In the absence of SAARC

ONLY weeks ago, Delhi and many other parts of northern India emerged from a season of choking smog. Likewise in Lahore, where the provincial government had to declare a health emergency, shut down schools and colleges, and order residents to stay at home. In the two Punjabs, Indian and Pakistani, an arid winter is making farmers nervous about the rabi crop. Jammu & Kashmir hasn’t had enough snowfall this year, which is bad news for its rivers. The Chenab has bottomed out already. Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) is undergoing a similarly dry winter. The impact is felt all the way across in the Himalayas in Nepal, dependent for snow and rain on the same western disturbances that bring winter precipitation to northern India and Pakistan.

Across the entire region, climate change has affected livelihoods and is endangering lives. Typically, it is the poor that bear the brunt of extreme weather events. When global warming raises sea levels, threatening to engulf Mumbai, Karachi, Kolkata and Dhaka in frequent flooding, extreme rainfall, cyclones and salinisation, it is the poorest in these large cities who will be the worst affected. The warming is also depleting marine resources, causing conflicts among fishers across borders, for example, between those from Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka’s Jaffna.

In the face of these challenges, civil society groups and media representatives from South Asia gathered earlier this month to discuss the possibilities of regional cooperation for climate action. It is possible to imagine that as the biggest economy in the region, a rising world power and an aspiring leader of the Global South, India would have hosted the conference, in line with its Neighbourhood First policy. But that boat has sailed. The conference, which brought together about a hundred people, was held in Islamabad at the Jinnah Convention Centre, all spruced up after a recent facelift for the SCO Heads of Government meeting that Pakistan hosted last October.

It was not the embattled government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif that organised this ambitious conference. The event was put together and helmed by the leading Pakistani media group Dawn. Seamlessly choreographed, the two-day conference, ‘Breathe Pakistan — International Climate Change Conference’, packed in 14 sessions, had the backing of several sponsors led by the provincial government of Punjab, the United Nations and the World Bank. Call it Track 2.5 or 3.5 or even 4. The visas, especially for invitees from India, would not have been possible without the official green light. I attended the event as a speaker in a session on the media’s role in climate action. Sonam Wangchuk, the famous Ladakh-based activist, and Harjeet Singh, the head of a climate resilience NGO, were among the others from India. Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment participated via Zoom.

The conference was being held against the rise of climate change-denying leaders in the US, and in other parts of the world — copycat ‘Trumpism’, as Harjeet described the new American age during a session on ‘Decarbonisation of South Asia’. The other elephant in the room was the absence of official engagement between the two biggest nations in the region, India and Pakistan. But that seemed to be the point: the climate emergency is too real, too here and now, to wait for conflict resolution, or for Trumpism to fade.

In an ideal world, climate change should have been right up the street of SAARC — a one-time dream of regional cooperation that struggled with bilateral hostilities from the start and is now comatose and brain-dead. If India has been striving to set up regional cooperation without Pakistan (also known in Delhi circles as ‘SAARC-minus one’), think of the conference as a sort of riposte, albeit a civil society-driven one, that action against climate change cannot be envisioned in ‘minus one’ terms. Pakistan has been ravaged in recent years by floods of epic proportions, glacial melt, the degradation of the Indus basin ecosystem, winds from the west carrying dust, and smog of the same kind — and from similar sources — that paralyses life in north India for three months every year.

But that elephant is real, so what about it? Most participants, including those from India, arrived on February 5, a day before the conference began. It was a national holiday for ‘Kashmir Solidarity Day’. Hoardings and posters on the highway from the new airport described the solidarity with the favourite ‘Pakistan’s jugular vein’. But save for one small protest near the conference venue that vanished as quickly as it formed, the competitive speeches by political parties, the crowds from the madrasas, the josh that I recall covering in the 2000s, were missing. Perhaps because Pakistan’s new powers that be cannot risk a large gathering on ‘D Chowk’ (D does not stand for democracy, it’s just the shape of the junction), now barricaded off from Constitution Avenue and its VIP buildings — President’s House, National Assembly, Supreme Court, Prime Minister’s House, and various ministries. Or perhaps because the circus got pushed to Rawalakot in PoK. After all, it’s no longer politic, what with the FATF and all watching, to have the heart of Islamabad resound with blood-curdling slogans against a neighbour.

Even so, Army Chief Gen Syed Asim Munir’s pledge in PoK to “fight 10 more wars for Kashmir” has to be set off against the sullen resentment of the people of that territory against the Pakistan Army, and the nation’s economic abyss. Plus, Gen Munir has his own compulsions in the bruising conflict with ex-PM Imran Khan, whose popularity seems to have surpassed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s at his peak. PM Shehbaz Sharif seemed more on point in his speech, emphasising dialogue with India, and in what sounded more like a memo to self, the need “for India to move out of the August 5, 2019, mindset”. So, maybe behind the elephant are opportunities waiting to be discovered.

Meanwhile, another elephant at the conference did not go unnoticed. The PM and his niece Maryam Nawaz, Chief Minister of the Punjab province, absented themselves from the inaugural ceremony, apparently because the CM of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Ali Amin Gandapur of Imran’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, was invited too. Gandapur praised his jailed leader as a champion of climate action, and argued for federal equity in allocating funds for climate action. The absence of the top two leaders was the cause of media chatter about how Pakistan should sort out its internal conflicts before aspiring to bring nations of the region and beyond together.

What the conference did though was to demonstrate that civil society in the region is alive, vibrant and willing to build bridges across borders to share climate change best practices and knowledge. Wangchuk was the toast of the conference, his innovations for climate resilience exciting as much interest as the ‘discovery’ that he was the inspiration for Rancho, Aamir Khan’s character in Three Idiots. And one evening, the queen of Sufi music, Abida Parveen, sang her heart out and showed everyone how to make friends across borders.