Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [62]
Life for the farmers here is difficult. “There is declining rain, and this affects yields, and the prices are still low,” says Linga Reddy Sama, a cotton farmer in the village of Jaamni, a few kilometers from the Sathnala Reservoir not far from the border of Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra states. Most of the people in this area are Adivasi, or “tribal people,” the Gonds of the Adilabad District. Others are Hindu migrants who came down from the state of Maharashtra.
On that day in 2009, when I sat in the shade of a roughhewn wood arbor with a group of farmers, none of them had yet heard of greenhouse gases or anthropogenic climate change. However, they all thought the weather was changing. They said that in the last ten to fifteen years, regular drought and strangely timed rains had become very common. Many of them speculated that deforestation was the culprit.
“This generation has done something wrong to affect the rains like this,” said a farmer named Mohan Rao. “ When I was a child, the forests came right up to here. You couldn’t see those hills; all of this was covered in trees. We used to have two rainy seasons. In June we planted irrespective of rain; we planted between the fifteenth and twenty-eighth, and by September we harvested.” He said typically the summer rains fall for three or four months and are then followed by lighter, shorter rains in the late autumn.
That pattern is common across South India. The summer monsoon blows in off the Indian Ocean, usually making landfall in southern India about June 1. These mighty rains arrive because the rising summertime temperature of the Indian landmass sucks moist air in off the ocean. The moisture rises, cools, and falls as rain. The monsoon is split into two branches by India’s coastal mountain ranges, the Ghats, and most of the rain falls on western coastal India, leaving much of the central region quite dry. The monsoons travel north until September; then, as the sun begins moving south, the weather system begins its retreat back in that direction, creating the winter monsoon. The summer monsoons account for fourfifths of India’s total rainfall; the lighter, retreating or northwest monsoons deliver the rest. But things are less stable than in the past. The farmers say recent years have seen only light winter rains. That makes it impossible to plant a second cotton crop.
To make matters worse, this area has been in the grip of a nasty little guerrilla war. India, the world’s largest democracy, is also home to one of the world’s oldest guerrilla movements—a Maoist insurgency known as the Naxalites. The Maoist ’s war began in 1967 in West Bengal. Their parties have fragmented and reunited as the war has ebbed and flowed.2 Today, this low-intensity conflict runs the length of eastern India and has a variety of geographically specific causes. In Bihar and Chattisgarh, the heart of the violence, large-scale mining on tribal lands is the immediate cause of troubles. But elsewhere, we find the catastrophic convergence.
If one compares maps of precipitation with those of violence, a disturbing pattern emerges: where drought advances, so do Maoists. This geography runs down the Eastern Ghats, from Bihar and West Bengal, through Orissa and Chattisgarh, into Andhra Pradesh and even further south and west.This “Red Corridor” is also the drought corridor. Drought produces a chain reaction of debt, land loss, hunger, suicide, banditry, and Maoism.
Why this neat correlation? The link is not “natural” but rather historically produced. In the years of the Naxal rise in Andhra Pradesh, drought was also intense: 1984–1985, 1986–1987, 1997–1998, 1999–2000, and 2002–2003 were all drought years.3
As India’s weather patterns have grown more disjointed, so too have its economic policies shifted rightward to effectively