Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [133]
8 Joseph Lelyveld, “Left Communists in West Bengal Are Deeply Split,” New York Times, July 5, 1967. Naxalite methods were a hybrid of modern ideological zeal and the bloody-minded pragmatism of West Bengal social banditry: Pulan Devi plus The Little Red Book. To their credit, the Naxalites also organized nonviolent mass movements that used direct actions to occupy land, confront landlords, and set up road blockades to demand justice, an end to repression, and economic concessions from the state.
Throughout India, Marxist parties have played crucial roles in coalition governments or even dominated them. Very often their progressive reforms have led to real development. Not only were these reforms progressive in content, but they were often radical in form: policy was not just delivered from the top down, but grassroots mobilization was also facilitated. Under the first United Front government in West Bengal in the early 1970s, four Marxist parties held the balance of power; the same rough coalition was later elected as the Left Front. In those heady days, Jyoti Basu, of the Communist Party (Marxist), was given the Home Ministry portfolio and thus had control of the state police. He used these forces to help peasants facilitate land seizures and played referee during the sometimes violent confrontations with the employer class. But the developmentalist thrust of most Indian communists was never enough for the Naxalite fanatics. In their eyes the mainstream communist parties were a Soviet-style capitulation to imperialism. The Naxals preferred the righteous path of Chairman Mao. In those days, West Bengal was a crazy Red maelstrom of center-left versus left, versus ultraleft, versus underground left.
9 S. Harpal Singh, “Gonds on the Path of Progress,” Hindu, April 20, 2009; N. S. Saksena, India, Towards Anarchy, 1967–1992 (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1993), 76.
10 “Maoists Target Jawans Again,” Hindustan Times, April 5, 2010.
11 “Andhra Pradesh Receives 27% Excess Rain During Monsoon,” Hindu Business Line, July 27, 2010.
12 Orville Schell, “The Message from the Glaciers,” New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010.
13 Z. W. Kundzewicz et al., “Freshwater Resources and Their Management,” Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. M. L. Parry et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 187, available at www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-chapter3.pdf. Estimates are that 120 million to 1.2 billion people in Asia will face increased water stresses by the mid-2020s.
14 James Lamont et al., “India Widens Climate Rift with West,” Financial Times, July 23, 2009.
15 Some scientists predict that by the end of the century, India will experience a three- to five-degree Celsius temperature increase and with it a 20 percent rise in summer monsoon rainfall.
16 Dennis C. Blair, “Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community” (testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, February 2, 2010).
17 Schell, “The Message from the Glaciers.”
18 Kundzewicz et al., “Freshwater Resources and Their Management, 493.
19 Emily Wax, “Global Warming Threatens to Dry Up Ganges,” Washington Post, June 24, 2007.
20 That characterization came from Charles Kennel, senior strategist at the University of California, San Diego, Sustainability Solutions Institute and former director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Cited in Stephen Leahy, “Climate Change: Snow Cover Turning to Lake in the Himalayas,” Inter Press Service, May 7, 2009.
21 Aiguo Dai, Taotao Qian, and Kevin E. Trenberth, “Changes in Continental Freshwater Discharge from 1948–2004,” National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, November 18, 2008; also personal communication from Dr. Aiguo