According to The New York Times , Narendra Modi will “make or break Obama’s climate legacy” at the Paris COP21 negotiations. “That India has positioned itself as the champion of developing nations is no great surprise, based on past climate talks,” said the report. “But Mr Modi, who wrote an e-book presenting the moral case for action on climate change, had been seen by American policy makers as a leader who might break that pattern.”

As Modi, along with French President Francois Hollande, launched an international solar alliance of 120 countries in Paris on Monday, The Guardian reported, “some see Modi as a clean energy enabler, having rapidly rolled out more than 900MW of solar energy across Gujarat when he was chief minister there.” Modi’s government is investing an initial $30m to set up the solar alliance’s headquarters here.

At the launch of this alliance, Modi was photographed with Hollande, holding up a copy of his book on environment, the one The New York Times had reported about. Modi has positioned himself well as a green warrior on the global stage, and the Western media (even the usually Modi-sceptic NYT and The Guardian ) have bought it for the moment.

Modi’s Convenient Action: Gujarat’s Response to Challenges of Climate Change, was first published in 2011, and it provides a good snapshot into why Modi is being seen in the West as someone they can do green business with. The title of his book sets the ambitious tone, taking off and building on Al Gore’s acclaimed book Inconvenient Truths .

Convenient Action starts with customary quotes from the Vedas, Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi, followed by some questionable poetry by Modi himself (Sample: The rainbow blossoming in the sky/Drawing circles of colour in the air). But if that does not throw you off, you get into what the author, India’s prime minister, calls his answer to the “dichotomy between dominant interventionist model of development and decentralised participative model”: he suggests his success in Gujarat came from a unique “synthesis” of the two divergent models.

Solar energy, because of its decentralised production capabilities, fits best into Modi’s “synthesis”, much more than large hydroelectric dams or wind stations. The well-publicised success of the Charanka Solar Park in Gujarat — Asia’s biggest, producing 221 MW over 5,500 acres — was part of Modi’s “interventionist model”, an ambitious, state-led project that set the tone.

But for the model to be truly participative, solar energy would have to become cheaper than conventional electricity (achieve grid parity), which would incentivise ordinary Indians to set up solar panels on their roofs, reducing dependency on coal powered energy. According to expert estimates, India is now three to five years away from grid parity, potentially revolutionising its energy mix, and taking a big step away from guzzling more coal and oil for its growth.

India’s pledge to the Paris summit is a 2030 target to reduce emissions by 33 to 35 per cent from 2005 levels and to draw 40 per cent of its electricity from renewables by then. Modi used the ambitious targets India has set, to put the ball back in the court of the developed countries. “We hope advanced nations will assume ambitious targets and pursue them sincerely,” Modi said in his speech in Paris. “It is not just a question of historical responsibility. They also have the most room to make the cuts and make the strongest impact.”

And that is true. Those who say that India will “make or break” the climate summit because it is today the third largest net polluter in the world, cleverly ignore that our per capita emission is among the lowest (155th) in the world, that the average American emits 10 times more and the average Chinese four times more than the average Indian. And the political resistance to emission cuts in America is much more vocal: it is a country hooked on everything big, where opulence is celebrated and being thrifty is considered un-American. Even now, the cuts being proposed by America are all related to new technology, and none call for a change in lifestyle.

India should continue to push the developed world on three counts: they should go faster on emissions reduction and compensate for emissions growth in poorer countries, they should provide green technology to the developing world faster and pay more to help the likes of India in their emissions reduction. While India should not block a consensus at COP21, if it emerges, it should also not kowtow to the developed world whose fossil fuel profligacy at home has got us to this point, and whose colonisation abroad meant that countries like India still remained in need of high doses of energy to pull millions out of poverty.

So while setting ambitious clean energy goals is in our national health interests, India’s negotiators in Paris should not fall for the Western media narrative that India is the “make or break” country in these negotiations. Modi does not owe Obama a burnished “climate legacy” as The New York Times put it.

Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi is the founder of The Political Indian

@some_buddha

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