The term climate apartheid was initially invoked by a group of climate activists as a political slogan. They used it to convey the idea that the poorest and most marginalized sections of the world’s population bear the heaviest burden of the rich world’s carbon excess. Later, it entered academic discourse as a useful analytic for thinking about different forms of climate precarity, and especially about the centrality of race in making sense of this precarity.
I began my IAS seminar with the emerging discussions surrounding climate apartheid by tracing this history. Today, its usage often evokes a planetary scale and a sense of urgency about the future. It also warns us that the future we confront may be a world divided between the ‘climate privileged’ and the ‘climate precariat’. Keeping this planetary scale in view, I asked in my seminar: how might we ‘confront climate apartheid’ from India? One way of doing this, I argue, is by turning to caste as a social force that structures relations to land, labour, mobility, and extraction in India, which shapes uneven patterns of vulnerability and resilience. In my seminar, I approached this question primarily by engaging with two strands of scholarship: recent work that examines caste at a transnational scale, and Dalit environmentalist scholarship that critiques the neglect of caste within mainstream Indian environmentalism.
A crucial moment for thinking about how caste oppression has been articulated in international forums, which becomes useful for our discussion of climate apartheid, is the ‘World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance,’ held in Durban in 2001. At the conference, some Dalit organizations sought to frame caste discrimination as equivalent to racial discrimination within the framework of international human rights law, sparking a series of debates in its wake. Their aim was not to draw a direct equivalence between caste and race, but rather to emphasize the similarities between caste-based and race-based forms of discrimination, particularly insofar as both operate as forms of exclusion grounded in descent.
The apartheid analogy has also been repeatedly invoked by activists, scholars, and organizations to describe the caste system as India’s “hidden apartheid.” What makes this particularly interesting is the way parallels are drawn between South African apartheid and caste-based oppression in India. I wanted to examine the apartheid analogy within this broader discursive context, not merely to judge whether its use is accurate, but to ask what using it achieves. What does it help us to see or understand? Can thinking about what this analogy has to offer be useful for our understanding of climate apartheid? This comparison has been noted as useful because it frames caste discrimination as an international human rights issue, positioning the Dalit movement within a global struggle against oppression based on descent. In this way, the apartheid analogy functions as a political and rhetorical strategy through which Dalit activists and scholars bring the question of caste into a global context.
Alongside, the direction of my enquiries has also been shaped by conversations with colleagues involved in the major project, Climate Apartheid. Their engagement with debates around racial capitalism led me to recent scholarship that emphasizes the centrality of caste, as a form of racialization, to the formation of global racial capitalism. This led me to recognize that caste must be treated as integral to any account of South Asia’s role in global capitalist accumulation, and therefore should also be central to our discussions of climate justice.
Finally, I turned to literary narratives from India to explore what a poetics of climate apartheid might look like: texts in which deep histories of caste-based extraction intersect with the everyday experience of climate precarity. The IAS has provided an exceptionally supportive environment for developing these ideas. I am deeply grateful for the conversations and discussions with faculty at Durham University and with Fellows at the IAS, which have encouraged me to think about these questions in new ways.
Dr Varna VenugopalCharles Wallace India Fellow
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