“I feel so very alone. So very sad.” She
paused pensively. “What will be left of our culture? Nothing is there.
My elders… I remember when it was evening they would explain things to
us, call us to do some task with them, say to us, ‘Come, learn, when I
am not here who will know these things? When we are not here, who will
teach you?’” Her voice breaks. “It was true, what they said. So we
learned these things, but now we can’t go forward with teaching the
young ones.” The Jarawa “must not become like us,” she concluded; must
never experience the unbearable loneliness of being the last of a people
dying off the face of the earth.
*
It isn’t only the Jarawa who are under attack. The forests in which
they live in are being systematically destroyed as well. At the edge of
the Jarawa reserve, Harish witnesses the felling of a majestic tree,
more than 100 feet tall, with “buttresses so thick and huge at the base
that a human being could build a small dwelling within them.” When it
finally falls, “screaming for the others to make way lest they too be
destroyed,” and yet smashing through several smaller trees to hit the
forest floor so heavily that the ground shakes, the reader feels like it
is a crime as unforgivable as the slaying of a human being. Such trees,
which provide the deep, dark, moist shade essential for maintaining the
biodiversity of the rainforest, have been cut down, so that all that
remains of the once-majestic 25-million-year-old rainforest survives
only within the Jarawa Reserve.
The military has floated plans to use several small
islands in the Nicobar chain as targets for practicing with missiles –
condemning many varieties of flora and fauna to violent extinction.
The rest of the archipelago’s incomparable natural bounty is also
slated for destruction. A radar station is to be built on Narcondam
Island, which will, in all likelihood, drive into extinction the
Narcondam Hornbill, a spectacular species unique to that island. In
addition, the military has floated plans to use several small islands in
the Nicobar chain as targets for practicing with missiles – condemning
many varieties of flora and fauna to violent extinction before any human
has even set eyes on them. As if that were not enough, the island chain
lies just north of a shipping lane that is vital to Chinese interests,
and which the Indian government therefore seeks to control by vastly
expanding its naval base on the Nicobars.
Such exploitation of the archipelago’s military potential requires,
in its turn, a massive expansion of the existing infrastructure.
Accordingly, the government has formulated an INR 10,000-crore (USD 1.54
billion) plan to turn the entire archipelago into a maritime hub,
apparently by auctioning off many of the islands to developers through
public-private partnerships.
“The ANIs [Andaman and Nicobar Islands] are trump cards of the Indian
strategy and can emerge as gatekeepers of the Indian Ocean,” wrote
Aniket Bhavthankar, a research associate with the New Delhi-based
Society for Policy Studies, in an October 2015 article. But this could
only happen, according to Bhavthankar, if “bottlenecks” posed by
environmental regulations were overcome. The Minister for Shipping,
Nitin Gadkari’s plans to construct no less than 23 ports along the
coastline will make Bhavthankar’s prescriptions a reality. That will
entail the felling of forests and the razing of beaches, and also result
in oil slicks, sewage, garbage and other routine pollution from the
vast levels of ship traffic envisaged – damage that the law does not
currently allow.
As if on cue, in January 2016, the Minister for Environment, Forests,
and Climate Change, Prakash Javadekar, visited the islands, and
declared a direct onslaught on a 2002 Supreme Court order that has
hitherto provided significant protection to the island environment.
Sekhsaria, acting on behalf of the Pune-based environmental
organisation, Kalpavriksh, had played a key role in bringing the case
before the court. The court had decreed the closure of the Andaman Trunk
Road, which runs right through the Jarawa reserve – bringing the tribe
in contact with providers of alcohol and tobacco and seekers of sex –
and also restricted timber felling and sand mining on the islands.
Javadekar declared, however, that the court’s misguided orders had
hampered the islands’ development, and that he would seek to further
develop the road by building bridges and also do away with the curbs on
timber felling and sand mining.
Amazingly, the road was never closed because of public pressure:
testimony to the contempt with which India’s politicians and
administrators regard the highest court in the land. Had it been shut
down as directed, and a few small ships provided in its stead to carry
the north-south traffic along the islands, the damage to the Jarawa
could perhaps have been contained. Developing the road further will only
increase the traffic on it and compound the harm. The environmental
aspects of the order, which restricted logging and collection of sand
from beaches, had, on the other hand, been essentially obeyed, curbing
the free-for-all of the earlier era. It was these orders that Javadekar
had in his sights.
Far from hampering development, the court had helped to protect the
island’s water supply and tourism industry. Dense jungle allows monsoon
rains to drip slowly into the earth, replenishing the water table; but
when the hillsides are denuded by tree felling, the rain runs right off,
carrying with it soil and debris, and smothers the corals with silt.
The water table diminishes, the beaches become muddy, and the corals
die. Since the Andaman forests had already been systematically felled,
as
The Last Wave describes, the archipelago has long suffered
from a serious water shortage. In peak summer, taps in the average home
in Port Blair run for only half an hour, every other day. If
deforestation resumes, the water crisis can only intensify. As for sand
mining, it will lead to the direct destruction of many beaches, and also
facilitate the ingress of salt water, further damaging the water table.
As if that were not enough, Javadekar called for increasing the
number of tourists from the current figure of three lakhs per year to 30
lakhs – a number pulled, it seems, out of thin air, with no
consideration for the carrying capacity of the islands. Not to be
outdone, in November 2015, Gadkari announced that yoga guru Baba Ramdev
was being offered an island with a scenic beach and a lighthouse to
develop a yoga center. The water shortage alone places such plans in the
realm of fantasy. Moreover, this programme is totally incompatible with
the vast expansion in ports and shipping, which will damage corals,
beaches and forests, as well as the projected increase in tree felling
and sand mining, which will finish off what little the ports leave
untouched. Anyone who has been to Corbyn’s Cove, an expanse of muddy
grey sand at the edge of Port Blair where garbage regularly floats up,
will know exactly how attractive beaches are when they adjoin industrial
and municipal areas.
What do tourists visit the islands for, if not the pristine white
beaches that still remain, the turquoise blue waters, the colorful fish
lurking in the corals, the towering, dew-dripping forests – all the rare
and exquisite treasures that
The Last Wave celebrates? Why
would they come when these are gone? The magical thinking behind these
grandiose plans leads to the suspicion that the Narendra Modi government
sees the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago as a terra nullius: an empty
space on which to erect elaborate fantasies of power, glory and riches,
leaving the reality check to others. To these men, the Jarawa are no
more than
junglees to be shoved aside, their remnants
nostalgically preserved in museums; trees and beaches are storehouses of
cash to be collected, counted and dispatched to the bank; and the
archipelago itself little other than an “unsinkable aircraft carrier”
that can survive any number of bombs. There is no room in this vision
for lyricism or love, whether for human beings or for trees, forests,
birds, or any other living creatures.
In the last, most poignant scene in the book, after the last wave –
the tremendous tsunami of December 2004 – has washed over him, leaving
him bereft, Harish meets once again that Jarawa man who had unnerved him
with his fierce gaze. This time, he stares “at Harish for a while and
then, tired, and defeated, lowered those intense eyes – a tragic
surrender. What an unequal fight this had been.” And yet, in Harish’s
empathy for this singular stranger, one finds a shred of hope. For if
anyone can save the islands, it will be those such as him, Seema, and
Uncle Pame, who have the capacity to love deeply – as well as, of
course, their acutely observant and passionate creator and all the
readers he happens to inspire.
~ Madhusree Mukerjee, a former physicist, has served as an editor at the Scientific American
magazine and is the author of two books, Churchill’s Secret War
(2010) and The Land of Naked People
(2003).
~
The author has worked with Pankaj Sekhsaria on Andaman-related campaigns in the past.
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