At the Delhi edition of Fridays for Future, it wasn’t uncommon to see youngsters with protest placards in one hand and carrying single-use plastic bottles with chilled water in the other.
This stood in stark irony not only to their cause, but also because of the Prime Minister’s exhortation to Indians to eschew the use of single-use plastic by October 2, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.
Between Friday and September 27, FFF, a worldwide youth-led movement against climate change spurred on by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg from Sweden, is marking Global Climate Strike, timed to be in sync with the Climate Action Summit that UN Secretary-General António Guterres will hold on September 23 to address the “global climate emergency”.
The Global Climate Strike, which kicked off in Australia, will see an estimated 5,000 protests spread over 150 countries, across one week. This will culminate in New York, where Ms. Thunberg is to lead a march to the UN headquarters.
Friday’s protest in Delhi saw about 2,000 people marching from Lodi Garden, claimed one of the protesters, although there were about 300 people who sat through the protest outside the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change office in Jor Bagh. Many students, whose participation was independent and not as part of any organisation or school, said they found out about the protests through social media.
“Cool kids for a hot planet”, “Hot but not sexy”, “ACT NOW”, “Earth will survive climate change, we won’t” read some of the placards held by the protesters.
Even till hours before the protest, the organisers had not received permission from the authorities. There were barricades around the gathering, with police personnel having cordoned off a lane outside the Ministry’s gate number 1.
Sloganeering and cheers got louder when a participant announced on loudspeaker that a delegation of five persons will be taken inside the Ministry to meet the representatives.
“While going in, they told us the Ministers aren’t in town today. I believe there are two — one main Minister and one who looks after Delhi I think,” said Akshay Kapoor, 24, a member of the FFF in Delhi, alluding possibly to Union Minister Prakash Javadekar and Minister of State, Babul Supriyo.
Meeting with official
According to Mr. Kapoor, Geeta Menon, Joint Secretary, Environment Ministry, met them, acknowledged their protest, but “didn’t give us a strong word that anything will happen”.
Among the other members of the Delhi chapter of FFF are Banashree, a student pursuing her masters fro Delhi University; Aashiq Rahman, a 20-year-old third-year student from Zakir Husain College, Ayushi Bose, a 17-year-old high school student, and Harsh Gupta, a 27-year-old filmmaker.
The gathering was a mix of high school students in their uniforms, fresh from a session of their ongoing term exams, university goers, climate change enthusiasts and activists, including expats, advocates for veganism, and a smattering of parents waiting for their children. Environmental collectives and FFF “allies” like ‘ There’s No Earth B’, ‘Extinction Rebellion’, ‘Nine is Mine’, ‘Tears of Earth’, as well as representatives from Amnesty International and volunteers from Green Peace were also present at the protests.
“We have three demands, basically,” said Mr. Gupta. “One is to declare a climate emergency. This is not only symbolic, with other countries doing this too, but it will also be a road map that will put pressure on the government to act; the second is that the government tells us the truth about how we are upholding the promises under the Paris Agreement [of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change], and the third is for them to put in place a legislation to do with the first two, which will also necessitate youth participation.”
On September 27, FFF will stage another protest, this time at Jantar Mantar. “Originally, the FFF is a school student-led strike. But from what I’ve seen today, this is a little different in India,” Mr. Gupta said. “The protest at Jantar Mantar will be led by students from schools like Delhi Public School and Amity International.”
