Dear Prime Minister of India,

You have the mandate, now please drive India in a new direction;  let India don leadership for a new world - a world of #renewal, a #sustainable world, a world that corrects its mistakes of the past centuries!  

Yes, dear Prime Minister, you are in a unique position today, because, you are the first Prime Minister in decades to have an overwhelming majority!  You can take bold decisions!  You can take risks!   And you can do it with a freedom very few Prime Ministers before you have had!  So, please use it with wisdom, use it with Urgency! 

And you stand in the middle of a unique situation today!  For, we as a country, and as a planet, are standing at the crossroads of our very existence!   This is no ordinary time, and we require not just ordinary leaders!  We need leaders who can change the direction of the world, because the world is headed towards certain disaster, the ones in the know say that we are headed for nothing short of Mass Extinction! 

COVID-19 is a reminder that when nature is destroyed beyond a point, the consequences could be unforgiving!  (Covid and most recent pandemics are zoonotic diseases caused due to deforestation)

If you continue in the path set by our previous administrations, we will only hasten the end.  Do you wish to go down, as one of those who had the power to rescue the world, but just allowed it to bumble on its path towards its self-destruction?  Or will you be a different leader, who will be thanked for a visionary term, that changed the fate of the world itself?  You make that choice!  After all, you are not going to live forever, so why not make the right choices for the planet, humankind and all life on earth, before you die? 

Where do we stand today?

The world according to most scientists, is at the threshold of its 6th Mass Extinction, thanks to actions of humans!  Not only will we perhaps be the last few generations to see life on earth, but we’ll also take all other life forms with us!

The only way we can avert this catastrophe is by returning emission levels to 50% of what it was in 2017 by 2030!   We were to reach -20% of 1990 emission levels by 2030, and ‘ZERO’ emissions by 2050!  Has anyone been listening?  Because, if we study the policies of the Govts of the world and industry, everyone seems hell bent on doing exactly the opposite.. everyone’s competing to double, triple or quadruple emissions instead!  And we are destroying our forests as if we wish to end the world, not in 2050, but in 2025 itself.  None of this helps! 

Majority of scientists believe that we had about 10 years to course correct, but due to the compounding effects of the increased temperatures, due to our inaction, that period now seems to have reduced to 5 years!  And we only have less than a year to set in action all the policies and decisions to affect that action!  Most of these actions are ‘Economic’ in nature!   (https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48964736

Let’s face it, the economic policies we have been following are handouts of the west, and they will never solve the problem, they will only lead us to mass suicide!  There is no wisdom whatsoever in the industrialisation or the consumerism of the west!  We should stop seeking inspiration from the illusion of the WEST.  The West is a dead desert with window dressing!  And we have been hanging on the coat-tails of the west too long, following them blindly into this trap.  It's time we broke with this stupidity.

The missed opportunities of our previous leaders:

We are living the ignominy of missed opportunities.  The very first opportunity we had to correct everything was when we won our freedom.  A century ago, in 1919, the visionary father  of our nation, Gandhiji, spelt out his vision for a new India, in all his writings, especially in ‘Hind Swaraj’:

In Hind Swaraj, he had categorically said that a free India should be different from the Colonial India.  An India, which only transfers the same administration from white people to Indian people, but continues to administer in the same way, would not be acceptable to him.  Isn’t it a shame though that this is what happened eventually?

Gandhiji was a sustainability visionary!  His views on everything from Governance, Economics to Social reengineering, were directed at sustainability.  He expressed:

1. that Governance ought to focus on local self govt, and devolution of powers to the local levels,
2. that Economics should be reversed from the model of Globalisation to Local and sustainable economics, that thrived in India before colonisation,
3. that Populations ought to live as communities, land should be de-privatised and revert to commons, and everyone have shared and direct relationship with this planet.
4. that The Western form of Industrialisation, factory production and trade would bankrupt nature, due to its excessive extraction of resources and destruction of rural community crafts. 
5. Gandhiji had warned against urbanisation, he had exhorted that development should refocus on ruralisation rather than urbanisation.  He had foreseen that Urbanisation is a trap!

Had we just followed Gandhiji’s advice in 1947, India would have showed the entire world, fresh leadership, and led it away from the path of destruction!  We would have led the world away from the mistakes of colonisation.

If the Father of our Nation had such foresight and advised all these right things, how did we go so wrong?  How did we go down the path of continued colonisation by big business, and destruction of our habitat at the scale it has?  We have destroyed our country at a much faster pace, than the colonial British ever did!  Which begets the question, did we really achieve freedom, or was it an illusion to cover neo-colonialism?

Murder of Gandhiji!

The murder of Gandhiji did not take place at the hands of Nathuram Godse, that was just his body.  The real murder of Gandhiji, as an idea, took place at the hands of our Post independence Govts.  For they were entrusted the mantle of carrying forward the vision of Gandhiji, but buried every single idea of Gandhiji, they buried the Decolonisation agenda of Gandhiji!   We got namesake ‘Freedom’, but we never got the ‘Swaraj’ that Gandhiji and other freedom fighters of his time, fought for, with their lives!

Successive Governments since 1947 have perpetuated the Neo-colonial agenda!  After Independence was declared, the skin colour and faces of administrators changed, but the policies remained intact, because the Colonial British had left behind an English educated elite who were a dark imitation of themselves, and behaved just like them! Our resources continued to get plundered, our forests and water bodies destroyed, our populations remained disempowered.  The gap between rich and poor keeps expanding, and today it is so vulgar, that even the dead British might actually be happy that they made us just like them!  Gandhiji’s worst fears thus came true!

The most crooked decisions of the British Colonial Government were never reversed: 

• The commons were never returned to communities. 
• The education system that is designed to create slaves was never reformed. 
• The bureaucratic system that promoted the interests of Big Business was never repaired!

Your opportunity to Resurrect Gandhiji!

You are just so lucky, you are at the right place at the right time!  That the World is poised at a dangerous situation, ie., Climate Crisis, and most scientists warn that life on earth can end as early as 2050 itself.... that is just 3 decades away!   If we are looking at mass extinction just 3 decades away, then it’s no time for politics, it’s time for PANIC!  And it’s time for massive change! 

And therein lies the new significance of Gandhiji!  Whatever Gandhiji advised, would have prevented us from reaching here in the first place.  And now that we have been stupid enough to ignore his warnings and advice, it looks like if we have a second chance, to avert the disaster, the only way again, is to follow his advice! 

Our present economics or politics has no solution to avoid this imminent demise!  The only way out of it is fresh thinking, and a fresh new direction!  We have been beating a dead horse!  Now, its time to create a new destiny! 

A Call to Action:

Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures

A.  DECLARE ‘CLIMATE EMERGENCY’!

1. If we do not see the writing on the wall, we will die the death of a stupid species!  Let that not be our fate!  Let the first big announcement of your second term be the declaration of a Climate Emergency!
2. Let all the policy making of the Government for the next few decades revolve around the resolution of the Climate Emergency.  The beauty of this wise decision would be that all the solutions to India’s problems will emerge from this simple declaration, be it livelihoods, or restoration of our commons and forests, restoration of our water sources, re-imagination or our nation, or restriction of urbanisation, of reimagining our economy, our relationship with the world, and the betterment of the planet!

B.  Correct the mistakes of History!

1. END GDP!  GDP was the devil’s idea for the world!  Only the most stupid of economists and policy planners could have embraced GDP, in a world that has finite resources! (apparently, there’s an abundance of stupid economists and policy makers) How can unlimited growth have worked for this planet?  We need to divorce permanently from GDP!  We cannot support a Growth based economy!  We need a sustainable economy!  We require a wellness economy that values the well being of our habitat and its inhabitants.
2. END Globalisation: Global trade is not sustainable, it extracts a huge price and destroys the planet!  Let’s turn our back on the world, we don’t need the world!  We are a world in ourselves!  Our villages are worlds in themselves! 
3. END the Colonial Education system:  This public school system that separates our children from its environment, surroundings, society, culture and traditional wisdom, creates a disoriented crop of adults who contribute nothing positive to our world, but end up being consumers and slaves, in either of which roles, they only contribute to its destruction.  We need to reimagine the way a child grows up in our society that makes it a contributor and sustainer of the planet.  Announce a new learning paradigm, where children are free to grow up in their own environs, but information and learning is borderless and seamlessly available to all.  With today’s pervasive computing, we could have digital libraries at every street corner.  There is no need for schools, and anyone can attain any skill they wish!  Let employers test their prospective employees on their own.  Let there be no degrees or certificates from any institution or universities any more!  With this, we can again generate a generation of citizens who are connected to their surroundings, their environment, their soil, their water and their administration and governance, and take ownership of their fate, ie., we can have true citizens!
4. Establish Adivasi University - Reverse Learning / native wisdom:  Until now we have been trying to distance our indigenous communities, the adivasis from their native forests.  By settling them outside on pieces of land, giving them private ownership, we have been making them consumers and exploiters, in our image... and by setting up schools and colleges for them, we have been brainwashing them with our ignorance based knowledge systems, depriving their new generations of the wisdom of their elders!  It is time to reverse this.  They don’t need our knowledge, which is destructive!  We need their knowledge which safeguarded our forests for millenia.  We need their intimate understanding of nature and forests, and their deep respect for it, to survive the impending doom!  Allow the adivasis back into the forests and allow them to live their traditional lives as safe-guarders of the forests, let them not ape our lifestyles!  Their traditional lives are the teachings of sustainable living!  And establish Adivasi Universities, where ‘we’ the modern stupid humans, can go and learn from them.  Allow them to teach us.  Let us go learn from them, to live at balance with nature!
5. Scrap the Forest Dept and replace it with a Conservation Dept:  The forest dept has a bad colonial past and was set up only to exploit the forests of India, replete with a culture of ignorance and profit orientation.  We need a complete break with this culture.  Replace it with a Conservation Dept, that is oriented only to conserve.  No exploitation of any kind of Forest resources, be it produce or minerals or natural resources should be allowed.   Only native tribes who live in the forests in their native lifestyles, should be allowed to use them, that too only for subsistence.

C.  Chart a New Course

1. Take a cue from smaller nations like Bhutan and New Zealand, and announce a new measure of progress - based on wellness!  When small nations have showed the nerve to dump GDP,  imagine what an impact it would be if a nation as large as us, dumps it!  Clearly, it will chart a new path for the entire planet and alter everything!  They say, about 3% of a population are sufficient for a revolution!   Imagine what power 1/6th of humanity holds... That’s the kind of power you wield!  A complete new policy direction from the Govt of India, would spell a new future for the entire world; it will bring about the seismic shift that the planet requires.  
2. Take cue from a small country like Costa Rica, and set a target for zero carbon, and ban fossil fuels! 
3. Show visionary leadership and change all policies upside down:
   1. De-industrialise production:  Move away from centralised large scale industry, and move towards handmade and sustainable local industries.  Help India regain her past glory in crafts and handmade!  Move away from state subsidised big business towards self sustained craft communities.
   2. Take Agriculture Back to Nature:  Move away from industrial farming and chemical supporting farming, to natural farming and agro-ecology.  This is the only way we can revive the wastelands created by chemical methods, and revive dead soil, and degraded farmlands, and revive ecosystems in our rural heartlands!  This is the only way we can bring back green cover and water resilience.  Also chemical farming is the single biggest contributor to global warming.  Reverse it, we must!
   3. Sensible Infrastructure:  Reliance on large scale projects was a doomed enterprise.  Even the architect of this policy Nehru himself regretted it in his later years!  But the monster was unleashed and it was too late, and it has consumed the entire body of India.  Now, there is no option but to bottle the genie!  Roll back the stupid policy and embrace ‘small is beautiful’.  This is not a choice any more, this is the only option!   Or else, there won’t be anything left for the next generation!
   4. De-growth:  Pursue an active policy for de-growth, to reverse the negative effects of growth, on every area of life and the planet!
   5. Reverse Urbanisation:  Large cities are the curse of the planet!  They extract resources and impose their carbon footprints on faraway lands, and destroy all their surrounding districts!  Set limits for any habitat, based on it’s ecological limits, and sustainable development.  If a city cannot meet its needs from its local resources, then the city should be limited!  Cities should primarily have its own water sources like lakes, waterbodies, etc,. and Urban Forests!  And the city should only expand to the limits these local resources can meet, never beyond.
   6. Depopulation:  Set targets for depopulation of the country.  Offer incentives to stay childless, and ensure public welfare for individual adults that do not have children.
   7. Revive the commons and community ownership:  Reverse the ownership of commons to communities, and devolve power to local communities.  Centralisation was a devil created for colonisation.  Power should go back to people, and in this lies the solution for all our political problems.
   8. De-colonise education:  If we are ever to evolve a better society, we need a good grounding for the youth.  They need to grow up in our own society and environment, learning everything about it.  They cannot grow within the walls of a jail called school, under pressure to perform at exams, and learning abstract things about faraway countries only, without any connect with their own neighbourhood, local governance, language, traditions, local wisdom, etc.,  Abolish exams, abolish certificates and degrees.  Allow open learning without restrictions and structure.  Let real creativity flourish.  We need creativity now, more than ever, to just survive as a species, and to keep our habitat alive!  This will make every individual independent and able to create their own livelihoods, and take care of their neighbourhoods.  We can then create a nation of leaders, not a nation of slaves.
   9. Decolonise the Government:  The Government should break with its colonial function of facilitating exploitation of nature!  It should become a bulwark against exploitation.  It should drive policy towards decentralisation, distributed production, localisation, rewilding, conservation, and REVIVAL!
   10. Change the narrative from Jobs to livelihoods:  Jobs have become the over-riding narrative in meeting people’s expectations.  This has been the single most damaging cause of increased industrialisation, commerce and the resultant destruction.  This has also become the single most important reason for people being de-humanised as they just become slaves in a system, and cogs in a money machine!  Change the narrative to ‘livelihoods’.  And community based co-production activities, that are environment friendly.
   11. Scarcity to Abundance:  Every citizen should, just as any other creature in nature, be able to live without having to work or depend on anyone.  This is how nature works.  Why have human societies become prisons in which people need to work, earn an income and purchase things to survive?  When you crack this, and find the answers, you’ll find the answer to solving everything in this world.  This world has been depraved by the ideology of ‘scarcity’.  But nature is inherently ‘abundant’.  When we get rid of this lie, that was created by the capitalists, we’ll find the answers to repairing society, and reviving the world!
4. Let people / communities be the stewards of the environment, and their neighbourhoods:
   1. People who depend on their neighbourhood are the ones that care for it.  When people drank water from their lakes, they took care of them, and guarded them.  When they got piped water in their homes from the Govt, they dumped their own waste in the lakes and destroyed them!  Its very simple!  If we are not in control of our resources, we do not take care of them.  Empower the 73rd and 74th amendment and allow all resource use, maintenance and renewal to the local panchayats and ward committees/neighborhoods.
   2. Allow the indigenous people, ie., tribals / adivasis back into their forests.  Amend the Forest Rights Act, remove the provision of settling Adivasis on private lands.  Instead allow Adivasis and Tribals to live inside the forests in their traditional roles, only if they are willing to lead their traditional lifestyles which do not involve private ownership of any kind.  But they should have free access to their native lands.. They should be accorded honorary positions of ‘Forest Sentinels’.  They should be on par with the Conservation Dept officials in rank and respect!  We should accord them the position that they actually deserve.  They are better than all of us!
5. End Plastic and all pollutants:  Little needs to be said about our civilisation’s irresponsible use of plastic and how it is degrading our habitat and oceans.  Plastic waste has now found its way into every part of the ecosystem, from the food chains, to forests to our rural and urban areas, rivers, lakes, and oceans, even arctic ice... and is contaminating and ravaging all kinds of life forms.  There is no way to stop this, except by stopping the production of plastic.  Life was possible before the introduction of plastic and life can very well thrive without plastic.  Stop the production of plastic, trade of plastic, use of plastic, Period!  And everything else thats polluting our world.

In all of the above, you will be resurrecting Gandhiji, and bringing his soul alive!  Gandhiji’s soul I am sure is wandering around helpless and unhappy since 1947, by the betrayal of a nation, towards his philosophies and ideas!  You have the golden opportunity to set that soul free, by embracing his vision! 

In doing so, you have the opportunity to ride the second coming of Gandhiji, and thereby becoming a statesman and a leader for the world, far beyond what you could possibly imagine! 

You have this moment unfolding, of an opportunity to leave a legacy that the world will celebrate in future years, or earning the curse for having been one more soldier for the global industrial neo-colonial economy that brought the earth to its doom!  What would your choice be?

You are certain to face the opposition of the Business and corporate empires that control almost everything!  But with a massive mandate, this might be your only chance to shake that off, and disempower them once and for all! 

Will you grab the opportunity, make your stand, and rescue the world, and build a legacy for your name that none would question in the future? 

The challenge is thrown open.  Let’s see what you are made of Shri Narendra Damodardas Modi. 

The young generation that face a fragile uncertain future are watching your moves with expectation!

With hope and determination, 

Sandeep Anirudhan                                                                                                       

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This petition is based on an Open Letter to the PM, penned by me, on the same day last year (5th June 2019, ie., World Environment Day 2019) and you can view it here: https://bit.ly/OpenLetterToPM