By Martin Wright on Fri, 13/11/2015 - 12:09

This article originally appeared on Forum for the Future and is republished with permission.

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi takes the applause at Wembley this evening he will be basking in familiar adulation. Immensely popular among the Indian diaspora, he could be forgiven for feeling somewhat more welcome here than back home. Since his stellar election success 18 months back, his road has become a little rockier. In the last month alone, his ruling BJP party has taken a hammering in state polls in Bihar, with many voters seemingly disillusioned by the failure of economic reformist rhetoric to deliver jobs and prosperity on the ground. Secularists have criticised his failure to promptly and roundly condemn continuing attacks on Muslims, and over 100 of the country’s most eminent scientists wrote to the President warning of a growing “climate of intolerance”.

That 2019 election victory, once seen as mere formality, isn’t looking quite so nailed on.

But when it comes to the physical climate, Modi might just be on surer ground. After years when Indian politicians both played the victim card on climate change – “it’s not our fault, so we shouldn’t have to do anything about it” – while also giving the impression that it wasn’t that serious an issue, the Modi administration is taking a more self-confident stance. Witness the climate and energy agreements signed during the UK visit, carefully choreographed as part of the run-up to the Paris COP talks. For sure, India is still pushing for funding pledges to help meet its climate targets – you wouldn’t really expect anything else – but it’s speaking in starker terms about both the threat and the opportunities, too.

This came home to me recently when I was in Delhi to ‘MC’ the annual summit of the Confederation of Indian Industry’s ITC Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development. Now, even a few years ago, you could reliably predict that big Indian sustainability conferences would be full of rhetoric along the lines that “Environment’s all very well, but first we have to lift people out of poverty”. As though the two were somehow at odds. There were echoes of that at the CII summit, but they were few and far between – and mainly from those no longer in power, whether in politics or the boardroom.

Instead, we heard environment minister Prakash Javedekar – hardly a green zealot – insist he was “convinced that protection of environment and development is possible simultaneously, they go hand-in-hand, they are not against each other. That is what sustainable development means.” Finance minister Jayant Sinha said starkly that “the number one risk [faced by the Indian economy] is climate change”. And he also pointed to the more immediate health impacts of coal power stations and soaring vehicle emissions. Most telling of all was railways minister Suresh Prabhu – whose political influence in practice extends well beyond his brief. (And given the fact that its railways are India’s single largest consumer of energy, that’s quite a sizeable brief in itself.) Prabhu castigated businesses who fail to see sustainability as opportunity, and who drag their feet waiting for regulations to force them to act. Instead, he said, they should be actively competing on sustainability – as the best way of positioning themselves for future success.

Of course, saying the right thing to a sustainability audience is hardly proof that there’s been a seismic shift in Indian realpolitik. But add that to the government’s aggressive pursuit of solar power – especially in Modi’s home state of Gujarat – and you can at least imagine you’re feeling the earth start to move.