply comprehend Trump, his politics, and his demeanour. The past, its memory and pedagogy, the meaning of national symbols, and questions about the mnemonic function of the state fed heated disputes and political skirmishes, especially over race and the legacy of slavery. While history was deployed in a volatile political landscape, invocations of the past – from whatever political camp – also indicated a desire for legibility and predictability, facing perceived threats, endemic insecurities, and a perennial gap between expectations and the reality of American life.

This chapter employs Trump and his tenure in the White House to explore the contours and content of the populist historical imagination in the contemporary United States of America (USA). A populist streak is discernible in American politics dating back to the 1830s. Historically, the term ‘populism’ carried a somewhat different valence in Europe, Latin America, and the USA. However, the current political moment signifies a convergence, exemplified, for instance, by Trump's cult of personality and authoritarianism; both were less pronounced in previous iterations of American populism.

Introduction

‘Climate change seems to be the last of the priorities of the state and central government. Despite various climate plans, we continue to privatize coal and divert forest land. How does one reconcile these decisions with the objectives of the climate action plan?’ asked a senior administrative officer in the Odisha Revenue and Disaster Management Department when questioned about the auctioning of new coal blocks and the state's climate action plan. His grim observation points to the political and economic barriers against implementing an effective climate policy that addresses climate justice in India.

In this chapter, we argue that India's climate policy fails to adequately address difficult political questions related to climate justice and rising inequality. As our analysis of state and national climate action plans show, India's engagement with questions of climate justice remains merely symbolic. This directly follows from the country's stance in international climate negotiations, during which it has shied away from undertaking rigorous domestic climate action citing high levels of poverty and a need to focus on economic growth (Kashwan and Mudaliar 2021).

Our analysis of India's national and state climate action plans offers insights into the often-unstated normative principles that guide decision-making on climate change within the country. In this study, we demonstrate how, if at all, these action plans incorporate questions of justice and equality. We argue that most of India's climate action plans demonstrate a superficial understanding of socio-economic inequalities and hence fail to adequately address the disproportionate impact of climate events on the poor and marginalized.

We begin by discussing the principles that guide climate policy internationally and domestically. We then provide a critical overview of national and state climate action plans. We then scrutinize these action plans in terms of substantive equality and climate justice criteria, namely caste, gender, poverty, and co-benefits for development. We then analyse the action plans with regard to their treatment of these substantive criteria, the limitations in their approach, and possible strategies to address these limitations.

Background

Internationally, India is known to have pioneered the approach of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), which allows developing countries to prioritize poverty alleviation and economic growth over climate mitigation.

Introduction

Populism rarely travels alone. As cases such as Narendra Modi's ‘Hindutva’, Brexit's ‘Take Back Control’, and Donald Trump's ‘Make America Great Again (MAGA)’ show, populism often travels with nostalgia. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's authoritarian populism takes its fuel from neo-Ottomanism, a nostalgic rewriting of the Ottoman past, exemplified by the Conquest Rallies, massive public manifestations commemorating the conquest of Constantinople; the government-endorsed television series Resurrection: Ertuğrul, depicting the modest beginnings of the Ottoman Empire; and the Panorama Museum of Conquest, a state-led interactive museum, intended to ‘transport’ audiences back to 1453. How does authoritarian, right-wing populism pair so well with nostalgia? What is the ‘lost state’ that the Ottoman nostalgia so yearns to bring back, and what emotions go into its making? This chapter answers these case-specific questions while extrapolating that both nostalgia and populism, specific to and exemplified through this case, rely on binaries such as good versus evil, us versus them, and a glorious past versus a crumbling present. Together, these nostalgic and populist binaries create an ideal type, namely nostalgic populism. Nostalgic populism is a common modality of populist historicities and therefore requires close attention. Drawing from the 2020 reconversion of the Hagia Sophia to a mosque, I argue that the nostalgic populism in Turkey, which operates simultaneously through nationalist and imperialist logics, showcases three discursive characteristics vis-à-vis history:

• 1. Legalization of history: Nostalgic populism uses history as a legal precedent and as a legitimizing mechanism for policy. In the case of the Hagia Sophia, the regime refers to national sovereignty and Mehmed the Conqueror's will regarding the Hagia Sophia to present the reconversion decree as lawful.

• 2. Monopolization of history: The regime asserts its claim as the only legitimate one, declaring continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Because Mehmed the Conqueror saved the Hagia Sophia, a marvel, from the state of decay and ruin – the result of Byzantine neglect – Turkey, as the heir of the Ottoman Empire, reasons it has the main claim on this monument.

• 3. Revivification of stolen history: While other countries and the previous regimes in Turkey neglected Ottoman history, the Justice and Development Party, or the AK Party (hereafter AKP), gives the people the ‘right’ kind of history, a history the people have been deprived of thus far.

Much before the Western radical youth ‘invented’ Occupy politics of 2011 (Occupy Wall Street, Occupy St Paul) in the West, inspired largely by the Arab Spring, there were instances in the Global South where precarious workers and communities unleashed their agency with unpredictable outcomes. What Hardt and Negri (2012) attribute to Occupy politics – their imaginations, revolts, slogans, movements and insistence on democracy as characteristics of multitudes – was also relevant for the subaltern struggles in the Global South. It is remarkable how the multitudes, both in the West and in the Global South, though spatially and temporally distinct, declare historically evolved truths through imaginative interventions towards a more egalitarian way of living. In South Asia, they also practised it as social movement identity politics in a world where corporates, often with the support of the state, threatened their rights to the commons, including their traditional environmental rights to land and water resources, and their human right to a decent living,3 thus bearing wider connotations than the Western-style Occupy protests. Latin American and African resistance movements such as the Landless Workers Movement in Mexico and Zapatistas/Chiapas in Brazil, and those in Buen Vivir (Ecuador), Cochabamba (Bolivia), the Estallido Social (Social Uprising) in Chile, and Ongoni (Nigeria) share similar traits in the way they assert and attribute new meanings to land rights, autonomy, food, water, environmental sovereignty, and identity. As a critical complement to the earlier-mentioned literature, the present monograph examines the livelihood, environmental, and identity struggles of the marginalized with a focus on Kerala, the state known for its twin legacies: the communist experiments and social development.

More on Premises

The protests, struggles, and movements in the Global South challenging corporate capital and the state, and even the mainstream male-led trade unions, take the form of what I would refer to as ecospatial struggles, resulting in the conceptualization of political ecospatiality in which ‘eco’ represents the varying dimensions of critiques of economics and ecology/environment and ‘spatiality’, the power relations ingrained in the social body politic (see Raman 2020b; Peluso and Watts 2001; Wapner 1996; Lefebvre 2011; Massey 1994; Harvey 2000).

Introduction

There was a time in political science and in political philosophy when emotionality and rationality were regarded as opposites and when the presence of emotions as such (especially of ‘passions’) in politics was seen as inappropriate, if not as outright suspect. Since the nineteenth century, many even liked to think that emotionality in politics was a preserve of unruly mobs and crowds. In democratic theory, politics was predominantly conceived as an arena in which various actors were basically pursuing their interests in a deliberate and rational way. Therefore, rational choice theory and coalition formation theory came to be seen as the best instruments to explain democratic politics according to most political scientists.

Since the ‘affective turn’ started in politics and in political thinking in the 1980s – spearheaded by philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Chantal Mouffe – this time is no more: emotions are increasingly appealed upon and taken seriously as objects of analysis (Nussbaum 2013; Mouffe 2005). Since then it is no longer possible in politics to criticize political opponents by simply unmasking that their beliefs and actions are based on emotions – and this obviously also holds for right-wing, exclusionary populism because political feelings are as old as modern politics itself (Frevert et al. 2022). Instead, the task of the critics of populism is to analyse the emotional repertoire used by populists in a comparative-historical perspective and to explain why it is successful in terms of mobilizing electoral support (Tietjen 2022; Demertzis 2019).

In this chapter, I address these issues by asking whether the emotions that populism appeals to form a specific set that distinguishes populism from other ideologies or discourses, especially from ethnic nationalism and nativism. However, in order to answer this first question, I first need to clarify the definitions of populism, ethnic nationalism, and nativism that I adopt. I depart from the well-known definition of populism formulated by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser and indicate the problems connected with this kind of definition in the light of ethnic nationalism. Then I elucidate the concept of ethnic nationalism and its relationship to populism because at least in Western Europe and in the United States of America (USA) they both appear to be very closely related.

My ongoing engagements with international and national debates on climate justice are a result of an intellectual journey over the past two decades that has brought me time and again to the complex intersections of environmental protection and social justice. Market-based solutions became the backbone of ostensible global responses to climate change at the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Bali in December 2007. The sense of excitement among environmental economists then is difficult to describe from where we are today. However, to those of us who had spent time in the field, this euphoria was evidently and grossly misplaced. The journey that marketbased solutions would have to take, from Bali to places like Bastar in Chhattisgarh, where they would be eventually implemented, is not paved with the freedom of choice that pro-market advocates like to celebrate.

Markets are designed to facilitate the accumulation of surplus in the hands of those who can channel it higher up in the ‘food chain’. In most cases, the market ecosystem is essentially a centralizing force and does not work for the poor and marginalized. Unfortunately, this argument often falls through the cracks due to the lack of interdisciplinary work that is needed to produce knowledge that may help inform public debates on these complex questions. The market-based solutions institutionalized at the Bali climate conference, especially carbon offsets and carbon emissions trading, have proven to be colossal failures.

Perhaps even more embarrassingly, the advocates of market-based climate solutions lost the battle of ideologies to right-wing reactionary forces. Even in the supposedly knowledge-driven market economies of the Global North, ultra-conservatives have been successful in labelling neoliberal policies, such as offsets and cap-and-trade policies, as part of ‘the radical Left's progressive wish list’. This is not surprising to many on the left but this also offers much food for thought for students of policy analysis, who focus rather narrowly on coming up with ‘efficient solutions’. While smart analyses can be helpful, the belief that such analyses are sufficient to drive policy change has proven to be a chimera. This is why it is necessary to cultivate a strong awareness of the extent to which the beneficiaries of the status quo use their political and economic power to thwart sensible debates on the unprecedented environmental and social crises.

With the Occupy protests in the West, which have lately been superseded by the Black Lives Matter movements, we started telling the stories of protest movements in the Global South, with a focus on Kerala. It would also imply that right-making/state-making dialectics ought to be applied to understand and assess state formation and state performance, including that of the Kerala model of development. After the post-independence state formation, the historical landscape of Kerala, by and large, validates the right-making/statemaking thesis despite shortfalls; it appears that after state formation, and until recently, there have been tendencies on the part of the state to put constraints in the process. It strengthened the case for why the confluence of class and race/caste, with its gender expressions, matters for appropriate politics, particularly in leftist groups. Furthermore, research has shown that different communities have been negatively impacted by global crises like the coronavirus pandemic, with the most marginalized members of society bearing the brunt of this burden because they lack access to adequate healthcare, are malnourished, and live in poverty. Neither the exploitation and oppression of global capitalism nor the pandemic is caste- or class-neutral. All the more important is the livelihood and environmental vulnerability of the marginalized in a state which is otherwise known for its social developments and socialist experiments which in turn demands what has been described in this monograph as political ecospatiality.

Threats and enclosures are additional features of the current world, and the pandemic has made individuals who defend their rights even more vulnerable. Countries of the Global South such as Colombia, Niger, Indonesia, and the Philippines are used as examples of neoliberal predations (Burns and LeMoyne 2001; Lucas and Warren 2003; Iwilade 2012; Quimpo 2009). In the case of India, as argued elsewhere, the modalities of emerging power is by and large constituted by the Hindutva–corporate regime; this is further contrasted with the ‘graduated social democratic state’ as in Kerala (Raman 2023). As we describe the problems of the excluded, the future seems as hazy as ever. Yet the ecospatial struggles we narrated so far are optimistic, and so is ecospatiality in its totality, which is in and of itself politics proper.

Introduction

In Figure 9.1, we see a meme made by the Brazilian far-right portraying the president Jair Messias Bolsonaro (2019–2022) as a crusader. How to interpret the engagements with history embodied by images like this one?* Is it a traditional use of the past for a coherent ideological project, or is it something else? We believe that this image and, more broadly, Bolsonarist engagements with history reveal certain dimensions of contemporary historicity – by which we mean the articulation of the past, the present, and the future. In this chapter, we thus analyse how the populist movement embodied by Bolsonaro engages with history in a way that activates its heterogeneous political base. These engagements seem to be different from some aspects of modern chronosophies, such as their abandonment of synchronization and coherent presentation of a national history. Instead, the new Brazilian far-right populist historicity relies more on emotional attachment, a pragmatic and highly fragmented historical performance that, as we claim, is more akin to a historicity that we call ‘updatism’, meaning this historicity in which an empty and self-centred present is loosely and pragmatically related to the past, whereas the future is desired as a reserve for the linear expansion of an updating – and sometimes upgrading – present (see Araujo and Pereira 2019).

To demonstrate the affinity between ‘updatism’ and the specific Bolsonarist version of populism, this chapter is divided into three sections. First, we introduce the concept and the theory of updatism. Next, we characterize the populist dimensions of Bolsonarism – that is, the cultural and political movement represented by Jair Bolsonaro. Then we analyse the new Brazilian populism in its engagements with history, especially the performances of history by the three secretaries of culture of Bolsonaro's government and how the defactualization of reality gains momentum, creating the conditions of possibility for the past to be like a large wardrobe full of prêt-à-porter images and templates. Taken together, we can conclude that the affinities we see between Brazilian populism, or Bolsonarism, and updatist historicity are the following: both flourish in a communicational environment characterized by a shared and simulated reality that defies modern authorities and institutions; both tend to dissolve historical synchronization and thus lead to dispersion and agitation; and both have a more pragmatic engagement with historical content.

Onam, the harvest festival of the Malayalis, marked the moment of departure in August 2001, when the Adivasis of Kerala planted ‘refugee huts’, the kutilkettysamaram, in front of the state secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram in protest against mass starvation deaths in their communities. The protest was historic and innovative; no other protest of this nature has ever been attempted anywhere else in India. What they sought was their right to livelihood resources – land for the landless. While there were several land struggles and movements by Adivasis in Kerala, the immediate provocation for them marching to the state capital was the report of 32 starvation deaths among Adivasis in and around Attappady and Wayanad, the tribal district in the state. They demanded a settlement outside the controversial Kerala Restriction on Transfer by and Restoration of Lands to Scheduled Tribes Bill, 1999, passed by the state legislative assembly, which repealed the original Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act, 1975. The Adivasi Dalit Samara Samithi (ADSS) argued that of the 75,000 Adivasi families in the state, 45,000 were landless, and the granting of 5 acres to each of those families would require the distribution of 2.25 lakh acres of land. The Adivasis, led by C.K. Janu – an Adiya woman who spearheaded the struggle – conducted their protest in an unprecedented manner. The struggle was considered successful by the ADSS, claiming that their demands for lands were met, at least partly, by the government. When no action was taken by the government to make the promised measures, and instead followed procrastination politics, the tribal alliance renewed their protest, now in the form of Occupy Muthanga. The indigenous people of Wayanad, under the banner of the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha (AGMS) – nearly 800 families – entered the Muthanga range of the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary (MWWS) in January 2003 and declared the area their own, a new republic. However, in two months’ time, on 19 February, they were forcefully evacuated with armed police: one Adivasi and a police officer lost their lives; several Adivasis were hurt or injured in the process.

Introduction

Indian cities are especially vulnerable to climate change due to their rapid population growth, high levels of socioeconomic inequality, and the general inability of infrastructure and public services to adapt to projected impacts (Revi 2008; Sharma and Tomar 2010). Although the neoliberal reforms introduced in India since the early 1990s have enabled the broader participation of non-state actors in decision-making, an ideological preference for entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance have largely led to the withdrawal of the state from delivering basic services (Datta 2015). Revenue shortfalls and lack of administrative capacity have further decreased the ability of cities to deal with climate impacts and risks (Cook and Chu 2018; Sharma et al. 2014). These effects are felt most acutely by the urban poor, who are disproportionately exposed (Michael and Vakulabharanam 2016; Satterthwaite et al. 2007).

Since the 1990s, there has been a growing awareness of climate change among government officials. For the next two decades, governmental interventions in Indian cities were confined to climate mitigation and targeted select manufacturing, construction, and energy sectors (Dubash et al. 2018). To be fair, climate adaptation was still a relatively nascent priority for India, and its policy focus was on furthering its geopolitical role in global climate negotiations. As a nation that saw itself as a rapidly industrializing global power, India aggressively pushed for the country's ‘right to development’ despite its significant exposure to climate change impacts (Gupta 2010). Indian negotiators highlighted how industrialized nations could support India through technology, resource, and capacity transfers that will allow it to ‘leap frog’ from fossil-fuel-intensive to more sustainable forms of development. Widespread awareness of climate adaptation only emerged in the late 2000s, spearheaded by transnational, civil society, and national scientific bodies that documented changing climatic patterns and advocated that subnational governments play a role in addressing climate risks (Khosla and Bhardwaj 2019b; Sharma, Singh, and Singh 2014; Sharma et al. 2014). Since then, and as climate adaptation has moved from the policy to the implementation space, there have been growing concerns that structural inequalities in urban development in India may dilute or even redirect the intended benefits of climate adaptation.

Introduction

The feminization of agriculture, or the sharp increase in the number of women in farming, is the result of a deep and ongoing agrarian crisis. Some scholars have more aptly named this phenomenon the ‘feminization of the agrarian crisis’ to capture how the ongoing agrarian crisis places a greater burden on women farmers than it does on their male counterparts. Patriarchal norms and attitudes prevent women from owning and controlling land, and women from marginalized castes and classes are the most disadvantaged (Pattnaik et al. 2018). Over 70 per cent of women in rural India are engaged in farming, but since the majority do not formally own land, they are not officially recognized as farmers and are instead considered as ‘farm helpers’ (Agarwal 2021). Given the substantial inequalities that affect women's ownership of and control over land, they cannot avail the benefits of land ownership – economic security, social status, and state support, among others.

This chapter looks at climate justice in the context of women in agriculture. Climate change and gender inequalities are deeply intertwined. Governments and civil society actors have launched various programmes aimed at climate resilience and adaptation in agriculture. However, when analysed through the lens of climate justice, these efforts do not always promote social equity. On the contrary, in some cases, mainstream climate solutions threaten women's land rights and farm-based livelihoods.

Using the novel framework of agrarian climate justice, which combines ideas from agrarian justice and climate justice, we explore women's land rights within agroecology programmes in India. We argue that advancing women's collective land rights through climate initiatives can achieve the twin aims of climate resilience and agrarian justice. We focus on agrarian land and do not look at forest lands, which, although equally important, are outside the scope of this chapter. Drawing from feminist scholars’ work on intersectionality, we emphasize the importance of an intersectional understanding of the differences between women based on intersecting identities of caste, class, age, education, and marital status, among others (Lutz, Herrera Vivar, and Supik 2011). Such an understanding is important to ensure that climate policies reduce, instead of reproduce, inequalities.

Mayilamma – the Dalit woman leader of the anti-Cola water movement in Plachimada – explicitly told this author: ‘I do not know whether it was due to globalization or not, what I know is that our wells are getting dried up; whatever little water left was polluted.’ This political statement came at a time when water has rapidly become a contested commodity worldwide, with local communities in many parts of the world suffering the threat of multinationals working in collusion with the state apparatus to usurp their precious natural resources, including in Plachimada.

There has been a recent proliferation of scholarship on water conflict and governance, both within and outside political landscapes, attempting to address the various nuances of global and local governance strategies. Increasing concern has been expressed regarding the widespread social and political-ecological implications of current and potential ‘water wars’ and water conflicts. Water supply, once considered a public utility or a service, is now fast becoming a marketable commodity, one that is to be sold on a full cost-recovery basis, an approach that is vehemently opposed by social agencies, which fight back, often as part of a wider struggle, but also within specific locales. Such movements throw into stark relief the ironies inherent in the discourse–counter-discourse (Grillo and Stirrat 1997; Terdiman 1985; Ashcroft 2001; Daudi 1983; Escobar 1985; Byrant and Baily 1997) generated as part of the process of conflict resolution. And now ‘governance’ as a conflict-resolution strategy wrought through the multiple agencies of a legislative, institutional, and regulatory framework promoting equitable access to and ecologically sustainable management of water resources appears to be the new polemics. This chapter critically engages with the multiple knowledge conflicts and the multiple agencies involved in the vexed question of water access, power, and community rights in Plachimada, a small hamlet in the Palakkad district of the south Indian state of Kerala.

Social movements by themselves are not merely sensitizers of the public, but have an important role to play in exposing the ever-increasing threats to marginalized communities in terms of their livelihood, culture, and ecology. The social agencies involved in these movements are also credited with exposing the untruth in claims made by scientific and expert knowledge in their reproduction of hegemonic power relations that gnaw away at the roots of community existence and the right to live.