Hundreds of millions of Indians will head to the polls from 19 April to 1 June amid scorching heat to cast their votes in the world’s biggest elections.
Their decisions could have significant consequences for how – or even if – India meets its climate goals and adapts rapidly to now almost daily extreme weather impacts.
Over the past decade, the Narendra Modi-led Indian government has been projected and perceived as a climate leader internationally: from his COP26 speech in Glasgow committing India to net-zero by 2070 through to his G20 presidency last year where he announced a renewable “tripling” target which was then echoed in the first “global stocktake” at COP28.
However, despite increasing renewable capacity, the Indian government’s rapid coal expansion and Modi’s links to fossil fuel interests have been dubbed problematic by many and “pragmatic” by others.
His party – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – holds a majority in the lower house of parliament and is the single largest party in the upper house, allowing it to pass controversial environmental and forest laws, with limited scrutiny and discussion.
While the BJP dominates – and expects to win the election – India still has more than 2,700 registered political parties and 56 state parties, of which six are officially recognised as national political parties.
Of these, the biggest and oldest is the Rahul Gandhi-led Indian National Congress (Congress), credited with giving India most of its progressive environmental laws and positions on climate, but also accused of ignoring them before its fall from national power in 2014.
In this interactive grid below, Carbon Brief tracks the commitments made by India’s major national political parties in their latest election manifestos across a range of issues connected to climate change.
The grid also includes proposals by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Parties yet to publish their manifestos include the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) led by Delhi’s recently jailed chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) representing India’s historically marginalised castes and minorities, and the National Peoples’ Party representing India’s biodiverse northeastern states. (The grid will be updated when these remaining parties publish their manifestos.)
Each entry in the grid represents a direct quote from one of these documents.
(Note that the BJP refers to India as “Bharat” in most of its manifesto. This is seen by some as a reaction to 26 opposition parties banding together last year to brand themselves the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) alliance.)
Despite an ongoing heatwave, drought, floods, farmer protests and debilitating smog blanketing most Indian cities, many argue that climate and environmental issues are too “peripheral” to sway the billion-strong Indian electorate. Others counter that “all key issues on the ballot in 2024” are linked to climate change.
Historically, however, Indian political parties have regularly rolled out campaigns and subsidies connected to energy, electricity and climate to appeal to Indian voters.
While welfare or development-based promises of free electricity for farmers and cooking gas price cuts are a running election feature, free public transport, land rights and managing natural resources, such as coal or forests, can also mobilise voters.
In 2014, for instance, Modi rode to power on a campaign promise of cleaning up corruption in India’s coal and mining sector, scarred by gargantuan scams.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Aditya Valiathan Pillai from the Sustainable Futures Collaborative, says on one side you have welfare and developmental projects as a “balancing factor” for climate shocks. On the other side, “it’s about gas cylinders, energy access, cheaper electricity…all of that is climate. It’s just that it’s not ‘Extinction Rebellion’-style climate politics”.
Pillai adds:
“I think we see climate politics as the sort of existential, titanic fight for the future of humanity where climate progressives arm wrestle climate deniers. It’s not. There’s a much greater diversity in climate politics. The core difference is the politics of gain and the politics of loss, and we are very much in the politics of gain in India because it’s such a low baseline of development. In the West, it’s the exact opposite.”
Climate and environmental issues may not have been explicitly on top of voters’ or parties’ priorities before, but that has steadily changed since 2019.
While the BJP set out an ambitious renewable energy target of 175 gigawatts (GW) by 2022, AAP campaigned on its air pollution and electric vehicle policies in Delhi.
In 2019, while Congress pledged to bring back protections against deforestation and land-use change, the BSP and its allies promised to deploy clean energy to “destroy caste discrimination”, as “an over-dependence on coal directly impacts tribal populations who are constantly under threat in the name of power-generation”.
This year, climate change is mentioned in all national party manifestos published so far, along with commitments to promote renewable energy and, for the first time ever, critical minerals. For example, the BJP and Congress manifestos both emphasise working towards achieving net-zero by 2070.
The BJP manifesto promises the country “energy independence” by 2047 – a century since India achieved independence from the UK – through “a mix of electric mobility, network of charging stations, renewable energy production and improving energy efficiency”.
The BJP also sets out a 500GW renewable energy target – although it does not specify when this goal would be met. If voted in again, the Modi government says it plans to achieve this through setting up “mega” solar and wind parks and a clean energy corridor, with aims to turn India into a global renewable energy manufacturing hub.
It also emphasises scaling up bioenergy and green hydrogen production, developing small modular nuclear reactors and incentivising private investment in large-scale battery storage.
In the run-up to the elections, Modi has already announced a rooftop solar scheme and promised farmers in the critical election state of Uttar Pradesh to turn India’s sugarcane belt into a biofuel belt.
However, while the BJP’s manifesto pledges to support India’s automobile industry transition to electric vehicle manufacturing, it fails to mention coal even once or to outline how heavy industry will be decarbonised, beyond its existing Green Credit Programme.
While it outlines its commitment to meet India’s still-unclear carbon sink target, the BJP’s manifesto is silent on the forest rights of Indigenous communities, unlike Congress, which promises to set up a national mission to guarantee their rights and to stem deforestation.
In an election where unemployment is set to be a key voting issue, Congress pledged a “Green New Deal Investment Programme” and a “Green Transition Fund” in its manifesto. Congress pledges to generate millions of jobs in renewable energy, sustainable infrastructure and mining critical minerals. Its renewable energy plans lack specific targets, but remain strongly focused on decentralised power and job generation in rural India, with incentives for village councils and farmers to set up solar grids.
Congress is the only national party promising to increase allocations to India’s National Adaptation Fund and wants to create an independent environment authority akin to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Both Congress and CPI have promised to look into landslides caused by floods that caused severe crop losses last year and to reverse “anti-people” amendments to India’s forest and environmental laws made under the Modi government.
The CPI is the only national party to explicitly mention coal in its manifesto, calling for unexplored private coal blocks to be returned to state-run Coal India, to reduce India’s dependence on coal imports and a judicial investigation into “fraudulent” imports by private companies.
Similarly, it is the only party to pledge a participatory “just transition plan” to protect communities and coal workers “affected in the process of transitioning to renewable energy from fossil fuel[s]”.
Its manifesto promises to end private monopolies in renewable energy, seeking to establish the government’s “decisive stake” in the sector “to protect our country’s energy sovereignty”.
To Bangalore-based climate activist Disha Ravi, protests by farmers, youth and citizen groups in the Himalayan region, as well as the visible climate impacts right before election season, have ensured environmental issues have “stayed fresh” in peoples’ minds and made it into manifestos.
However, she is concerned about follow-through, including from state governments where the opposition has been in power. She tells Carbon Brief:
“I live in Karnataka and one of our main environmental demands locally was to get back the right to protest. And they [Congress] haven’t enabled that since they’ve come back to power. They’ve been a little more open to conversations, and it’s great that they have these amazing-sounding policies on paper. But will they actually translate into real life? I don’t know that because they haven’t had a great track record.”
It remains to be seen whether the heat, deforestation or renewable jobs sway Indian voters as they step out to vote over seven phases this summer. But to activists and observers such as Ravi, it is time India has “a national-level climate conversation, and it shouldn’t be just because elections are around the corner”.
The post India election 2024: What the manifestos say on energy and climate change appeared first on Carbon Brief.
India election 2024: What the manifestos say on energy and climate change
An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
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