In April and May this year, the largest population of climate-vulnerable voters took to the polling booths amidst unprecedented heat waves in India. The extreme weather events brought home concerns climate activists, researchers, and journalists raised about the missing climate question in India’s electoral agendas. A lot has been said about whether or not climate change is a critical agenda in Indian electoral politics. While dissecting the electoral manifestos and promises made by political parties, analysts note that leading players such as the incumbent Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) and the opposition party Indian National Congress (INC) did have sections dedicated to some big-ticket climate issues, as well as broad climate strategies. However, the lack of substantial targets or action plans left much to be desired. Critics argue that even though the climate agenda has managed to find mention in manifestos, it’s completely absent from election campaigns, rallies and speeches.
While political parties are accused of evading climate change issues, voters are also called upon for not considering the same when deciding which parties or leaders to vote for. Yet, there is an important acknowledgement that even if one could say that climate with a big C doesn’t figure in the electoral agenda – the linkages between issues such as inflation, access to resources, the precarity of agricultural activities, and air pollution are definitely on the mind of the populace. There is also an important discussion on how marginalised communities, the Dalits (socially ostracised castes), the tribes, and forest dwellers are all the more precariously positioned against the perils of climate change. Voters in cyclone-hit areas in states such as Odisha and Assam are upset about the neglect and lack of political will regarding better mitigation and adaptation measures. Farm leaders from drought-prone regions in Maharashtra lament the uncertainties that befuddle them year after year due to changing rainfall patterns and lack of state support to bring any reprieve.
Despite acknowledging all these divergent and distinct articulations of lived experiences with climate change – the broader frame in the conversation remains that of a deficit. There is no denying the lack of political will towards sustainability initiatives and the side-lining of the climate agenda in the governance issues in India. The disproportionate subsidies given to industries and coal-based mega power projects stand witness to these. However, the superimposition of this frame also, even if inadvertently, glosses over the day-to-day negotiations that people undertake with climate questions. One article about climate change and electoral agenda in India goes on to say that Indians are far from being ‘climate voters’, unlike the Europeans, assuming that there is such a thing as the ‘Indian voter’. Another calls upon the ‘well-informed middle class’, a category which has evaded social theorists and political gurus alike, to leverage their positions to foreground the climate agendas in their voting decisions. There are prescriptions for the citizens, the media and civil society to rise to the occasion, mobilise around climate change issues and hold the political parties accountable. Granted, the quotidian negotiations with the scourge of climate change do not use the vocabulary of climate action, reduced emissions and international climate agreements. Yet, they are far from being absent. They come in the form of demands for access to better irrigation facilities, reasonably priced electricity, clean air, and minimum-support prices (MSPs) to protect against the uncertainties of monoculture agriculture.
The framings of omission, of the missing climate question(s), argue that Indian voters are preoccupied with ‘conventional’ issues such as caste, religion, inflation, unemployment and so on, which results in the neglect of ‘climate issues’. In the 2024 electoral campaign, Prime Minister Modi explicitly deployed religious propaganda to target minorities. The standing PM accused the opposition party of insinuating that the Muslims have the first claim to the nation’s resources. While this reaffirms the preponderance of communal politics, is the Prime Minister’s rhetoric divorced from the climate question? I argue it’s not. It’s not difficult to see that political propaganda preys upon the rising insecurities among the voters in the face of dwindling resources and livelihood opportunities. The artificial separation of the climate and socio-cultural dimensions of electoral politics forgets that climate burdens are, most importantly, tied to questions of environmental justice, differential access to resources and differential distribution of damages. In a highly stratified society like India, climate issues must be imagined alongside the questions of deprivations and entitlements structured by dominant social categories.
SustainableCZ 
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