Environmental Movements in India: Re-Assessing Democracy

After the Stockholm conference held in 1972, governments of almost all the developed and developing countries had showed considerable enthusiasm towards the needs of environmental preservation but their enthusiasm was confined to making further announcements of environmental policies and legislations, and they failed to bring changes on the ground especially because the agenda of economic development was still dominating the governmental discourses. Due to lack of genuine political will, the structural procedures and mechanisms evolved by different governments for maintaining the ecological health thus proved to be insufficient and over time, the limitless and incessant exploitation of natural resources further deteriorated the state of the global environment. This is probably why a number of grassroots environmental movements were organized by the civil society to think of alternative ways to harnessing natural resources in a way so as to ensure ecological sustainability and social equity. In the global South, environmental movements including the anti-dam movements have emerged as a preferred strategy, at the societal level, for ensuring justice and protecting rights of the underprivileged and marginalized sections of the society. However such movements are considered to be flourished in the specific political environment only. Scholars often believe that a democratic system provides plenty of avenues to people to participate in the policy-making process, and such regimes are more amenable to the societal interests articulated through various collective actions as compared to the authoritarian regimes. This paper reviews this assumption by comparing the response of a democratic government in India and an authoritarian regime in China towards the environmental movements, specifically in context of anti-dam movements which were mobilized against the ?Sardar Sarovar dam? and the ?Three Gorges dam? in these countries.