Not an idea, an ache: GIVE ME GREEN
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Change does not always arrive as revolution. Sometimes it arrives as a question, a doubt, a enigma, that refuses to say goodbye.
By Suresh Nautiyal 'Greenananda'
On 16 April this year, the Global Greens, political confederation of most of the Green parties in the world, celebrated 25 years of the adoption of its Charter. On this occasion, a unique two-day global online gathering was organised to connect, to look back, and to reflect on the future of the international Green movement.
A quarter century after the Global Greens Charter articulated its quiet but radical framework—ecological wisdom, social justice, participatory grassroots democracy, social justice, respect for diversity and nonviolence—the world finds itself not ahead of that vision, but catching up to it. What was once framed as an alternative now reads as an inevitability. Climate disruption, ecological fragility, and deepening inequality have dissolved the illusion that environment, economy, and society can be treated as separate domains.
The Charter did not merely propose principles; it anticipated a crisis of civilisation itself—a crisis born out of disconnection.
Yet, even as Green Politics gained global language and coherence, its journey in countries like India unfolded differently—not through declarations, but through lived unease.
Here, the ecological question did not arrive as theory. It emerged as a disturbance, as imbalance felt in the soil, the river, the forest, and the village. The global articulation and the local experience were never in contradiction; they were two expressions of the same truth—one spoken, the other endured.
Not interested in Political Power
It is within this continuum—between a world that is beginning to understand and a society that has long experienced—that Green Politics in India must be read. Let us reiterate that it emerged quietly, as discomfort — a persistent tension between soil and authority, between inherited rhythms of indigenous life and communities, and the imposed haste of extraction-driven development.
It surfaced first not as an idea, but as an ache — a wound felt long before it was named.
From the beginning, Green Politics was not a bid for political office. It was a moral warning against unchecked growth, ecological destruction, and unrestrained power. Its central insight was simple yet unsettling: development divorced from ecology and inherited indigenous civilisations would hollow out society itself.
Over time, ecological crises — climate instability, water stress, land degradation — have repeatedly validated this warning. And yet, Green Politics has remained politically marginal in India and across the world. This marginality does not reflect a failure of truth, but a failure to translate ethical clarity into institutions, livelihoods, and everyday politics.
A fundamental mismatch lay at the heart of this struggle. Green Politics spoke of limits in societies driven by aspiration and scarcity. In a country where dignity is often denied, restraint appeared as deprivation, and ecological caution as obstruction.
Over time, ‘environmentalism’ itself drifted towards elitist and technocratic language, sidelining the lived ecological wisdom of local communities. Conservation became regulation, compliance, and control — no longer a shared ethic rooted in life.
The wound, however, remained visible — in hills where forests thinned without ceremony; in rivers whose ancient songs were interrupted by concrete; in villages emptied of youth and increasingly inhabited by abandoned elders. The land did not shout. It eroded, retreated, collapsed — and then reminded us of disasters that arrived not as accidents, but as delayed answers.
Ecology before Politics
Spiritually and culturally, ecology was never a separate domain in India. It was the grammar through which existence itself was understood.
Seasons were not statistics; they were our teachers.
Mountains were not obstacles; they were our elders.
Rivers were not resources to be priced; they were memories in motion, carrying stories from its origin to the sea.
Life unfolded through relationships, not extraction.
Modern politics ushered in a different language — one trained in acceleration, scale, and appetite. It learned to speak of ownership, mining, damming, monetisation, and growth, often without consequence and always without memory or refinement. In this rupture between living knowledge and abstract power, Green Politics in India emerged — not as a fashion, but as resistance.
A civilisation does not collapse when it loses power. It collapses when it forgets what it once knew about living.
Long before European Green parties took shape, India had already articulated the ethical core of Green thought. Mahatma Gandhi’s insistence on restraint, decentralisation, nonviolence, and village self-rule were ecological realism, not nostalgia. His warning that the Earth has enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed was not a moral aphorism; it was a political forecast.
Gandhi’s philosophy, shaped by Indian spiritual traditions and thinkers such as Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, and Socrates, recognised what modern economics still resists: unrestrained growth in a finite world is not progress, but postponement of the inevitable collapse.
Independent India, however, eager to escape colonial poverty, chose to outrun this wisdom. Gigantic industrial acceleration, like big dams, became national faith. Scale was mistaken for strength, speed for success. Ecology was politely asked to wait.
It did not.
Chipko movement: Women’s Resistance and Victory
The earliest ecological language in Indian politics was not parliamentary; it was embodied.
When women in the Himalayan villages embraced trees during the Chipko Movement, they were not opposing a policy document. They were asserting a relationship. Without slogans, they declared forests not as commodities, but as kin.
When communities along the Narmada river resisted mass displacement in tens of thousands, they were not rejecting electricity or irrigation in thought. They were asking a question Green Politics everywhere must confront: can progress that uproots lives and communities still be called development?
These movements revealed a truth Indian politics was unprepared to hear — that democracy without ecological ethics becomes a mechanism of dispossession. When development forgets to ask for whom, it quietly manufactures suppression as policy.
Yet, movements alone could not carry the burden forever. Protest could delay damage; it could not redesign governance. Moral clarity without political structure remained vulnerable. Slowly, uneasily, ecological resistance began to seek ecological politics.
Ecology as Inconvenience
For decades, environmental concern in India was treated as an activist’s luxury rather than a citizen’s necessity. Employment, housing, food security, health, education, and security appeared more urgent. Ecology was pushed to the margins, as if it were unrelated to all of them.
Mainstream political parties, deeply entangled with corporate finance and neoliberal growth models, found little incentive to foreground ecological limits. Growth — even when destructive — promised immediate rewards.
Restraint did not.
As a result, development steadily undermined the livelihoods of those most dependent on land, water, forests, and climate stability. Farmers, forest dwellers, fisherfolk, informal workers — the ecological majority — were rendered politically marginalised.
Until the turn of the century, the idea of a Green party in India was widely dismissed. Those who imagined it were labelled idealists or “activists,” voices of protest rather than contenders for power. This dismissal itself became a political barrier.
History, however, does not discard unfinished questions. It returns to them under pressure.
From Ethics to Emergency
As climate instability deepened, ecology re-entered public life — no longer merely as ethics, but as emergency. Cities became unbreathable. Agriculture grew unpredictable. Water scarcity, land degradation, public health stress, and food insecurity revealed a shared root: development without balance. Or vision.
Slowly, people recognised that ecology was not competing with bread-and-butter issues — it was producing them.
It was under this pressure, not abstract idealism, that Green political thinking in India began to reorganise itself.
The intimacy of lived life
Those who carried ecological wisdom into Green Politics did not enter through ideology. They entered through geography. In the Himalayan landscape of Uttarakhand, ecological consciousness was shaped by lived intimacy — with mountains and villages, elders and rituals, oral traditions and silences.
Long engagement with folk culture revealed a neglected truth: ecological collapse is also cultural erasure.
When forests disappear, songs lose context.
When villages empty, memory fractures.
When elders are abandoned, the future loses guidance.
A society that neglects its elders has already abandoned its tomorrow.
From Movements to Institutions
Gradually, many activists recognised that values without structure cannot endure. Protest can awaken conscience; but, only institutions can preserve it across generations.
This conviction led to efforts such as the founding of the Uttarakhand Parivartan Party (UKPP) in 2009 and later in 2018, the India Greens Party (iGP). These were not opportunistic ventures, but reluctant recognitions that ethical politics must eventually confront electoral reality. Both of these parties, still growing, are active in the electoral politics.
On 2 July 2017, representatives from 17 states agreed that India needed a pan-India Green party. On 18 November 2018, the India Greens Party was formally constituted.
Aligned with the Global Greens’ principles — ecological wisdom, social justice, nonviolence, participatory democracy, and respect for diversity — the party attempted something rare: to imagine governance beginning with life itself, not markets.
Yet Green Politics in India could never be a simple translation of Western models. European Greens emerged amid excess; Indian Greens confront scarcity layered upon deep inequality. The challenge here is not merely to consume less luxury, but to secure dignity without destruction.
Now, we have Green parties like the Green Tamilnadu Party, the Green Party associated with the Socialist Party (India), the Green Party of India, the Indian Peoples Green Party, etc. However, most of these exist on paper only, are activist-driven or symbolic platforms.
Grassroots democracy: Gram Swaraj
At its core, Green Politics in India is a democratic question. Decision-making remains distant from those most affected by ecological harm. Gandhi’s vision of gram swaraj — village self-governance — remains profoundly relevant. Panchayati Raj exists constitutionally, but not substantively.
Green Politics insists that ecological sustainability is impossible without democratic deepening. People must exercise real power over land use, water, agriculture, and local economies. Without this, development remains extractive, even when clothed in welfare language.
Electorally, Green Politics remains marginal. The election candidates of the India Greens Party and the Uttarakhand Parivartan Party have so far only forfeited their deposits; but this is not failure. It is contextual.
Failures are because Indian democracy operates on short cycles, while ecological repair demands long time horizons. Citizens are often forced into a false choice between immediate survival and long-term sustainability — a failure of policy, not awareness.
Yet, the terrain is shifting. Climate disasters no longer arrive as distant warnings. They arrive as , tangible lived disruptions.
The future of Green Politics in India is unlikely to resemble sudden electoral conquest. It will be quieter, slower, deeper. It will reshape the human conscience, influence policy language, expand what is politically thinkable, and insist that progress be redefined.
Change does not always arrive as revolution. Sometimes it arrives as a question, a doubt, a enigma, that refuses to say goodbye.
Suresh Nautiyal is Contributing Editor, independentink.in
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